The Monster Inside Me
By: The Good Men Project
Tags: Depression, Suicide Prevention, Short Story, Therapy, Anxiety

We first became acquainted when I was in second grade. It was a class during a particularly boring afternoon. Very few seven-year-old boys could spell “Czechoslovakia” properly, much less find it on a map. I could, and was proud enough of this feat to write on the exercise sheet: “I want to kill myself in Prague, Czechoslovakia.” I spent an afternoon in a shrink’s office. I liked him because he looked like Bill Clinton. We talked at length about the 1992 election. He seemed to think I was fine.

I was an angry child wedged into the body of a man rapidly approaching six-feet tall with a fierce intellect and no sense of emotional restraint.

Four years later, I hung up the phone on my grandmother and tried to asphyxiate myself to death with a sock wrapped around a doorknob. I was 11, picked on daily, and getting into fistfights almost as often. I genuinely wanted to die, but my mother came home before I could figure out how to make myself pass out. I was in and out of therapy for the next three years. My mother strained to keep it all from flying apart. Sometimes, it didn’t work. Our running dialogue until I was well into my twenties was one of recriminations and sarcasm between moments of innocence and humor.

The good doctor was a mild-mannered man with a weak handshake who didn’t really know what to do with me. In hindsight, he had no chance. I was an angry child, wedged into the body of a man rapidly approaching six-feet tall with a fierce intellect and no sense of emotional restraint. Occasionally, my mother would sit in as well; her and her baggage squared off against my monster and I. (The enemy of my enemy is my friend, after all.) Those sessions stopped quickly.

If he treated me like an adult, I reminded him indirectly of my tender age and my genuine innocence of the world of adults. When he treated me like a child, I ignored him, staying silent for minutes at a time. He whined in a dull, placid tone: “This isn’t going to work if you aren’t cooperating, David.” I would nod, smile, and continue to count down the 40 minutes until my mother came to pick up me with a check in hand. Sometimes, payment was an issue. This did not help me respect a process I already saw as wasteful. We would head home and have the following dialogue:

“How’d it go, Dave?”

“Good.”

“And?”

“It was alright.”

The conversation usually ended there unless my mother wanted to pick a fight. If she did, we would argue for the entire car ride home, sometimes for days afterward.

As the sessions continued, I began high school. My monster now had a name — clinical depression — but it remained abstract for now. What was all too real was that I began a term of four years in an all-boys Catholic school at precisely the moment that I craved female attention the most. I completely lost my mind. I left early to head off to the all-girls schools, came in late, and threw batteries in class. Indefinite JUG, the Catholic school equivalent of detention, was the punishment; I absconded from that, too. I even flunked classes, which brought about a very public verbal and physical assault from my mother after parent-teacher conferences.

Oddly enough, I was really happy. This was in large part due to the furtive and awkward attentions of Stephanie, an overweight girl from a nearby school I tried miserably to make conversation with when we weren’t having sex or making out on mall benches. It didn’t work out, but then others followed. I turned it around academically, only to get thrown out of school and then reinstated for something I hadn’t done. I can’t win, I thought, but at least I’m fucking. This was a real accomplishment.

It was a shock, then, when the urge to harm myself returned during a school dance. Where did this overwhelming feeling of panic and despair come from? It had been nearly three years, and plenty had passed, but my skin was cold to the touch now and I was sweating profusely…what’s happening to me? I refused a dance and walked out early, ashen-faced. A teacher asked if I was all right; I waved him off. I rode the bus home, and shivered in my bed: I could not talk.