5/14/2018 Radioactive By Hannah Searsy Radioactive “Why the hell did you short me five dollars?!” Finn yelled at me. I stood in front of the person who had once been my best friend not that long ago. He was blocking my bedroom doorway, towering over me. I had come armed with boxes and movers. I knew this would be the last time I would enter our shared apartment. I didn’t have many emotions about this, beyond the sinking feeling of loss that I knew I had onto brought on myself. He stared me down. I avoided his eyes out of shame. “You really should kill yourself, you know”, the voices whispered to me. I clawed my palms with my fingernails, trying to focus. Finn and I were hashing things out. Loudly. I had shorted Finn five dollars on the electric bill. This had not my intention when I went to dingy looking gas station near my soon to be former home to get the cash to pay this final obligation. I had counted the bills haphazardly while I was in the checkout line to get iced tea. It was a mistake, but in a situation where all his good intentions had been betrayed, my mistake turned into an insult. Our friendship had come down to a list of possessions to be divided (like most bitter divorces do). I yelled at him about all the things I was taking: the toilet paper, the paper towels, the dishes, the silverware, the blender with no lid, the bedroom lightbulb. He yelled back about the missing five dollars, fury radiating from his brown eyes. “Just like you to fuck your friend over, you stupid bitch”, the voices said. “Just fucking give up now.” I ignored them or tried to. I felt sick inside every time I heard them. Finn had been my best friend for five years by the time I stood in front of him in my bedroom doorway, ignoring the voices in my head, screaming about blenders and lightbulbs. We were an odd duo, the maladjusted former homeschooled girl and the artsy anime nerd. But it worked, somehow. Finn and I dyed our hair together, went to concerts (at one show, Finn made balloon animals for all the members of the band Mindless Self Indulgence, which they loved), sang along to Rent, Wicked, Glee and all our other favorite musicals. (If I was granted the privilege of asking one question of him now, it’d likely be to ask what he thought of Hamilton.) I had started smoking pot because of an ex-boyfriend but I kept smoking it because of Finn. He and I commiserated about our various loves and hookups, took art classes together, got butthurt when the one of us had gotten a piece put in an art-show but the other hadn’t, overshared about our sex lives (that was mostly me), and argued fiercely with one another. We did nearly everything together. I cannot describe my feelings for Finn adequately with words, to this day. If it was his life or mine, even though we haven’t spoken in years, I’d pick his every time. Another friend summed it up well for me, saying Finn was a person who had pressed his face into my soul and left a deep indent that would always remain. It was one of the most intense friendships I’ve ever had, and I am thankful for that experience. I’ve always seen myself as a time bomb: when I’m well I’m very well, but when I’m not, I’m REALLY not. I have been diagnosed with a myriad of psychological disorders in my life: Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and later (the cause of my voices), Major Depressive Disorder with Psychotic Features. These illnesses live with me in my bones, even though they are not actively turbulent. They are bedfellows that seem almost banal to me now, after years of therapy, years of learning to control the fires that rage on inside of me. However, I avoid close friendships. (Finn was one of the first close friends I have ever had, and he likely will be the last.) I don’t confide in many people. I actively avoid social activities when I’m unwell, not wanting to inflict my presence and subsequently my problems on others. One acquaintance, when I told him that I go to therapy regularly, asked if I didn’t have a friend I could just “spill all my shit to”. I told him the kind of shit I spill needs a professional with a master’s degree in psychology and an hourly rate just to be tolerable. On the outside, I am a people person. I am often described as “bubbly”. The reality is different. I have periodic anxiety attacks and bouts of depression. I struggle to maintain healthy coping mechanisms. I am too much. My problems wear people out. I have learned through experience that my friendship comes with an emotional body count, a price I’m not willing to inflict on anyone. I am radioactive, a glowing green orb that looks pretty from far away. If you get too close to me, over time, you will slowly get poisoned. It’s the kind of thing that lingers in your bones, eats away at you until you realize you’re dying. Finn was in the process of poisoned, though he didn’t know it when moved in with him. I had come to live with him about a year and half before our fight in my bedroom doorway, when I was twenty-three. I had moved out of my prior roommate’s house because he’d gotten bedbugs. This was only a tragedy for my belongings, really. There wasn’t much left of me to find. I had been raped by a virtual stranger the year before at an arts festival Finn and I had both attended. I was in complete denial about it. I had not been in a good state of mental health before the assault. My parents were emotionally and physically abusive, I had been sexually abused as a child, all the generic sad white girl tales. I always was one of those perpetually suicidal friends you don’t really take seriously, someone who just seems a little sad. The one who makes occasional suicide threats now and then, mostly for attention (which in my case was mostly correct). However, the assault and my denial of what had happened had destroyed me. I had pushed away most of my friends outside of Finn with my maladaptive coping skills. For lack of better things to do, I had spent a lot of time in my old home alternating between drinking myself into a stupor and turning the gas stovetop on high when no one was home, until I felt like I was gasping for air. I was not well. I was hearing voices even then, though they were less frequent. I couldn’t tell you exactly when they started, though I date them to sometime after I moved in with my prior roommate. I hadn’t told anyone this, because it terrified me. At first it was even something I could ignore, a kind of low-level static hum whispered darkly in my mind at times of distress. “You are worthless. You are terrible. You should die. You deserve to be alone.” Finn asked me to move in with him mostly out of pity, with a tinge of loneliness thrown in the mix, as his girlfriend had just left him several months prior. I knew then it wouldn’t end well. I had made all the rookie mistakes: I had slept with Finn just before leaving my prior living situation, and I had feelings for him. He’d asked me a few months before I moved in if I was in love with him. I hadn’t wanted to ruin the friendship, so I had lied through my teeth, a thing I typically did in those days. My emotions weren’t the only thing I had kept from him. He didn’t know about the voices either, and I’d do anything to avoid him finding out. The shame I felt about it, the fear about being viewed as crazy, the worry it would affect our friendship….I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. The radioactivity beamed off me, piercing the heart of our friendship. Finn didn’t know this yet, because he couldn’t see it. Still, the cracks and blinding rays showed despite my best efforts to shield us from them. I became aggressive. I couldn’t handle criticism. If Finn tried to bring up how I never cleaned up after myself, how I left my cups of tea in my room to mold, I screamed at him. If he tried to point out how it wasn’t necessary for me to know where he was, what he was doing or when he’d be home, I cursed him out. If he told me that maybe I should slow down with my drinking, I threw his pot use back in his face, not even willing to broach the fact I had a problem. I felt terribly guilty every time I did it. I was learning then that if I didn’t contain my own irradiated problems, it had consequences for everyone around me. My behavior reminded me distinctly of my father in the home where I had grown up, how in times of stress he would berate me for almost anything. This horrified me, but I didn’t know how to stop doing it. Meanwhile, the voices grew louder in volume. “You are a terrible person. Why do you even bother to get out of bed in the morning?” they yelled at me in stereo. Whenever I was alone I’d listen to them tell me how I was “a stupid depressed lump of a person. You are useless”, they said. They told me to repeat after them, every harsh thing they said, so I’d know who I was. I often did so whenever Finn wasn’t home to hear, watching my mouth move reflexively in the bathroom mirror. I’d take my razor and run it down my thighs, the sticky red blood mixing with my tears as I spoke the words along with them that I was convinced were true. Everyone was better off without me. I had deserved to get raped. I had deserved it because I was a liar, because I was a slut, because I was bad. I was terrible, I was a slut, a bitch, a bad friend, and I deserved to die. It was a harsh place to live, surreal and bizarre. Even though Finn couldn’t see this, I couldn’t hide it. He knew I’d changed. He finally felt the those poisnious ions coming off me, piercing his skin. He would beg me to tell him what was wrong, but I couldn’t. I was looking into an abyss that I saw no way out of and felt like Finn could never understand this. Finn was tired of this. I didn’t blame him. It didn’t help that I was jealous of his new girlfriend, a beautiful Columbian girl with curly black hair named Marcie. She was petite, with tiny hands and a cute smile. She wore crops tops, shirts with the backs cut out, high heels. She knew how to style herself. She was uncommonly nice. She liked X-Men, Adventure Time, anime, and other prerequisite nerdy things that you needed to care about to even enter our apartment. I could tell he liked her right away. I hated her. I had no reason to, beyond jealousy and what the voices told me. “She’s replacing you”, the voices whispered. “You’re obsolete, he hates you so just go away.” This came to a head on a day when the Texas heat surrounded us like a cloud of steam in a hot sauna. Unrelenting, yet soothing all at once. We stepped into my Finn’s blue Honda, the windows fogging up from the humidity as we entered. The fog hid our faces. It hid Finn’s chocolate brown eyes, his rich brown hair, the left hand with the scar on it, right by his thumb. It hid my face, my blue eyes, the mousy pixie cut, and a waifish figure. We both felt the wall in our silence. “He thinks you’re an awful person. Put a bullet in your skull, you slut”, the voices screamed at me. I shuddered, trying to ignore them, as always. I looked over at him warily. He tried to turn the radio up, out of instinct, before he remembered his car’s stereo system had broken a long time ago. We rode for a time in silence, avoiding the other’s glance. I broke the uncomfortable silence. “What’s wrong, are you mad at me?” He looked at me, pursing his lips, drawing the discomfort around him like a cloak. “Yeah, I am. Marcie told me….” he hesitated. “She told me she doesn’t want to come over, because every time she does, you’re a bitch to her. You are, and it really bothers me. I really like her, and I want her to be in my life for a long time. Why are you doing this? I don’t understand.” The steam rose up in me, boiling me alive, like I was possessed by the heat that surrounded the Texas landscape. The yelling in my mind continued in full force. “You are worthless. You are stupid. You should die. Just kill yourself now and do everyone else a favor. That fucking whore is going to kill you and replace you and you need to stop her Hannah. Oh my god, shut up shut up shut up!!! God please forgive me-you’re a whore, you’re a whore and she’s a whore she’s a whore-fuck!” I stared ahead, gripping the denim cloth of my jean shorts as I whispered what I heard in my mind, what the voices kept whispering to me. I mumbled only barely under my breath, repeating what they said just hoping to get them to stop. “She’s a whore.” I said. “What the fuck did you just say?!” Finn yelled as he stopped the car. I made some excuses. I honestly don’t remember what I said. Some bullshit, slut shaming remark about how Marcie dressed perhaps. We got the apartment, in silence once again. He got out of the car fuming, radiation poisoning slowly kicking in. I made an excuse about something I left behind. I walked away, leaving my cell phone, my wallet, my keys in his car. I started running through the streets to the park down the road. I looked furtively around me, making sure I wasn’t being followed. I was crying, tears running down my cheek. I stopped at the edge of the park near our home, the quiet spot by the creek where the tallest trees met the darkness of the night. I could taste the salt from my tears on my tongue, flickering on it like a bug. I took out my arm, scratching it, the voices yelling at me unrelenting. “You are a piece of shit! Everyone hates you and you deserve to die!” “Shut up!” I screamed, my nails gripping the skin of my arm tighter and tighter, scratching myself until I drew blood, red like a tide. “Please god fucking stop!” Not too long after this incident, I completely succumbed to the contamination that my illness had brought me. I was depressed. Everything hurt. The voices wouldn’t stop yelling at me, no matter what I did. I wanted to die. The only reason I hadn’t was I hadn’t wanted Finn to have the burden of finding my body. I had locked myself in my bedroom, not wanting to ever come out and expose anyone else to my sickness ever again. I started screaming and ripping the pages out of my books. The grey-white pages with their tiny black type made little sense to me. They mocked me as they fell to the floor, my only hopes at recovering the silence that had once ruled in my mind. My screams only served to mildly drown out the voices going now at full blast in my mind, only saying one thing: FUCKING KILL YOURSELF ALREADY BITCH, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!. During this most recent breakdown Finn had called my friend Alex crying, because he didn’t know what to do with me. The radiation had burned his flesh, singed his hair, left a bitter test in his mouth, and he couldn’t handle it anymore. Alex was a woman in her thirties who had faced her own demons, made it past them, and took no nonsense from anyone. She immediately picked me up, made me go to her house and stay there for a few days. She wasn’t sure what my issue was, but she insisted that I get help before I got any worse. If I didn’t, she said she’d take me to the psych hospital (a place I hadn’t gone for fear my fiercely anti-psychiatry parents, whose health insurance policy I was still on, would find out about it). Desperate to avoid this, I agreed. I started therapy at my university’s health center, but it was a slow recovery process. I didn’t tell anyone about the voices out of fear, of what I don’t know. “Dumb cunt,” they said. I was angry, I was scared, the bullshit in my mind kept playing over and over and wouldn’t stop. I was struggling with strange thoughts. Magical thinking if you are charitable, and delusions if you are not. Looking back now, I remember thinking these things, and I could tell you that I know they were illogical. They were crazy. I was deeply convinced they were all happening at the time. They varied in tone. People could hear my thoughts. Everyone knew how terrible I was. Everyone hated me. Finn hated me so much in fact, he was trying to kill me. I was convinced I was possessed. I left my shirt and shoes in a cemetery near my home one night to keep the ghosts there from continuing to bring me bad luck. I walked through the park at night, screaming at the evil things I saw in the trees to stop tormenting. I slept in the woods sometimes, telling both my Finn and my boyfriend I was at one place or another, because there were times I was certain Finn would stab me in my sleep. In this moment, I did a shitty thing. I started mailing Finn junk mail. I mailed him boxes of DARE flyers, travel brochures, sent the Jehovah’s Witnesses to his door. I’d spend hours finding things to send to him. I glowed a bright green, dark energy burning. Finn was left to choke on the deadly dust I had strewn about our home. I lied about it to him later when he found out about the junk mail, to protect myself from his deserved anger. Somewhere in me, I knew my reasoning made no sense. I knew it was terrible, and I knew it would end whatever was left of us. I felt like he was better off without me (the only assumption regarding this situation I still hold to be true). His face when he figured out that I was the one doing it, and the hurt in his eyes I’ll never forget. So, I decided to do what I did best at that point, nope out. I moved out, just told the apartment manager I was leaving, turned in my months’ notice, paid the next month’s rent, told Finn I was gone without ever discussing it. So, there we were, him standing in my bedroom doorway. Me standing just outside it. His eyes hard with betrayal and hurt. Me standing there broken and leaking my radioactivity, avoiding my illness, my voices, the fact that I had done terrible things. I packed my things and left the apartment as quickly as I could. “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, you fucking traitor bitch,” the voices said. Psychosis is like a waking dream that feels real, until you wake up in a cold sweat, and reality fades in. Everything is meaningful in the moment, everything is true, until the storm leaves you, and you see all the destruction you created without even realizing it. I often pick through my memories from this time as though they are debris from a tornado. I find shards of glass, bricks strewn around, pieces of paper, but never enough to grant me the whole picture. Almost everything is trash, mostly useless. Every so often, in the rubble I find a photo, a family portrait or an heirloom with some meaning, though I cannot connect it to any specific context. The things I do find distress me. I have a cognitive dissonance between sick me and well me. I sometimes even question if I ever did those things, though I know I did. I can’t ever allow myself to forget it. After I moved out of Finn’s, I started getting better. I finally confided in my therapist about the voices and got properly diagnosed and medicated. The voices and delusions receding from my mind only left me a dry mouth and no sex drive from my medication, and the wide-eyed horror of what I’d done to Finn. I couldn’t forgive myself for it. I left the social world for about two years, going to therapy twice a week, taking my medicine regularly, drying out from my drinking, going back to school, getting my shit together. It was a form of decontamination, a lead box for myself and my illness. I kept to myself. There were lessons to be learned in the silence and isolation. I knew I needed them. If I ever could hope to have friendships without hurting anyone, I needed to learn them. There are things we do to people in life that are unspeakable. There are no words to express the profound anger and sorrow I hold against myself for the things I did to Finn. They were the death throes of a wounded animal, but I refuse to defend them. Instead, they speak to me at 3 am, when every negative trait I will ever possess comes to beg me for a second chance. I sit still in my lead box, radioactivity buzzing around me, and tell those traits, no, never again. This would not be the first time my mental illness and I would ruin a friendship. However, failures with Finn are my most spectacular ones, the ones that cling to my soles of my sneakers like old gum that can’t be scrapped off. My friendships are often collateral damage in my fight with my illness. I burn them if I’m not contained. I’m flaky and unreliable, I’m judgmental, I let my friends down a lot, and often I don’t explain why. (“I’m so depressed, I can’t get out of bed”, “I didn’t sleep all night because I kept having flashbacks”, and “I’m too anxious to focus on what you are saying right now”, never seem like good or believable excuses.) I cannot deny my own culpability in this, despite my mental illness. The truth is that I’m a lousy friend. I’ve lost the people I’ve loved most to my own selfish destruction. While this has improved over the years, my failures with Finn still remind me never to forget what happens when I let my illness go unchecked. I tried to apologize to Finn. I am never very good at saying I’m sorry, if only because I know those words are never enough. They’re only a band-aid for the wounds we inflict on one another that never stop bleeding. He does not owe me forgiveness, and if he never speaks to me again (like I suspect he won’t) I will deserve it. Not too long ago, he asked me never to speak to him again. I ignore him as he requested. It’s a reasonable request, it’s the right request, it’s a request I completely understand. At this point, walking away is the best thing I can do for him. The soul can only absorb so much radiation before it withers and dies. But sometimes when I get home at night, after I’ve seen him at an event or a show we both mutually happen to attend, I go into the locked drawer of my desk. This is the place where I keep the things that break me. I take out the picture I have of me and him from my 21st birthday, him in the beanie with the blue flames and the superhero shirt, bitch beer I picked out in his hand. Me in the navy-blue college hoodie and that ridiculous sombrero he forced me to wear. I sit on the concrete stairs by my current apartment, smoking a cigarette. I stare at the photo, though every detail of it has been etched into my mind for years. I look at both of us, smiling and ready for the future, and say to the children in that photo the same thing, over and over again. “I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’m sorry.” ![]() Bio: Hannah Searsy is a writer who lives in Fort Worth, TX with her partner Luc, and their two Siamese cats Mojo and Scrambles. Her work has appeared on Madswirl.com and is forthcoming in Thimble Literary journal. |
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