My Best Friend

My best friend, lets call her Suzanne, is the best person I have ever met. Had she been a man, I would have married her. We met while at school, but didn’t really bond properly until sixth form. It was around the time of sixth form that I began to deteriorate. It was the first time I considered suicide, and that being dead was preferable to being alive. I think it was something to do with the fact that school was over, and I had to decide what to do next, and I couldn’t. I had no idea. I tried to imagine a future and all I could see was a blank nothingness, and I had no faith in my own abilities. I was weak and fragile from 5 years of schooling, and being constantly teased for one thing or another. I wasn’t fat or ugly, I was just quiet, and for some reason, in life, being quiet is the worst personality trait there is. It gets you nowhere.

Anyway. Sixth form. Suzanne and I got talking. We discovered we were quite similar, and we were scared of the same things. We were both lost, and as our fellow classmates filled out UCAS forms and discovered clubs and drinking, Suzanne and I shrank away, withdrew, stopped dead. Everyone around us was developing in a nice normal way, growing up and having fun. We had halted to a stop. Pubs and clubs seemed unimportant to me. My other friends seemed stupid, and shallow. They tried to get me to join them but I found it so hard to be around them. They seemed so carefree, and I felt like I had a million things to worry about, and that I had a million faults, and I became inundated with negative thoughts. Suzanne and I would talk in depth about how shitty things were, and how terrible we were, and we read books like ‘The Bell Jar’ and ‘Girl, Interrupted’ and an assortment of psychology textbooks. We thought we were deep. We grew closer and closer and set ourselves apart from everyone else. People started calling us ‘the sisters’ and teased us about being lesbians. The truth is we were both miserable for no apparent reason.

Then I saw marks on her wrists. Cuts. I knew exactly what they were. I never told anyone. I talked with her about it, and that was it. For many years I hated myself for not telling her parents and getting her help.

Then she took an overdose.

From that point onwards we were different. She had crossed a line. I had thought about suicide but never done anything with those thoughts. I began to see that Suzanne was further gone than me. But still we clung together and skived off of school and lost interest in everything but the illness. She failed her A-levels, I got a B in art but the rest of my results were poor.

Out in the real world, I got a job, got a boyfriend, started to perk up. Suzanne went to a psychiatric hospital and took a myriad of medications and even had a course of ECT. (I would see her the night before every appointment, and every time she would say ‘oh, that’s a nice coat’) her memory was shot, and she was fading.

I lost the boyfriend, and sank into a depression greater than anything I had ever known. I lost a year of my life. I have no memory of the year after the break up. All I know is that I went to the doctor and I was prescribed my first SSRI. It was 2002.

Since then much has happened. Suzanne goes into hospital quite frequently. She never got better, despite medication, and therapy. She even developed bulimia. They thought at one point she had borderline personality disorder, but they keep changing their mind. I stay on my medication, suffer the occasional bought of proper depression, maintain a restless, generally dissatisfied existence. Suzanne and I are still close. I see her quite a lot and we’ve developed into something less destructive. Before we wallowed in the depression, now we’re more supportive. We laugh. We enjoy each other’s company. From reading this you may think we’re always miserable. We’re not. There’s a certain degree of gallow’s humour. When I spend time with other people, I see their faults, I am easily annoyed. With Suzanne I accept her totally and agree with the things she says, as though she were a sister. Of course, it’s hard. She has scars all over her body, and there are numerous medical problems due to the bulimia. But the thing with mental illness is that it’s not deliberate.

It’s a strange tale. I don’t know if we’ll ever reach a point where we’ll both be able to say that we are happy and settled. But then I don’t suppose anyone else can either.