Skinny Love

Out patient therapy

You know I thought it was embarrassing walking around school with a black eye but that's nothing compared to waiting outside in front of the school for the van to come pick up the crazies for out patient therapy. Oh and the whole black eye thing... I bet you could guess what happened. My two favorite people at school decided to add some nice bluish purple color around my eye. What a lovely look to start therapy with.

The van pulls up in front of the school. Two other people climb in, me going last. I don't know the other two I think they're both freshman and I'm a senior. We get to an empty church building which is where the meeting will be. There's five of us in the room. Three girls and two boys. One of them being me. Three more kids come in along with someone wearing a name badge. I'm assuming he's the group leader. But I'm not focused on him. I'm focused on the guy next to him. Tall, piercing blue eyes, and skinny.

Everyone sits down at the couches. They are in a circle in the middle of the room. The tall guy sits next to this red haired boy on the couch to my right. The couch in front of me has a girl with greyish blueish hair sitting next to the girl she walked in with. Then on the couch to my left sits an orange haired girl, then a girl with short brown hair, and one with long brown hair. The group leader sits next to me. His badge says Pete W. on it.

"Welcome to out patient therapy. My name is Pete. Lets all take turns saying our name and the reason we are here," Pete says.
We go clock wise in the circle. "My name is Sarah and I have an eating disorder." "My name is Ashley but I prefer to be called Halsey and I'm here because of my drug addiction." "My name is Hayley. I'm here because I have depression." Halsey and Hayley are the two girls who rode in the van with me. The girls on the couch across from me start introducing themselves.

"Hi. I'm Breezy. I'm here because of my depression." "I'm Billie and I'm here because I have borderline personality disorder." Then it's onto the couch with mcdreamy on it. First is the red head. "I'm Gerard. I'm here because I'm addicted to crack." "Dallon. I tried to kill myself and got sent to this group." Dallon. I like his name. "I'm Brendon," I say. Everyone's eyes are on me. I can't tell them why I'm here. They'll think I'm crazy. "I'm here because I was forced to come."

"Weren't we all?" Hayley asks. "Yeah. Who would come here willingly?" Billie adds. "Okay that's enough," Pete chimes in, "Why are you being forced to come here Brendon? Don't be afraid to tell us. This is a safe place." I roll my eyes. "There's nothing wrong with me if that's what you're trying to get me to say." I cross my arms. "Okay let's move on then," Pete says, "for the first meeting I'm going to share my story. What happened to me and how I ended up here. Then I want you guys to take turns each week telling us your stories."

What if I don't have anything to say. There's no story to tell. Nothing is wrong with me. At least nothing I'm willing to share. Pete starts telling his story. "When I was about 14 I started to get into music. It was just for fun. But once I got into college is when it started getting serious. I was doing about 30 to 40 hours of college while trying to perform shows on the side and on the weekends. I felt like I didn't have enough time to do both. So at some point I decided to drop out and pursue the music."

I start zoning out a little bit. I look down at my hands. I wish they weren't so fat. I wish I could see the bones. Bones are beautiful. Out of the corner of my eye I see Dallon looking at me. I look up at him and he looks away. I try to pay attention to what Pete is saying again.

"The darkest moment was... We had just finished recording our major label record and um two days later we were gonna go to Europe and I felt completely lost and out of control. At that point I had seen some doctors and they were like some Hollywood doctors. They kinda gave me a cocktail and I was like some drugs store cowboy and took the cocktail the way I wanted to take it. So one day I got in my car and sat there and took a bunch of Ativan in a Best Buy parking lot. I called up my manager because at that point I was completely out of my head with Ativan. I was talking to him and I was slurring my words. He called my mom and my mom called me and she came and got me and we went to the hospital. And then I came home and we realized that we needed to do more than just kinda keep your head above water."

I zone out again. I look around the room. The girls seem very interested in his story so does Gerard. Dallon is playing with this rubber band around his wrist. Dallon looks up at me and I look away pretending that I'm interested in what Pete's saying.

"So I left the band. I had a hard time discussing it with people. I couldn't talk about it with my parents because they would say you're just having a bad day. They didn't want to admit that their son was having problems. And at one point my parents got separated but then they got back together and during that time I started seeing a therapist. The problem with going to a therapist is that if you're not gonna be open and honest with 'em and you tell them your own stories and your lies it doesn't really matter. So talk therapy didn't really help me. I feel like I didn't have anyone to talk to at that point. I guess I mean one of the big things for me was being honest with everybody about it. That was the first step.

The second step was finding someone I could talk to that I was gonna be honest with. And not necessarily that they had all the answers for me. Just that I could get it out to them. And together we could help piece things together. You know what I mean? I think that that was one of the big things. Actually being honest with a therapist."

I notice there's some food at the back of the room. I really hope they don't force us to eat. I try to keep paying attention to Pete but his story is really long. I hope he doesn't expect our stories to be that long.

"I mean I know everybody's first piece of advice is to go see the school therapist or let someone know. But when you're in that state you don't want to do any of those things. My best piece of advice more than anything is that there's other people out there that feel that. There are people out there that feel the exact same way who made it out of that. I would say more than anything you're not alone in it. You know that was one of the biggest things for me. I felt like I was all alone in it. But you aren't alone and there's ways to get through it."

Finally his story ends. He tells us that we can take a break, go get a snack, talk to each other, and get to know each other. I try to stay away from the snack table. I notice Sarah grabs an apple. She takes a really small bite out of it then throws the rest away. Dallon grabs a bag of chips and starts walking over my way. "You're not gonna eat anything?" Dallon asks me. "Nah," I say shaking my head. "Okay. Well. I was actually wondering what happened to your eye?" Oh so that's why he's been staring at me. "Nothing. I'm just clumsy." "Oh," he says like he doesn't believe me, "if you ever want to tell me what actually happened here's my number."

Dallon hands me a napkin with his number on it. I blush slightly but I don't think he noticed. He walks away with his empty chip bag. I go over to the couch and shove the napkin in my backpack that's sitting on the floor. Pete calls us all back to the couches. "Now before we go I'm going to give you all this blue piece of paper. It's a weekly diary sheet or for you boys it's a journal sheet. What you're gonna do is rate on a scale of one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, how you feel for each category. The categories are depression, sadness, anger, happiness, anxiety, etcetera. And then you're going to write a small paragraph about how your day went, what happened, if you had a bad day, or even a good day. And you're gonna do it for an entire week. Then when you come back to therapy next week you're gonna hand in your papers so I can make sure that this group is helping you," Pete says.

And with that being said he hands out the papers "don't forget to put your names on it," Pete reminds us. I take the paper from him and roll my eyes. I hate this group. I can't wait to not fill out this paper.
"Alright everybody thanks for coming, have a safe drive home and I'll see you next week," Pete says and then we're all released.