Think Twice Part 1

If I can get just one person to think twice before turning the wheel, then it will all be worth it.

Dedicated to: My Bestest Mamma. I hope I make you proud. You were my rock through it all.

Part 1

How It Started: 1984

I was born in a small town outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. I had two wonderful parents, who were always there for me and did their best to support me. I had everything a girl could ask for. We weren’t rich, but we didn’t want for much, either. I have an older sister, Shantil, who always knew what she wanted in life and always stuck to her plan. I have an older brother, Eric, who started a family and married his high school sweetheart. They both have beautiful families now who I love so much.

Our life in Stansbury Park, Utah, was simple and safe. I was the baby of the family, and boy did I know it. I knew how to get what I wanted and how to get my brother in trouble when he wasn’t even in the same room.

“Mom, Eric’s bugging me!” I would yell.

“Eric, knock it off!” she’d yell back. It was payback for threatening to flush my head in the toilet the day before when my friends were over.

Whenever we would go anywhere as a family, my parents and siblings would tell me to be sure and bring the “good” Kari and leave the “bad” Kari at home this time. I could be a bit dramatic at times. Crying and throwing a fit was my tool to get what I wanted, and it worked. My mom once told me she should have named me Walk instead of Kari because all I wanted was for her to carry me everywhere. I was a momma’s girl to say the least.

In 1998, things started to change. I was 14. Puberty, whew! What a time in a kid’s life. The hormones, the changes, the confusion. It’s a hard time for everyone. Trying to figure out who I was while dealing with peer pressure and trying to fit in. Jr. High started, and I started comparing myself to the other girls. My self-esteem started to plummet. Reading back on my journals, I would say things like, why can’t I be more like C (a friend my same age) or Shantil (she has it all figured out). Why don’t boys like me?

I felt small, ugly, and insignificant. Why? I don’t really know. I was a cute girl. Nothing horrible ever happened to me. I wasn’t molested or beaten, but it felt as though these types of feelings came naturally to me. I didn’t need attention. My parents were loving and kind.

But nonetheless, at 14-years-old, I started cutting my wrists. Maybe I felt like I wasn’t being heard? Maybe I just wanted to feel something, anything? Mainly, I felt like it gave me a reason to be depressed because, otherwise, feeling depressed seemed so wrong. I believed I didn’t have a right to feel the way I did, like I needed a reason to feel sad and depressed. I didn’t understand, and it made me feel worse. I would get depressed and then feel shame or guilt for feeling that way, and then I would get so mad at myself – which made me even more depressed. It was a vicious cycle. My feelings were becoming too much, and I didn’t know what to do with all of them. So, I ignored them. I started to become distant and detached from myself and my loved ones.

One day in the 7th grade, my friends saw me cutting my wrists with the metal end of a pencil. I knew it wouldn’t kill me; I just needed to feel something. They told the principal, and my parents were called. My mom was out of town, and my grandma was watching me. She came to pick me up from school and took me shopping. That was her way of making me feel better. We had lunch at a fancy restaurant, and I got to pick out a whole outfit. From the shoes all the way to the earrings. It did make me feel better for a while, because I got to show off my new outfit at school the next day. When my mom got home, she took me to talk to a therapist, and they put me on Prozac.

Prozac was no stranger to my family. My mom had been on it for 10+ years. It wasn’t uncommon for her to “forget” to wake me up for school, which I loved. I got to stay home with her all day, watching soap operas and drinking Pepsi. Later in life I learned that she was too overwhelmed and depressed to take on the day, a thing that soon became familiar to me. Jack was her brother, who I never met. He was in the Army for around 4 years, but was sent home early due to a medical condition. When he got home, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He and his girlfriend went into the mountains one day and never returned. It was declared a double suicide/homicide. We didn’t talk about it much. I just sort of knew about it in passing. So, there is some history there, but it still didn’t make sense to me. I was me and not them. Why did I feel the way I did?

When my mom would stay in bed all day, we didn’t talk about that either. I didn’t understand it, but I think I could feel the shame that she felt when she couldn’t show up for her family, so when I felt similarly, I felt that shame too. All I knew at the time was that I wanted to be someone else, anyone, even someone that had bad things happened to them, because then I would have a reason to feel the way I did. I know that doesn’t make sense now, but to 14-year-old me, it did.

In 2000, in high school, I started dabbling with drinking and smoking weed. Boys started to like me, and I knew it. I learned that confidence was a superpower, but I didn’t know how to feel that way naturally. I became an amazing actress. I could turn into a different person, this confident amazing, cute girl that everybody loved but was maybe a little afraid of. Inside I was numb, because if I let myself feel too much, I would crumble. Sometimes I couldn’t take it, and I would cry nonstop, not getting out of bed for a few days. Occasionally my therapist would try strengthening my Prozac. Once I was put on Zoloft, but it made me feel nauseous. I would put on the Band-Aid and carry on. Brushing all my feelings under the rug and not ever being totally honest with myself or anyone else.

My family decided to move to a different small town. Lehi, an hour away. I think my parents thought it would help get me out of the situation I was in. I loved the idea because then I could really be this make-believe person I had begun taking on, I was getting rather good at it at this point. I quickly found the misfits. The smokers and partiers. I would hang out with the misfits after school when no one else knew and the popular kids during school, in public. I felt deep down that I fit in better with the misfits, though. Being the new girl during junior year was harder than I thought it would be. I couldn’t keep the façade up much longer. I was starting to crack. The girls wouldn’t talk to me, and the boys would invite me places; this made the girls mad. I got into a few fights, got suspended a time or two. It was getting harder and harder to try and be two different people, the perfect cheerleader, and the misfit, when really, I had no idea who I was. Later in life I learned that nobody does. No one knows how to be in their own skin at that age.

The Attempt

January 22, 2001. Junior year, school was just about to begin for the day; the bell had rung, and I was running late. I was hurrying to class when I heard the two girls behind me mumble something under their breath and giggle. My heart wrenched and tears started to roll down my face. I just knew they were talking about me. I walked right past my class and out to my car. I called my friends from my hometown and told them to skip school, that I would be there in an hour, and we were going to hang out all day. Little did they know that was my way of saying goodbye. I had a plan later that day to kill myself. I didn’t know how it was going to happen; I just knew it would. I thought about all the ways I could do it on the way out there. We hung out for hours; it was so much fun. We painted our nails, ate junk food, and watched movies all day. It felt like true honest fun. No façade.

Four o’clock approached fast, and my mom was going to be home from work soon after. I had such a wonderful time that I forgot for a moment why I was there: to say goodbye. I got halfway home, and I remembered my plan. I flipped my car around and called the friends I had just left. I thought, if they don’t answer, I’ll do it.

“Ring, ring, ring…” No answer. “Ring, ring ring…” No answer. I left a message telling them the whole plan. I told them I had had enough and that they would all be better off without me. I hung up and decided that was it. I intentionally took off my seat belt. I pressed on the gas and stared at the speedometer until it reached 60 miles per hour. I looked up and saw a hill off to the right. I cranked the wheel and let go. I covered my face and hoped that would be the end.

BOOM! Flashes of light. The smell of the air bag. My legs were curled up in my chest, and I couldn’t tell what was up and what was down. It felt like I was floating. There was the flash of the ground. Then everything went black. Did I get out of the car on my own? Was I thrown from the car? Did I crawl? Was this the end? Did I do it? When I came to, I was 10 feet from my upside-down car.

Now, let me explain this location just a bit. It is a desolate back road with very little traffic. It leads to the desert, and it just so happens to connect the town I had just moved to and the town I used to live in. So, when I saw a car approaching, I was shocked, surprised, relieved, and terrified. I reached out my hand and tried to yell, nothing. I tried to get up, nothing. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t speak. You know when you are having a nightmare, and you try to yell for help, but nothing comes out? It was like that, but real life. Petrifying.

The two men that saw it happen were in town from Sweden. They were at a funeral and decided they needed to get away. Not being from the area they decided to just drive and see where they would end up. They just so happened to find themselves on this desolate back road. They saw the whole thing. They said my car flipped 4 times.

It was like slow motion dream sequence in a movie. A man approached, and he immediately took off his red and white windbreaker to cover my face. Why? Wait! I couldn’t hear out of my left ear. Was my ear cut off? Did I lose my ear? I thought. He pressed his jacket into my face and told me not to move. I felt twisted and broken.

The second man approached, saying with his thick accent, “Don’t worry, I call 119.”

Shit, this is it. I really am going to die. Is that what he said or is that just the way my memory replays it?

Soon an ambulance arrived, and the medics maneuvered my body ever so carefully to lay me on the stretcher. It seemed like forever sitting in the ambulance. I finally asked why we weren’t going anywhere. They said we were waiting for life-flight. Time suddenly caught up almost too fast as I thought, Life-flight? Oh man I really must be messed up. I’m still not sure if that was a sigh of relief that I wasn’t dead or the feeling of dread because I wasn’t dead, and now, I might be paralyzed for the rest of my miserable life.

We landed on the helicopter pad and as they wheeled me in, I saw my parents. I reached out my hand and grazed their palms as they rushed me to the MRI machine. High on the morphine, the clouded thought slid through my mind. Wait, my parents? What were they doing here? How did they know?

It turned out my friends heard my message just minutes after I had hurled myself off the road. They immediately called my parents and the police department. Officer Hernandez with the Tooele Police Department was on duty that day and had the awful task of telling my parents they found me and I was being life flighted to LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City. The phone call every parent dreads, and never deserves to get. They got there before I did and were waiting in agony for me to arrive not knowing the severity of my injuries or why their daughter had just tried to take her own life.

“Wait, this isn’t mine.” I yelled as they cut my clothes off so not to move me and prepare me for a full body MRI scan. The yellow sweater I had borrowed from my friend was ruined.

Time is a strange thing when you are in the middle of a trauma. It’s slow, yet so fast. My memory of it all is still spotty 20 years later. I still have flashes of memories that don’t feel real.

Fourteen stitches on the left side of my face. My ear was attached with only a few cuts on it. The blood from my face had run into my ear, plugging it so I couldn’t hear. Most of the cuts were next to my left eye. Did I hit the window? I’m not sure, it’s so fuzzy. A broken jaw, they said it’s a good thing I had a permanent retainer on the bottom because it kept my jaw from splitting open. My back was broken in two places. L5 was broke in half and T13 cracked. I stayed in the hospital for a couple weeks while they decided if I needed surgery on my back or not. In the meantime, I had surgery to wire my mouth shut. For two long months. That is a lifetime for a 17-year-old girl. Wired shut.

They wheeled me down to the surgery ward, my mom just behind me. The room was dark and old. But there was one bright colorful picture of a dolphin on the wall. As they started the anesthesia and told me to start counting backwards from 10, I tried to tell my mom about the picture. To look at how pretty it was, but my words were slurred, and I couldn’t get it out before everything went dark.

When I woke up, I was back in my bright white room that had become home. My mouth felt swollen and sore. I couldn’t open it. It was debilitating. Getting your mouth wired shut is like having braces but in your gums, and then instead of wiring horizontally, they wire them together vertically. Yeah.

How did I eat? I could only eat so much soup. So, a week in my mom started to blend my Ramen Noodles. Then after a few days of that she would blend Spaghetti and meatballs, after a while I didn’t care what they were having. It would go in the blender so I could suck it through a straw. Oh, did I forget to mention it had to be thin enough to fit through a straw, otherwise it would just get stuck in my vertical braces. I’ll never forget blended pot roast, potatoes and gravy, and I can’t leave out the liquid Lortab smoothies every day. Liquid Lortab is as disgusting as it sounds. Think of the worst cough syrup ever, then take away the added cherry flavor. Yuck! My mom would blend it up with ice cream, chocolate, and caramel. And bam, you’ve got yourself a liquid Lortab smoothie.

I remember a lot of people coming and going from that hospital room, bringing me flowers or a note saying how glad they were that I was okay. Not many of them knew what really happened. Only the ones that I considered my real friends. The ones that knew would stay the longest. We would watch “Temptation Island”, one of the first reality T.V. shows, every Wednesday night. I think I was there for three or four weeks, but it’s still a little blurry. Once I got home, there was a new group of people that would stop by. Sometimes it would surprise me who came to see me, some of whom I didn’t know knew I existed. People that would eventually become “real” friends.

The doctors decided against surgery for my back. And I got to go home on bed rest, but I had to wear a back brace for six months. It was two pieces. The front piece covered my whole stomach with a metal bar that went between my breasts and a padded bar across the chest, shoulder to shoulder so I couldn’t twist. The back piece ran all the way from my shoulders to the top of my butt, and Velcroed together on the sides. That is not something a girl wants to wear. But I was so numb from the liquid Lortab smoothies it didn’t matter. I was so disconnected from it all. Nothing mattered. I wasn’t too happy about the fact that I was still here, not only suffering mentally but physically now too.

After a month, I was able to stand up to shower. Halle-freakin-lujah! My mom had been giving me sponge baths for four weeks too long. I still wasn’t allowed to walk much, only to the toilet, to the shower, and from bed to recliner. And only with assistance. Man, I spent a lot of time in that recliner. Because I couldn’t walk around school, I was home schooled for the following semester. I slowly gained strength and learned to stand and walk on my own again. My mom was there the whole time, supporting me and loving me, no matter what. I got the wires taken out of my mouth six weeks later and was able to go back to school two months after that. That was not where I wanted to be, though. I was known as the girl that got in that wreck.

People would come up to me and ask, “Are you the girl that got in that wreck?” As if the massive back brace wasn’t a dead giveaway. No one knew why. No one knew what really happened that day. Maybe they suspected, but no one ever talked about it. My family and friends and I all just held our breath and hoped it would all be okay. I was put on a stronger anti-depressant and started seeing a new therapist. That only lasted a couple months. I’m not sure what it was about the therapists I kept getting but these people seemed crazier than me.

As I got older, I would tell certain people, but it always changed their opinion of me. or at least it felt like it did. I still never looked inside myself for any answers. I never talked about how I was actually feeling. I didn’t understand how I was feeling. I would say the things I knew people wanted to hear. Yes, I’m feeling much better, and, no, I don’t want to die anymore. I continued to numb myself with Prozac, Wellbutrin, Zoloft, weed, alcohol, ecstasy, and eventually meth. Did I still want to die? Not necessarily, But I didn’t want to live either.