My Memoir – Where the Dark Things Grow
**This is the beginning of my memoir. Please read this page for more information, as well as an easy-access list of each chapter.
**The following contains material that may be sensitive to some readers. If you are struggling or thinking about suicide, please reach out for help. In the U.S., you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline anytime. No matter where you are in the world, please reach out—someone cares and wants to help you through this.
“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”
— Psalm 34:18
June 17, 2015 – Maumelle, Arkansas
A Little Tree air freshener dangled from the rearview mirror of my car, where I sat in a Kroger parking lot. Alone. Broken. And tired—so very tired. Tears choked and blinded me; my insides were a mass of emotions coiled around one another like serpents knotted around my ribs.
I couldn’t breathe.
The harder I cried, the harder I cried. The unraveling of my body was like pulling the only thread left that held me together. Bit by bit, the demon tugged, grinning its devil grin, teeth dripping with malice and melancholy.
I wanted to die.
Not the emotionally driven, figure-of-speech, or attention-seeking kind of death, but the profound, literal kind that no one can possibly understand unless they’ve experienced the overwhelming feeling firsthand.
I. Wanted. To. Die.
As someone with an unhealthy, irrational fear of death for most of my adult life, suddenly wanting it to take me was confusing and cathartic. I welcomed death’s mercy. I felt a sense of freedom and joy in the moment that I cannot adequately describe in words, even as someone who once wrote for a living.
The parking lot, I thought, would be the next-to-last leg of my journey—the place where I’d pray a prayer that I hoped would set in motion the end of everything for me in this life. The days leading up to it trailed behind me like something lifeless, already gone.
I spent seventy-two hours in my walk-in closet, tucked inside a big house that was as ill-fitting on me as the world was. I had everything I’d ever wanted—and prayed for—even a successful career as an author with bestselling books that paid for that engulfing, too-big house I lived in. But I didn’t care for any of it—not the recognition, the money, the home, the car, the college fund for my kids, or the ticket out of lifelong poverty. The only thing that gave me any comfort in those seventy-two hours was the carpet beneath my wet cheek and my little dog, Ares, who never left my side.
I lost thirty-two pounds in what seemed like one week, though it was probably around three weeks leading up to the day in the parking lot. I remember I was so weak I could hardly feel my foot pressing the gas pedal or my hands white-knuckling the steering wheel as I drove toward it. I don’t even remember why I stopped there, of all places, or if I even knew where I was going.
The only thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want to be here anymore, and I was desperate to find a way out.
But how did I get to this point?
What could have possibly happened in my life that led me down a path of darkness so dark that I thought the only way out was to check out early? What could make a young woman who feared death and loved life—even when it didn’t love her back—want to die? How could a single mother who loved her children more than the world want to leave them in it to grow up without her?
Twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years of living only where the dark things grow.
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