IN TOO DEEP
ICOULD FEEL IT coming. An angry, pulsing energy started to grow inside me. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I tried to zone out to the symmetry of the white subway tiles lining the wall in front of my face. But it always came too fast. I knew that. The only light in the bathroom arrived through the wall of opaque glass bricks behind the tub where outside the sun beat hot on Venice Beach. I blocked the daylight with my back, trying to keep the room dimmed out, as if that would help anything.
My toes curled up. That’s how it always started. Then the nervous energy drove up my body. My knees bounced hard. My fingers refused to stop wiggling. One ran against the inside of my palm as if foreshadowing the inevitable. I made a fist but the energy was now up around my face, clenching my jaw and grinding my teeth back and forth.
Rushing around my bloodstream, it started to overwhelm me.
When it got to my brain, which would be soon, I wouldn’t be able to think at all. Then, at least, it would almost be over.
My heart pumped like crazy, and my breathing was heavy. Suddenly it was hot, too hot.
Let it out.
I felt like a cartoon character with steam coming out of my ears.
Let it out.
Something had to happen. Something had to be done to release the pressure, or it would be released by my exploding. I was going to scream my head off, smash the bathroom mirror, or grab one of those tiny little eyebrow razors and cut my arm.
I grabbed the razor, a two-inch handle in a cheery shade of pink with an extremely thin and sharp blade at its tip. I surrendered to the object so tiny in my palm. With the razor in my right hand, I revealed the underside of my other arm, cradling it close to my body. The energy ran too fast to contemplate the moment before the half-inch silver blade hit my arm. It flashed briefly in the sunlight before slicing into the meaty part between the wrist and the elbow. One. Two. Three. I made the small lines as I had done so many times before. I didn’t have to press hard, only run the razor across my skin as lightly as a blade of grass moving across the leg of a child running through a field.
I knew immediately. Something was wrong. The calm that usually washed over me as soon as I made my light little cuts with their delicate beads of blood was replaced by a new fear. In the moment when thinking was not possible and the energy took over, I must have applied too much pressure, because one of the cuts gushed blood. This was not in control.
Within a second or two, blood spread across my arm, dripping down from my elbow to the white tile floor below. It was getting all over the place, on my tank top, my jeans, my feet. I yelled at my boyfriend, Sacha, all the time for the messes he made around the house we shared. I was never the cause before.
The sight of too much of my blood, a creepy red-brown color, sent a wave of panic over me. This wasn’t the satisfaction of the cuts that put things back in control. Scared, I grabbed a towel and threw it on my arm to try to stop the bleeding. Soon enough the towel was soaked in blood. I tried to grab another towel that was hanging on the door, but in my panicked state I knocked over a roll of toilet paper. I stood up and continued to drip blood on the floor, now covered with red drips and toilet paper.
I threw the tissue in the toilet and tried to clean up the disaster on the floor with the fresh towel, but everything was chaos and I couldn’t stop the bleeding. I was like a kid who, trying to hide the evidence of her mistake before getting caught by Mommy or Daddy, just winds up making everything worse.
HOW DID IT get to this point? I was a three-time Olympic swimmer and world record holder who had appeared on the cover of national magazines in skimpy bathing suits that made everyone think I had all the confidence in the world. I made money in a sport where no one makes any. I owned my own home and paid my own bills. Lots of Americans who didn’t know anything about swimming knew my name and the face under the goggles. I also had a wonderful boyfriend, who made me feel like the sexiest, smartest, most important woman in the world. And yet I was miserable to the point of this. Bleeding and broken on a bathroom floor. I felt embarrassed and ashamed. Why was I such a loser?
I might have been an idiot, but I didn’t want to die. So I stood and looked at myself in the mirror to clean myself up. With my face and eyes red from crying, mascara running down my cheeks, and blood all over me, there was no masking this disaster.
I opened the door to see Sacha standing right outside. When he looked at me, I could see in his face just how terrible I was. “What happened?” he asked. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I went too deep this time.”