Honesty circle is seriously the worst thing I have ever experienced before in my life.
Of course, that’s a complete exaggeration but I’m a huge fan of keeping things to myself and I think that everybody should do the same. Which is why, when Jake starts taking volunteers around our circle on Friday to start our conversation about triggers, I want to groan and just roll out of my chair and then out of the room and go be by myself. Not only do I want to keep my problems to myself but I don’t want to hear about other peoples’ problems either.
“I get bad when I see my uncle,” Shayla is the first one to share (just like she always is). “Because of what he did to me.”
I’ve heard her story over a bazillion times now and, don’t get me wrong, it’s a really sad and terrible story but I don’t want to hear it anymore. I didn’t even want to hear it the first time. We all have our sob stories, that’s why we’re here. Shayla, however, seems to think that our stories are inferior to her touchy uncle.
“And the smell of whiskey makes me go spastic,” She continues. “Because he always smelled like whiskey. Always.”
And then a guy tells us how he goes into a panic attack whenever he sees the movie Private Ryan (not because it’s a war movie but because of the unsanitary living conditions). A girl who’s sitting close to my left admits that she feels more depressed around Christmas because that’s when her mother died.
After a few more people share their triggers and some people explain the reasoning behind them, Jake gives me that look that he always gives me right before he’s about to ask me to participate, which he does every week, and I shoot him down every single week. “Ana, what about you? Do you have any triggers?”
I want to shoot him down again, to give a vague and dismissive answer and then deal with Shayla’s backfire but I take a deep breath and remember my deal with Dr. Lombardi that if I participate now, I won’t have to come back after next week. “Yeah, I have a few,” I find myself saying, telling myself to get it over with quickly so that they’ll move onto the next person and forget about me.
He raises his eyebrows at me, seemingly surprised that I actually answered the question. I see a few other mildly surprised looks around the circle as well. “Do you want to elaborate on that?”
I lean forward with my elbows on my knees and look down at the tile floor, ignoring all of the people staring at me. “Well, I hate the dark. It makes me really paranoid. Most of the male population scares the crap out of me too. The smell of pine. We can’t even have a real Christmas tree in our house anymore because one whiff of that stuff and I go into full on panic mode. People touching me when I’m not expecting it, like if they touch my shoulder from behind and I didn’t know that they were there. Some loud noises will set me off too. There’s a few more, I guess.”
“You’re afraid of the dark and Christmas trees?” One of the guys asks me with raised eyebrows and the girl beside him elbows his gut but she laughs as if that’s a joke. “Isn’t that kind of childish?”
“We’re not here to judge, Gregory,” Jake reprimands the guy.
“Yeah, Gregory,” I snap at the kid, who isn’t laughing anymore now that he got yelled at by Jake. “See? And you all think that I’m stuck up or something for not wanting to share but the second that I do, there’s somebody there to try and make fun of me or judge me or whatever. Why would I want to tell you people anything about me if that’s how you react to what I say?”
“That’s the real world,” Shayla justifies Gregory’s remark. “People are going to judge you all of the time, you just have to get used to it.”
“Do you think that I don’t already know that?” I wonder incredulously. “I’ve been at this for three years, darling, I know how people see me. Those people that judge me out there in the real world, however, aren’t asking me to open up about myself. They aren’t asking me to tell them things just to throw it back in my face. So fuck you.”
“Ana, I think that-“ Jake starts to talk but I’m not done. I have sat through all of these circles being silently miserable and I’ve listened to their stories silently for so long but this is just not okay. They force me to open up and then they just make fun of me for it? That’s ridiculous and I knew that I had a good reason to hate honesty circle, this just proves it.
I stand up from my chair, deciding that I’m done dealing with their crap, but not before I give this Gregory kid a piece of my mind. I stand in front of him and give him a dense glare and he looks up at me, his face unreadable. “And as for you, I guarantee you that if you’ve seen half of what I’ve seen, the dark would be the least of your worries. So you can go fuck yourself.”
Jake tries to get me to calm down one more time but I’m not having it, I just march out of the room. I don’t care of this means that I can’t get out of the rest of honesty hour, I’m not going to sit in there for another forty minutes while they try to turn my fears into just some childish little thing.
Since nobody else is out of honesty circle yet, I’m thinking about going to try and call Penn to vent to him but before I get to the bank of phones, one of the nurses, her name is Jemma, steps out in front of me. “Oh, hi, Ana. Are you done with honesty circle already?”
“I stormed out,” I admit.
“Oh. Well that’s a shame,” She says. “Well, you have a visitor so you might as well go on in and see him now that you’re out early.”
I’m kind of surprised that she doesn’t want to drag me back into that room but I’m also really surprised that she’s telling me that I have a visitor. “A visitor? Who is it? My family came to see me last weekend. Are you sure it’s for me?”
She nods with a smile. “Yep, I’m sure. You know where the visitor’s room is?”
I nod at her and start to make my way in that direction. “Yeah. Thanks, Nurse Jemma,” I say as I hurry down the hallway, curious to see who’s waiting for me in the visitor’s room. It’s definitely not Penn or anybody from my family because they had just come to see me last weekend, there’s no reason for them to fly all the way out here two weeks in a row- that’s ridiculous. I don’t know who else it could be though, which makes me even more curious.
When I get into the room, it’s way more empty than it was on Saturday when I was in here with Penn, Sienna, and my dad, but there are a few families waiting for their patients to get out of honesty circle to see them. I look around for somebody that I recognized, expecting Niles or maybe Johnny. However, when I see a familiar hair of dark hair (like my own) sitting down at the table at the far end, I can’t hide my excitement as I run towards the table.
“Peter!” I exclaim as I wrap my arms around my older brother and burying my face into his shoulder. “Wow, what are you doing here?”
He chuckles and then hugs me back. “Hey, Annie. You didn’t think that I forgot about you, did you?”
“Well, no, but I thought that you were in rehab or something. You didn’t escape, did you?” I wonder cautiously, pulling my head away from him just far enough to look him in the eye.
“No, I didn’t escape,” He tells me as we sit down at the table after he pretty much has to pry my arms off of him. It’s been so long since I’ve seen him though, and I miss him so much. My hands are shaking as I try to comprehend that my brother is sitting across from me right now, which is something that I never expected in a million years. “I got released and when I found out that you were here, I decided to make a pit stop to come see you.”
“A pit stop? Wait, where are you going?” I ask him.
“Back home,” He says. “I know that Mom will freak but I have a job set up there and I know some friends that I can stay with until I can get a place on my own.”
“That’s really awesome,” I grin at him. “So are you feeling totally better now?”
He nods, leaning back in his chair. “Yeah, I’m clean if that’s what you mean. And I plan on staying like that. My rehab place wasn’t nearly as nice as this one though, Annie, it looks like you have it made here.”
“I’d rather be home,” I sigh. “But I’m really happy for you, Peter. You better stay out of trouble so that we can hang out when I get out of here.”
“Everything’s going to be fine, Annie, I promise,” Peter tells me with a firm nod. “Enough talking about me though, how are you? What happened in the first place?”
“You mean how I got here?” I wonder and then I flip my wrists over so that he can see the healing scars there. “I got closer than ever this time but Penn found me just in time.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed about that,” He demands. “And that’s pretty hypocritical, don’t you think? You’re so worried about me not relapsing but here you are. At least I don’t do drugs with the single intent to die. And you’re not allowed to die, Annie, alright?”
“Don’t yell at me,” I say in a quiet voice, looking down at the table and hiding my wrists from his view, now feeling incredibly ashamed for some reason. He is right, though, I am being pretty hypocritical about telling him to stay clean when I haven’t done so myself.
“I’m not yelling at you,” He sighs. “It’s just that you’re my sister and I love you and I don’t want to lose you.”
“Well, I’m alive, aren’t I?”
“Yes, and you better keep it that way,” He tells me. “You can’t leave me alone to fend for myself with the rest of our family.”
“Our family isn’t that bad,” I roll my eyes at him. “I mean, Mom can be tempermental but you shouldn’t be mad at Dad or Penn.”
“Penn’s an asshole, Annie,” Peter says stubbornly. As if I could actually change his mind on how he thinks about our brother. I know that they will probably never get along ever but I always have to try because I love them both so much and I wish that they’d just get over whatever it is that they’re always fighting about.
“Yeah, why do I even try anymore, right? I know that you won’t ever get along,” I mumble. “Anyway, on a brighter note, my doctor says that I’m getting better. I’m being more social and everything. She said that I might even be home for Christmas.”
“Christmas? Wow, Annie, that’s great,” He smiles at me. “That is really good news. Are you making any friends then? I assume that’s what ‘being more social’ means.”
“I’ve made a few friends,” I assure him. “One of them got out though, so he’s already home. And another one of my friends is in the hospital. But yeah, I have some friends.”
“He? So you have guy friends?” Peter seems so surprised by that.
I shrug. “I guess so. It’s not really a big deal though. I don’t know why everybody thinks that it’s such a huge thing that I have friends that just so happen to be male.”
“It’s just that the last time that I saw you, you never would have thought about socializing with a guy if he wasn’t me, Penn, or Dad. It’s good to see you changing so much for the better,” He explains.
“Right, I’m top notch,” I say to him. “But just a little bit ago, I was in this circle- it’s like a group therapy thing that we have to do every Friday- and that part of this whole ‘recovery’ thing is super crappy. If anything makes me feel suicidal, it’s the idea of having to go through Honesty Circle every week until the end of December. Did you have to do that?”
“Group therapy? Yeah, we did that. I thought that it was alright,” He shrugs. “Why don’t you like it?”
“Well… okay, get this. So I’ve always hated this circle thing so they always try to get me to contribute to the conversation but I always just turn them down but today, I decided to contribute or whatever and they were talking about triggers. So I told them about how I panic when I’m outside in the dark. So this whole time, they’ve thought that I’m stuck up or whatever for not wanting to share but then, I share and they start making fun of me. Like, why is it so surprising that I’m not in a sharing and caring type of mood with bitches like that?”
“Did you punch her in the face?” Peter wonders with raised eyebrows.
“It was a guy.”
“Oh, well then you can tell me who it was and I’ll punch him in the face. Nobody messes with my baby sister and gets away with it,” He tells me, obviously feeling protective and upset about what I had just told him. “Or you could at least have kneed him in his balls.”
“I don’t like violence and you can’t hit somebody who’s ‘mentally ill’,” I remind him. “But anyway, I just stormed out. That whole honesty circle just drives me crazy- no pun intended.”
“You know, Annie, just fuck them,” He tells me. “It doesn’t matter what they say. You’re a fucking star.”
“Right,” I chuckle. “So motivational there, Peter.”
“It’s what I do,” He jokes.
Peter stays for another half an hour before we say our goodbyes and I almost start crying, but I bite my tongue and hold it in as we hug goodbye and then he’s out the door. He promises that if I’m home by Christmas, we’ll go pick out a Christmas tree together (a fake one of course).
With nothing else to do, I go back up to my room and grab my ‘reasons to live’ list and add “You’re a fucking star” to the bottom of the list. Five things on my list of reasons to be alive. And what a list that is.
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Song: Darlin' by Avril Lavigne
Picture: Ian Harding who plays Peter
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT
Title: Imperfections
Author: __natalie__
Genre: Teen Fiction
Summary: Taylor is the school's golden girl. She gets perfect grades, is popular at school, and is involved in practically every extra-curricular activity there is. But she has a secret. She is insecure. The perfect girl isn't happy with herself. She is tired of being the perfect good girl all the time. If it were up to her, she'd quit every sport, every club, and every program. But her dad always pressures her to do more, to include herself in everything. And the heartbreak makes it a lot worse. So one day, she snaps.