(Warnings:
mentions of addiction and suicide attempts.)
“Jessica
Burkhart is an author of tween and teen books. She loves all things pink and
sparkly.”
Those were constant lines in my author bio. Plastered on 1.5 million copies of my books. My
readers sent me glittery gifts in the mail. Loved discussing Twilight
and all the sequels with me. Knew that if something was pink and sparkly, I
needed to know of its existence.
However, my
private, personal bio read: “Jessica Burkhart is an author of tween and teen
books. She loves all things pink and sparkly. She’s also dealing with
depression and anxiety.”
But how do
you tell that to the kids who idolize you and want to be you? That love and
adore that version of Jessica Burkhart? The Jessica Burkhart who’s
cheerful and sparkly?
I didn’t tell
them. I didn’t tell anyone. I was too afraid that if I did, I’d lose them and
the career I put sixteen plus hour work days into would be gone. After all, I
was living my dream—I had a Brooklyn apartment, a steady job that I loved and I
was making it. No one would believe that I was depressed, would they? I didn’t know what to do, so I began taking
benzos. Then, I tore a tendon in my elbow from writing (Yes, seriously!) and
started on painkillers.
By 2010—just
a year after my debut novel came out—I was a full-blown addict. I thought of
pills as pretty poison—they helped me feel “pretty” which meant feeling
nothing. They were “poison” when they’d start to wear off.
The bottles
said to take one fifth of what I took every six hours. I’d wait four hours if I
was being especially good that day. Most days I’d go three and a half hours.
But that makes a bottle of 150 pills run out really fast. So fast that my life
revolved around where and when to get pills and when and how to take them.
It was all I
could plan for in my life. I had it down to a science: always have one or two
doctor appointments scheduled for every eight days max. I carried a notebook
with me to every appointment that helped me keep track of what I’d told which
doctor. I’d gone from crafting stories in fiction to creating lies for my own
life to help me score. The notes filled an entire mini-notebook.
It took so
much time to keep my stories straight. I had to make sure I didn’t go to the
same doctor too often and I had to keep looking for different doctors and pain
management clinics. It was exhausting and the fear of running out of pills was
a constant. It happened a few times and the hallucinations, gut-wrenching
vomiting, sweating and the other withdrawal symptoms I experienced were more
than enough to keep me up at night worrying that one day, I wouldn’t be able to
score. I was trapped in a loop that would keep me prisoner for almost seven
years.
I needed help
to get clean and I didn’t love myself enough to get that guidance. My life had
become an ongoing cycle of pills. So many handfuls of pills a day. Pills crushed
into fine power and put in my morning green tea. Sometimes, I was too lazy to
even crush them, so I’d dump the full pills into tea, stir and wait for them to
break down in the scalding water. That was just my dose of painkillers. Benzos
were next. Rinse and repeat for lunch. And dinner. Snack time pills were chewed
and swallowed.
Sometimes,
I’d wake up a couple days later from a post-benzo and painkiller dose so heavy
I shouldn’t have been alive.
Pills were
fuel to my depression and anxiety. With pills, I didn’t have to feel. Which is
why I thought I was happy for so long. Then, when all of that crashed around
me, I took more and more drugs to “help” my feelings of sadness and loneliness.
What I couldn’t see then was that without getting clean and dealing with my
mental health struggles, I’d never be okay. I was going to die with my then one
true love: pills.
It was only a
matter of time. My parents had found me unconscious once and I knew I’d
terrified them, but I wasn’t ready to get help. On one of the worst nights of
my life, I walked in front of a car in my Brooklyn neighborhood. Somehow, the
driver managed to swerve and avoided hitting me. He honked and screamed, though
and when I finally crawled into bed sobbing later that night, I ended up
looking at kittens on a local rescue’s Website. Why? I can’t remember.
Soon, I had
two kittens in my tiny one-bedroom apartment. I loved them fiercely. Bliss, a
grey and white tabby, had a hip fractured and I taught her to walk. Bella, my
muted orange and white, was a one-eyed sweetheart. I bonded with both of them,
but what Bella and I had was special. She was like a dog—she wanted to be with
me everywhere and didn’t care if I was going on a trip on the subway or sitting
on my porch—if she could be in my lap, she didn’t care.
And before I
knew it, I realized that yes, I wouldn’t stay alive for myself. But for them?
For Bella? For the pirate kitty who sat by or on me while I cried over hallucinated
cockroaches and who watched me hurl lamps or books into walls when I just
didn’t know what to do anymore, I could do this basic thing of staying alive. Both of my kittens became cats as they watched me exist with my addiction and mental health struggles. Then, one day, I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't just exist.
I went to rehab for the painkillers and got counseling. Hours and hours of counseling. And, soon after that, I was able to start to tackle the things in my past that led to my depression and anxiety spirals.
A year later,
I started working with another doctor to come off benzos. That was a bitch. I
won’t even lie. I’d thought coming off painkillers was hard. It’s been over two
years, though. I know with certainty that I’ll never touch pills again.
The longer
I’m off drugs, too, the more things come back. From my personality to my
memories. I’m feeling things again. Some feeling suck, they really do! But I’ve
learned how to cope without taking a pill. I’m able to feel happiness, too,
which I could feel before, but it was muted. Through a haze of drugs that felt
as though there was a Plexiglas wall up between what I could feel and what I
wanted to feel.
I lost Bliss,
my tabby, at the end of 2017 to a freak heart condition. Bella passed away in
April 2018 after a short battle with cancer. They were each only five years
old. It never crossed my mind, though, to go back to pills even in the darkest
months after Bella’s death. See, the vet said she’d had cancer for a while, but
had kept her symptoms very well hidden. I will always believe she stuck around
long enough to make sure I was good—that I was clean and able to live—before
she finally showed me that she was sick. She’d taken care of me for long enough
and she could finally go. And, because of her, I’m here to stay. I still have
dark days and I fight with my anxiety on the daily. But I’m not going anywhere.
I’m going to keep being honest and open about my struggles with mental health
and addiction.
My readers
have stuck by me since I’ve started talking about my mental health struggles. I
wish I would have come forward with my stories earlier, but hey, I’m doing it
now.
Speaking of
now, my current bio reads: “Jessica Burkhart is an author of tween and teen
books. She loves all things pink and sparkly. She’s passionate about speaking
out about the importance of good mental health.”
Thank you so
much to Eva
Pohler for including me on this World Suicide Prevention Day campaign.
Please check out the rest of the stories that will be posted
over the next several days.
