What It Means When Your Idol Puts Her Head in an Oven

Once upon a time, I was 15 and riding around town with a boy who was 18. This was the first boy I ever kissed [this is where I should point out
that I thought I was a late bloomer...until I went to college and my
suitemates from Long Island told me I'd been involved with a lot of
guys - that I'd had an "exciting" life. Huh?]. I don't remember where
we were going. I don't remember if he'd just picked me up or if he was
bringing me home. I don't remember why I thought I liked him. I don't
remember what we were talking about, if we were talking, or what was
playing on the radio.

What I do remember is getting the uncontrollable urge to grab the steering wheel and jerk it hard to the right.

Since I had yet to master the art of suppressing potentially fatal urges, I
did just what I had envisioned. Years of athletic training must have
payed off, I suppose, because his reflexes recovered his father's car
before we ended up plunging into someone's neat box hedge. Then, it
happened. IT. The thing you're always bracing yourself for at that
fragile age when you're teetering on the precipice of innocence.

He called me crazy.

Fast forward a year, and I was sitting on the bleachers at a football game
staring into oblivion when another boy, home from college, walked up to
me, hugged me, asked "how are you doing, Hon?" to which I responded
with a shrug and a mumble. He cocked his head and furrowed his brow in
lighthearted concern and advised me "to stop being so depressed all the
time." Then, he told me to call him and I never did and he ended up
wondering why I didn't and...hmm maybe it's because I'm "depressed." Your word, mister.

After that I had a label for myself. Labels consume; they take over your
being one cell at a time until you don't remember anything other than
this constructed identity. This word that defines who you are and all
that you'll ever become. That word for me was depression. Depressed. I
am. I was. I will be.

When I was 19, I got a job at a crummy supermarket ceremoniously triangulated by the highway on-ramp, a
Zares-turned-Ames-turned-Flea Market, and the usual smattering of fast
food joints and gas stations. You'd think in a shit hole like that
where no one respectable goes to buy their weekly eats, people would
leave you to your sullen ways. No. No, they didn't. The most common
response I got when giving people their receipt was "you should really
smile more." And they'd walk out the automatic double doors pushing
their overflowing carts, handles of plastic bags flapping smartly from
the rush of recycled air, and I'd sputter and fume and repeat in my
head the mantra that had carried me almost to my second decade on
earth, "but-but-I'm DEPRESSED! You [insert creative expletive
pertaining specifically to the offender and their manner of dress or
income level or some other shallow and offensive way to judge people]."

This was the night manager's cue to saunter over to my register, laugh, and
say we were very much the same. Naturally, this made my skin crawl. Who
did this high school drop out with two kids from two different women
think he was telling me we were the same? It didn't take me long to
realize it was true, however, and agree to spending most of my nights
drinking Jack and Cokes with him and walking up the train tracks at 4am
to the next town over, but I suppose that's another story for another
day.

When I was 26, I read The Bell Jar for the first time. So thrilled was I to have a psychic companion
sharing my conclusions about the painful monotony and futility of life
that I told my BF, "see, I'm not really crazy, Sylvia Plath felt
exactly the same way I do!" And you know what he said?

"Yes, and she also killed herself."