Have you ever met someone who is so much like you, it’s frightening? I’m not talking about someone who looks like you or does the same job or grew up where you did. I’m talking about someone who is exactly like you. These people never seem to walk into your life when you’re at your best; they always find you at your worst—in those moments when you’re stuck and feel like everyone else is running at a different speed or moving in another direction, or when you can’t tell if you’re on the outside looking in or right in the middle without anyone noticing you. I’ve spent a lot of time in that very spot. That’s where I met Reagan.
Now, the best thing you can do when you’re there, when you’re lost, is to follow Mr. Rogers’s advice and “look for the helpers.” This quote, as well as his song “What Do You Do with the Mad That You Feel?,” go viral every couple of years, usually after a school shooting or something else equally heartbreaking and inexplicable. His “helpers” quote goes like this: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers—so many caring people in this world.”
But what if the disasters are happening inside you? We can’t claw our way out when everything is spinning so fast, so we stand still and convince ourselves that this is now our life. Maybe it’s what we built, or what we deserve. Maybe we’re just broken and we need to get on with accepting that. This is when you need the helpers. Helpers will make a difference. What won’t make it better is if you find someone exactly like you. Someone in the same fucked-up spot. These people are bad for you. They feel glorious and for the first time in a long time you’ll feel whatever normal used to feel like. But they’re so very bad for you.
I didn’t want help, and I didn’t need a friend. I needed a partner, someone to race to the bottom with. Someone who also believed the world was a cult of cruelty and full of monsters—because they’d fought them too. Someone with scars and secrets. That’s who Reagan was. She and I would meet at a filthy diner up the street from me at 9 a.m. on weekends and start drinking. The diner didn’t sell alcohol that early, but Reagan had a way of convincing anyone to do anything, especially when it came to breaking the rules, so they’d serve us secret beer in coffee mugs with our breakfast, and we rarely had to pay for any of it. She was magnetic and wild, and I just wanted to be around her. Everybody did.
Reagan was an expert at getting people to do all the things they never would, good or bad, humiliating or exhilarating. But when you were doing them, you never felt manipulated or taken advantage of. You felt free. I felt free. She was another vice, another distraction, but I loved who I was when I was around her. Nothing mattered, and we used each other.
There’s a power in irresponsibility. A freedom. It gives off the sense that you have nothing to lose, and that’s an intoxicating quality to certain people. Living without consequences can be goddamn sexy.
Reagan and I would drink from early morning until after midnight, getting lost in heady conversations and co-commiseration, then we’d jump in her borrowed minivan, drunk, and she’d sideswipe a half-dozen parked cars all the way down the narrow one-way street around the corner from my house.
This went on most weekends. Just the two of us, hammered, cheating death, and pouring our guts out to each other. It was all so incredibly self-indulgent, yet validating.
“Do you think you feel things differently than other people?” she asked one morning, in that diner, drinking beer out of mugs.
“I don’t know what I feel. Sometimes I don’t even know if I do feel.” If I didn’t play the part, I knew she wouldn’t want to hang with me anymore, so I told her what I thought she wanted to hear. She looked at me like I was special, broken and fucked, but she somehow made me feel good about it, like I was doing everything right.
“Do you want to feel?” Reagan grabbed my hand, laid it out flat on the table, took a long drag off her cigarette, then hovered the tip of it over the back of my wrist until my hairs curled and burned. “Do you feel that?”
I couldn’t tell if this was like a sex thing or if she thought this was helping, but I went with it. “No,” I said. And that was the truth. I’d spent hundreds of hours locked in a bathroom burning myself, so the hot end of a Camel Light an inch above my skin didn’t even register.
“What about this?” She touched the end of the cigarette to my hand and quickly pulled it away.
“No,” I said again. I started to feel less like I was part of something and more like her plaything. Like a toy. I’d been in this situation before, and I knew what to do. I became the thing she needed me to be.
“How about now?” she asked, and she snuffed what was left of the cigarette out on the meaty part, right between my thumb and index finger. The end of it sunk right in and the skin turned black around the edges. I knew enough about burns to know this one was going to take forever to heal.
“No,” I said again, shaking my head without breaking eye contact. Maybe this was a sex thing. I couldn’t tell if she had just fallen in love with me or lost all respect. She reached across the table, took my cigarette from between my lips, took a long drag, put my other hand flat on the table, and did the same thing, only harder, and I helped her. I put my hand on top of hers to make sure she didn’t flinch. To make sure she knew I felt nothing.
She held my cigarette there until it was out.
That was the last time anything hot ever touched my body in any sort of deliberate way. Half of me was pissed because I knew Reagan just ruined my favourite thing, my ritual, but the other half was relieved. I was done. A better story would have been that I got the help I so desperately needed or found a healthy way to deal with it through honesty and growth. But I didn’t.
These were my first burn scars that other people could actually see, and that’s when everything changed for me. I don’t exactly know why I stopped hurting myself, but I just did. I knew I needed to start actually feeling life, and this was step one of a million, but it was a damn good start.
You can still see those scars almost twenty years later. I’m not embarrassed by them anymore, but I’ve never told anyone the truth about where they came from. I told my mother I got them from the broiler when I reached into the oven and the door came back up and slammed my hand inside.
“You got the clumsiness from me,” she said.
I told my co-workers the burns were from a hot motorcycle engine, or my barbecue, and I even used fishing as an explanation when I was bored one day in a car with a cameraman.
“How the hell did you burn yourself fishing?” he asked.
“You’ve never been fishing with me,” I answered.
These were all lies: addicts lie, and I was a liar. I used humour to get me out of most awkward situations, because I was in a constant state of pain and anxiety. Hurting myself was an addiction. I was addicted to using physical pain for emotional release. It was my way to deal with and ease all the awful stuff inside—the psychological pain. There’s a romantic, almost punk aspect to seeing yourself as a weirdo or outsider. Living on the margins, by force or by choice, can be wonderful. But you can’t stay there. You have to have the courage to grow, and that first step is always the hardest.
“Life is about choices,” my dad always used to say. “Sometimes you’re going to make the good ones, sometimes the bad ones. Just don’t beat yourself up too hard over the bad ones. We all make bad ones. But the worst thing you can do, after you really screw up, is not ask for help.”
My old man was certainly no Mr. Rogers, but I always knew what he meant. I’m not saying that all of this was a choice, because for most of us, the ones who hurt to not hurt, it’s not. But not asking for help was.
For anyone who self-harms, as I did for half my life, you owe it to yourself to exhaust all your options when it comes to help. There’s an end to it, and your world is filled with helpers. They want to help. Let them.