Okay

The table was grimy, covered in years of spilled coffee and cigarette ash, the hand-made doilies my stepmother had laid out making the edges between clean and filth stand out garishly. It was late, but summer in Norway means that there was light coming into the windows even at half-past two in the morning. Across from me was a chain-smoking man with my nose and dark hair, slack faced and glazed over with either fatigue or nicotine; it didn't seem possible to tell which. My stepmother hovered just outside the door to the area that served as dining, living, and occasional guest room in the tiny European house and my half-brother who was just a few months past seven years old was asleep upstairs. As my father smoked one cigarette after another, sometimes lighting the next before the first was fully finished, I tried to find my words, to put what had happened into the air between us.

My eyes stung, unaccustomed to the fog of smoke and I tried not to cough. As I looked up from the table, the mirror behind my father's head showed a pale, drawn girl with smudged red lipstick and huge, glazed, empty eyes. I looked away, frightened by what I knew was my face. A little cough from my hidden stepmother caused me to jump. She was trying to be supportive but stay behind the scenes, her eyes worried and full of support. I almost giggled at the absurdity of the situation: my father chain smoking in silence like a character from a black-and-white Noir film where he would say “sweetheart” a lot and I would faint away in a puddle of black satin dress, my hand pressed to my perfectly tweezed brow; my stepmother as the stage hand tucked behind the corner of the set where she would make sure everything would go just right. It was laughable.

With a sigh, my father stubbed out the glowing filter of his latest cigarette and I managed to unclench my jaw, finally ready to say the words. I cracked my smudged red lips and in a teary rush revealed my secret: I tried to kill myself last night.

I expected some sort of exaggerated reaction like you saw in movies. I imagined him jumping up, his chair falling backward with a bang as he rushed to fold me in a hug with questions of what I needed. I imagined him becoming angry, demanding to know why I had done it, telling me that I was worth so much more than that sort of end. Many scenarios had flooded my mind while we had sat there in silence, but none of them would come to fruition. There was no reaction at all. He simply looked at me like I had remarked on the lateness of the hour and told him I was going to bed, took a long drag off the cigarette pinned between his fingers and said-

Okay.

Two months before that night I had flown in on a plane ticket gifted from my estranged father to spend the summer with him and my stepmother at their home in Norway. I was twenty-two, I had never seen Europe, and the prospect of a free flight there was something that lived with the fantasies of winning the lottery or finding out I was the long-lost great granddaughter of a royal family, (Me, a princess? Shut up!). But I was more excited that my dad had invited me. Just me, without my sister and after seven years of separation. It didn't matter to me that that separation was because of a hasty elopement because of a baby on the way with the woman who's clandestine existence caused the divorce of my parents, or that we had barely spoken outside of birthday and Christmas greetings sent through Facebook. Here was my chance to get the relationship with my father back! I had planned most of my High School achievements around what I thought would make my dad the proudest: music was my whole life and I chose it to honor the fact that he was a musician himself. This must be his way of rewarding me! No more missed holidays, graduations, or music recitals! He would be there to walk me down the aisle, and to pat me on the back after I graduated from college and landed my dream job! Combine all those innocent hopes with a recent break up with a long time boyfriend, being forced to drop out of college a few months prior, and still being in denial about a newly acquired Bipolar diagnosis, and the timing couldn't be better. I was going on a European vacation, that would solve everything, right?

In the end, I realized my naivety, though it was in the most painful way possible. The night-life lifestyle I wasn't used to with a massive increase in drinking on my medication, the loneliness of a six hour time difference that made it almost impossible to talk to my mom or any friends, and heavy denial about my Bipolar swirled together into a perfect storm of deep depression that resulted in deciding I would only get on the plane home in a body bag. I overdosed on what amounted to a month's worth of anti-anxiety pills, mood stabilizers and sleep medication, laid down on the bed on top of a plastic garbage bag (See? Considerate even in death, I thought), and waited to fade away into blissful nothingness.

Obviously, I didn't succeed. And something like thirty-six hours after the event I stumbled out of my room determined to pretend nothing had happened. In my numb and drugged state, I was convinced that coffee would sooth everything over and I could get on with my life like it was nothing more than a hangover.

A really terrible, horrible hangover.

It was my stepmother that found me out, almost immediately. She asked what I had done, I confessed and she insisted (with tight, comforting hugs, and kind words while plying me with lots of water), that I tell my father (later I would find out that she was the one who called home and told my mom, who then arranged my flight back home to the states with the skill and speed of a White House staffer). So I told him, teary and sorry for putting everyone through it but still angry at failing. It was that one word put the seal of fate on our relationship: Okay. That one word made me realize that my father had his own demons and that I meant little to him as anything other than pride his own achievement in having an accomplished daughter. I was a prop to his life, not something he was emotionally invested in, and it's changed my whole life.

I had to be reinvented as a girl without a father. I am stronger for losing the co-dependency that kept me from seeing my own worth except through his eyes. I never knew it was a problem until I stared at a father who was unfazed by his daughter telling him she had tried to take her own life in despair, who never offered a kind word or gentle touch in her grief. My stepmother, the one person in that house I wasn't related to me by blood, showed the most compassion and it's her I'm grateful for in that moment. It proved to me that to surround yourself with people who love you, the people who will always love you is far more important than relying on blood as a standard of loyalty. It's a hard-won lesson that I have never forgotten, even in the battles of the past five years. My chosen family includes blood and surrogate relatives, people that have shown their love for me time and again, unconditionally.