Free Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing by Stormie Omartian

incidents were common and I suspected that she planned them, part of me began to believe her. “I am going crazy,” I thought. “I can’t cope with life. I’m a misfit. I don’t belong anywhere. I can’t think clearly. I feel lost.” I began to question why I was even alive.
    One evening I was across the street at a girlfriend’s house watching her prepare for a date. She was a beautiful girl and very popular with the boys—everything I desired to be but wasn’t. As I compared myself to her, my depression became unbearable. By the time I left her house to return home, I was filled with pain and self-loathing. When I opened my front door, I met two angry stares. Dad said, “Where have you been? What have you been doing?”
    Before I had a chance to answer, Mother’s venom began to spew out. “You’ve been whoring around the neighborhood like a slut. You’ve been with ... ” and she began to list names of boys I liked.
    I fled to my bedroom. How did she know all those names and details? Sure I’d been attracted to those boys, but I had certainly never mentioned them to her. How could she have known my thoughts?
    Mother followed me into the bedroom to continue her accusations. She spit out her words between clenched teeth: “Your father and I have decided you can’t go across the street anymore. You can’t see your friends after school and you can no longer use the phone.” She couldn’t threaten me with taking away my allowance because I didn’t get one, or saying I couldn’t go someplace special because I never went anyplace special. But what few privileges I’d had were now gone.
    When she finally left the room, I didn’t cry. It was as if I’d been returned to the closet and I was a little child again. Fear, terror, hopelessness, and futility flooded over me, and I could not withstand the magnitude of this force. The voice in my head said, “It will never be any different.” If that was true, I could no longer bear to face another day.
    I waited until the house was quiet, then slipped into the bathroom, opened up the cabinet, and proceeded to empty every medicine bottle and swallow every pill. I swallowed 1½ bottles of Bufferin, plus pain-killers, sleeping pills, and a couple of prescription drugs. When I was done I went back to my room, put on a clean nightgown and robe, and laid down in my bed knowing I’d never wake up again. This wasn’t a plan for getting attention or shocking people into caring. I just wanted to end the agony inside me.
    When I opened my eyes again, I could not focus. The room was spinning and I felt weak, dizzy, and sick to my stomach. I rolled over, noted the sunlight, and tried to focus on my clock. It was one P.M.
    What happened? What went wrong? Why was I still alive? Gradually I remembered. Sometime in the middle of the night, Mother had held me over the bathtub and forced me to drink some vile thing until I vomited.
    I stumbled to the bathroom and locked the door. The empty bottles were in the trash. Most of what I had taken was aspirin. I looked at the other bottles. The sleeping pills and pain pills were old, from the time right after Suzy was born, when Mother had trouble resting. Maybe they had lost their power. Obviously they weren’t enough to kill me, but just enough to make me very sick.
    As I returned to bed, I reviewed all of Mother’s accusations the night before. Where had she gotten that information? How did she know about those boys? Then it clicked. The diary! The lost key! Everything was in my diary, and she was using it to spy on me. Even my most private thoughts were subject to her scrutiny and dissection.
    From behind my closed door I could hear the muffled sound of Mother running the vacuum cleaner. Whenever something horrible happened, she ran the vacuum. It was her way of denying the problem and appearing to be perfect. And what was the problem? That I was good for nothing, a disgrace to the human race.
    Or could it be that she was the