Never Too Late (13 page)

What can I say? I got a little mean. One day when she texted me to hang out I said, “Okay, fine, drive to my house and we’ll go out.” Now, let me just mention I was looking pretty damn good at the time, and that day I dressed up to the T. White spandex and heels, man. I was at my peak.

When she showed up, we did the small talk bullshit for awhile before I said, “Okay, let’s take my car.”

But I’d already been scheming. I was talking to Leah’s father just an hour before she showed up, and I asked what he was doing that day. He said he was gonna be hanging out at home with his friend Joe. So I pulled out of the driveway and started heading over. When the girl asked where we were going, I just casually said, “Oh, we’re going to my old boyfriend’s house.”

She started freaking out a little bit and asking why we were headed there, but I was just like, “Because that’s where we’re going.” I drove us there, got out of the car, and walked right up to the house. Leah’s father opened the door and saw the girl sitting in my car. His face was absolutely priceless. I just said, “What’s up?” And I walked into the house.

The girl got up and followed me, and I could see the look in his eyes as he was shaking his head at me like, “What the hell . . . this crazy bitch.” That’s when I looked at him and said, “Yeah, what’s up? So, pick one.”

And guess what? He picked me.

Not like that made a difference to me at that point. All I did was turn around and look at the girl like, “That’s right, bitch.” Let her deal with him, was the only thought I had on the matter. My give-a-fucks were gone.

The poor girl was obviously in over her head. She was just kind of cowering on the side and looking at me like, “Oh my god. My car’s at your house...”

So I was a bad bitch for a minute there, and that was satisfying. Of course, then I realized I had locked my keys in my car. We had to wait for somebody to come and unlock it. That was a little awkward. Then I found out my tags were expired or something when I got pulled over on the way home, with this girl in my car. By the time she finally got behind her own wheel and drove off, I was pretty bored of the whole thing.

Oh, and just to be clear, I did
not
get back together with my ex. As far as any chance of romance was concerned, I had made up my mind and I was done with him.

One thing I know one-hundred percent about myself is I have the ability to make some tough-ass choices when I have to. Deciding to stay away from Leah’s father was one of those big decisions I made when I looked around and just had this wake-up moment, and I realized I didn’t want to be stuck in that terrible situation.

Like I said, I never really feared consequences as much as a normal person should have, and I was never held back from doing anything by any fear of regretting it later. It’s actually the opposite. I have this fear deep down inside of being on my deathbed and thinking, “I wish I would have done that.” I don’t want to look back and regret what I
didn’t
do to save myself because I was letting pain hold me down. I don’t want to ruin my life and then sit there looking back and seeing where I missed the chance to get back on track.

When I have that clarity, I have the strength to make those drastic moves. And that’s just my style. Not doing anything in moderation can be really bad in a lot of ways, but when you’re really feeling stuck in a bad situation, you have to be ready to go to the extreme and say, “Enough is enough.” For me, it was a skill that would come in handy later, when I found myself needing an emergency exit once again.

I wasn’t there yet, though. In fact I felt like I was in the tiny eye of a horrible storm. Everything around me sucked. Everything had fallen apart. And as far as I could tell, I had nothing to lose. It was not a good state to be in.

I
’m going to share some life advice with you now, just a piece of wisdom earned through my own unique experience. The advice is this: if you have paparazzi knocking on your door saying, “Hey, I heard you’re fun to party with,” chances are you’re doing something wrong with your life. Just make a note of that somewhere.

The media attention I was getting at that point was ridiculous. I’d walk up to my house and there would be four cars just sitting there out in front. Just a bunch of paparazzi in Anderson, Indiana for no damn reason but to follow around the notorious
Teen Mom
Amber Portwood and hope she did something juicy enough to sell a picture of. And, well, to be fair, they were on the right track. I was wild as hell at that point, and doing everything I could think of to go even wilder.

In the last few months, it felt like I’d lost my grip on every good influence that had been keeping me somewhat sane. My family had totally fallen apart, and I couldn’t see a shred of hope that it would ever go back to the way it was supposed to be. I’d given up custody of Leah and failed to figure out how to handle co-parenting with her dad. All my expectations and responsibilities were a complete mess.

So what did I do? I turned to partying.

The conditions were right for it to happen. Not only was I feeling completely miserable and desperate for a distraction, but I’d finally gotten to where I didn’t care about the mean things people said about my looks or my body, and I had some sense of confidence back. In fact, I guess because of all the stress, I had lost an insane amount of weight after having Leah. After all the bullying I’d experienced for my size, the urge to dress up and go out and show off how awesome I looked was a way to strike back and settle that score in my own mind. When the paparazzi came knocking and asking me to party, they could have been anybody. I was ready to go out and stir some shit up. There was nothing healthy about my mindset at the time. There were definitely much better ways I could have handled the hopelessness and heartbreak I was feeling. But there were also plenty of new faces who were more than eager to egg me on in my mission to go crazy. Yes, including the paparazzi.

I was pretty good at avoiding them, usually. I’d just sneak in and out of my house through the back. But there was one time when I’d just gotten out of the shower and I heard a knock on the door. I went and answered in a towel, and so of course there were four guys standing there. That’s how fate works. One of them was a guy from a pretty well-known publication who said he’d heard I could party. He must have heard it from some people I’d gone out with the night before. I don’t know. But these guys wanted to hang out, so I went along and partied with them at the hotel where they were staying.

You think teenaged reality TV stars are crazy? Well, listen up: paparazzi are crazy. At least the ones I know. Those guys go hard, and they just live in a really weird kind of world where it’s normal to act completely insane. I remember them showing me all the photos they’d taken lately on their computer, pictures of Brad Pitt and the cast of
Twilight
. One of them had a bunch he’d taken while he was hiding in trees in the woods and stuff. There was one guy there I really liked, through. He did a lot of high-end stuff, photo shoots for
Vogue
and everything. Another of them just sold to tabloids and all of that. But the kind of important thing was that they were all pretty damn hot. We went to the hotel and stayed the whole night hanging out and partying. There were people there who were trading pills and getting all messed up. We got crazy in the hot tub, rocking out and acting wild, and early in the morning we went back out and these guys stole a bunch of balloons from some store parking lot and handed them to me. There were pictures online of me walking down the street with this big bunch of balloons while they were just taking photos of me. Weird kind of trade-off, right? We all got to party, I got balloons, they sold their pictures, and the world got to see another wacky
Teen Mom
candid.

We all know it wasn’t all fun and games, though. I was pretty much living as fast as I figured out how to do, going out as often I could, and taking pills by the handful. Somehow this was still a secret by the time I went to rehab.

My life was just a roller coaster of extremes at that point. I felt like I was having the time of my life when I was out partying and taking pills, trying to kill off my feelings and remove myself from all my worries. But in the daytime it was usually a different story. The fact that I didn’t have my daughter anymore was always hanging over me in the back of my mind. And the consequences of hitting Leah’s father hadn’t even fully come down on me.

I had been hit with two felony domestic battery charges, along with a charge of felony child neglect that was eventually dropped. The reason the charges were so serious was that people were saying I had beaten up Leah’s father in front of Leah, which is a bigger crime than if I had hit him in private. I fought the charges, but they were riding my ass and pretty soon it became clear that I wasn’t going to be allowed to walk away from that situation without some kind of serious legal consequence. I was facing three years in jail if I was convicted of that, and my odds just weren’t looking good. Finally, I decided to strike a plea deal to stay out of prison. In exchange for my pleading guilty to the battery charges, the judge put me on probation and told me I had to complete thirty days in an inpatient treatment facility to deal with my anger management. He also ordered me to get my high school diploma and to put ten thousand dollars in a college fund for Leah.

It could have been a lot worse, but that was not the way I looked at it. The glass definitely wasn’t half-full. The way I saw it, it was empty and cracked on the floor. Being found guilty of those battery charges felt like the nail in the coffin of my sanity. Any work I was going to do in the interest of anger management, I felt like I probably should have done long, long before I lost control and wound up in such a horrible situation. I was already so overwhelmed by stress at the time, between my toxic relationship with my former fiancé, my anxiety and depression, not being able to see Leah, and keeping up the constant juggling act with all the pills I was taking. The way the media and strangers were talking about
Teen Mom
had me feeling like public enemy number one. They were saying I was worthless, that I wasn’t fit to be a mom, and the worst of them were that I should just go and kill myself.

On the outside, whether it was on camera or just the way I was acting in front of the people who knew me, I was angry. That was the side that people saw. I had such a short fuse at that point, and I’d never been exactly easygoing to begin with. The more anxiety, depression, and stress that piled up inside me, the faster I lashed out whenever I got upset. Everything felt like a fight. It felt like the whole world was attacking me.

When there were people around that I could blame for what I was feeling, I reacted with anger. But when it was just me, alone, on the inside I felt something much darker and lonelier. I felt hopeless. I was back on the edge of that big black hole of sadness I’d felt since I was a kid, just feeling lost, alone, miserable, and miles away from any hope of happiness.

How was it ever going to get better? What change could I make that would matter? I couldn’t see a damn thing I could do that would make an impact on how far down my life had gotten. I had already lost what was most important to me. Even if I straightened up everything as good as I possibly could, stopped taking pills, and started acting the way everybody seemed to think I should, would that get me custody of my daughter back? Would that get me my relationship with her father back? Everything was still going to be messed up no matter what I did. The media was going to keep picking my every move apart no matter what. I’d never act perfect enough to change people’s minds at that point. And even if I did, I’d still have that monster of depression and anxiety eating me up from the inside out every single day. The fact was I couldn’t see a single exit from that moment in time that led to a better place. I felt like I was already so deep in the hole there was no point clawing at the walls. I was stuck at the bottom, and I just couldn’t picture myself ever getting out.

And you want to know what? That wasn’t just my take on the situation. If you followed the tabloids or read what people were saying online about me at the time, you would have seen plenty of people saying I was hopeless, worthless, selfish, a psychopath, a manipulator, a bully, a mess. And you would have seen plenty of people saying I should kill myself.

It had all come back around again. Just like that time when I was eleven years old and got so tired of feeling bad for no reason that I decided to do whatever I could to end it, I drifted into those desperate measures again. For the second time in my life, I went into the bathroom of my house and tried to hang myself.

Before I did it, I called up Leah’s dad and told him I loved him. As shocking as it sounds, I barely remember any of this happening. It’s like a movie playing in my head, little clips of it, because I was so checked out and blacked out. I didn’t even take as many pills that day as I usually took. But it was just like, “I’m a failure. What’s my purpose? I’m not even a mom. I don’t have my family. I’m here all alone. What am I doing with my life?” Everything just seemed worthless. I didn’t feel happy. I didn’t feel any happiness at all. One sign that depression has grown out of control is when the things that usually bring you happiness or pleasure suddenly leave you feeling nothing at all. You love chocolate chip cookies? Not anymore. Best friend surprises you with an awesome present? You can’t even pretend to be happy. Nothing feels real. Your good emotions have completely disappeared. That’s where I was, to the point where even spending time with Leah wasn’t giving me any sense of happiness, not even for a little bit. And that’s bad. That’s really bad. When I realized how far away I’d gotten from any chance of happiness, I just sort of said, “Fuck it, what’s the point?”