Never Too Late

by Amber Portwood

  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?”

  I took a bunch of pills and tried to get a rope around my neck. I can’t even remember clearly exactly what I did. When the police came, I was unconscious, just moaning. They put me on oxygen and took me the hospital, and I ended up regaining consciousness and stabilizing.

  It was a very weak, weak point in my life. There’s no question I needed some kind of extreme intervention at that moment. It just so happened that in order to avoid jail time for those battery charges, I had to agree to more intervention than I ever wanted. Specifically, the court ordered me to serve two years probation, invest ten thousand dollars in a college fund for Leah, and serve thirty days of anger management treatment in an inpatient rehab facility.

  So just ten days after my fresh suicide attempt, I headed for rehab in Malibu, California. Pretty good timing, right? Ultimately, I didn’t get much out of rehab because I was so resistant. At the time, I was completely convinced that I did not have a problem. Because they were prescriptions, and because I did feel so insane and anxious when I wasn’t on anything, and because my rehab papers said I was only in there for anger management, it was easy for me to convince myself that I wasn’t really an addict at all. I always had what felt like pretty solid excuses to fall back on, and I didn’t have anywhere near the desire or motivation I needed to have to start fighting with the pills.

  I did meet some great people in there. I made friends with an incredible fashion designer, a beautiful girl, and a wonderful person. And there was another girl, Molly, who I became amazing friends with. She was this beautiful California blond bombshell, very young and really fun. We did everything together in there, wearing each others clothes and hanging out all the time. There was one time, too, when one of the MTV producers came and saw me at rehab, and we went out and got our nails done and stuff. I even had a guy in there, which isn’t remotely allowed in rehab. He was very cute and we had an amazing little romance in there. We never had sex, but we definitely broke the rules.

  Rehab was only supposed to last for thirty days, but I ended up staying for sixty. I wasn’t having fun, though. I had a social life and everything, I guess, but I also had some screaming matches with staff. I wasn’t getting much of anything I actually needed out of the experience, obviously, not that it was anybody else’s fault. And I was missing Leah so bad my heart was just aching. Her dad brought her out one time to visit, and that was a really good day. But the rest of the time I was just miserable and missing her and missing my family.

  About two days before I left rehab I finally admitted I had a problem with pills. But I was already on my way out, so what were they going to do about it?

  The day you leave rehab, they give you all your medication. Everything that’s yours goes home with you. Right before I walked out of there, I got my pills and took five Klonopin. Sounds like a lot, huh? The sad thing is that was nothing to me.

  I barely even remember flying home, although I do remember getting in a fight with a girl at the airport. There was a drunk couple there who started messing with my bodyguard, asking ignorant questions, and then they started yelling at me and stuff. Nothing serious happened, but that’s pretty much what I remember of the trip home.

  Which sums it up, basically. In my memory, that part of my life is just a dull haze punctuated by stupid shit.

  When I got home, my mom was there, and she’d cleaned the house and put up a welcome home banner for me, which was really sweet. At this point, what everybody hoped was that I was on the road to recovery. That’s what rehab is supposed to symbolize, after all. It was supposed to be a fresh start or a new beginning or whatever.

  Obviously, reality was a little bit different. The stress of coming back from rehab just had me feeling like I needed more pills than ever. My ex-fiancé and I were fighting as bad as before, or maybe even worse. And something was starting to happen where I would black out for three days straight. I mean, I would literally look around on Wednesday and realize I didn’t know how I got there from Monday. Any addicts out there will know what I’m talking about. There comes a point where you’re so messed up on pills, and so used to being messed up on pills, that you start losing big chunks of time. The freaky thing is that you’re still functioning and talking to people, but afterward you can’t remember a damn thing. It’s like something else has taken over your body while you’ve been asleep.

  Like I said before, nobody came right out and confronted me on the pills or anything. But when a person changes as much as I had changed at that time, everybody around them notices. People were worried about me at the time, I know. My mom and brother tried to reach out to me and talk about it, but even if we were talking, they couldn’t reach me. Whenever anybody brought anything up, I’d shut it down. Part of the reason you don’t hear much about my family as I tell this story is that I was always putting distance between me and them, especially as my situation got worse. Maybe I didn’t want to face their questions. Maybe I just couldn’t focus on anyone. Who knows? I doubt it will ever make perfect sense. I don’t know how else to explain it other than that I was in a dark place.

  My brother said to me later that he thought he had lost me at that point. Between the suicide attempt, the pills, and how detached I was from my life, he just thought I’d gone out of reach. After I got out of jail, we sat down and talked, and he looked me in the eye and said to me, “Amber, I’m not gonna lose my sister again.” There’s no question there were people around who loved me, and they weren’t giving up on me. I was just on my own. If you ever met somebody who didn’t give a shit, it was me. I didn’t care about anything that happened anymore.

  9

  Nothing Left to Lose

  Like any regular person out there, I’ve been diagnosed with my share of mental disorders over the years.

  I’m just kidding. I know it’s not really normal to have to use your fingers to count how many disorders you’ve heard in doctors’ offices and counselors’ rooms. Bipolar disorder, clinical depression, anxiety, sociopathic tendencies . . .

  You know, I have to call a time out on that last one. Most of the time, I’ve been able to see where people were coming from. The anxiety is just a fact. I don’t think you have to be a psychiatrist to see that much. Obviously depression is something I’ve struggled with since I was just a kid, so I have no argument there. Bipolar disorder? I don’t know about that one, but I can understand how somebody might look at my behavior from, say, back when I was on the show and come up with that diagnosis. Half the time it looked like I was either screaming at my ex-fiancé or lying in bed. Manic-depressive. I get it. Whatever. Maybe.

  But a sociopath? Come on.

  Maybe the doctor who told me that thought I seemed unemotional. But maybe that had something to do with how many pills I was on at the time. I mean, how can you judge somebody’s emotional reactions when they’re on a prescribed cocktail of opiates, antidepressants, and anxiety medications? Of course I’m not going to be reacting to things like a normal person.

  And, well, maybe I haven’t always reacted to things the same way other people have. It’s true I can
remember a whole lot of times in my life when I didn’t show the emotions people expected me to show. Even just off the top of my head, I can think of plenty of times where something horrible, shocking, or violent happened in front of me, and the other people who were there turned to me afterward and couldn’t understand how calm I was. That’s just the way I am. I don’t always cry at funerals. I don’t always freak out when something scary happens in front of me. And when I’m in a relationship, my heart doesn’t always jump into it right away.

  I can’t explain all of that. I’m not the psychiatrist. But what I can say is that just because I’m not crying doesn’t mean I’m not sad. Just because I’m not flipping out doesn’t mean I’m not scared. And if I’ve been a little distant in my relationships, well, the fact is I’m still pretty young, and most of my memories are taken up by the one great big love that blew me away when I was sixteen, the love that gave me my daughter.

  When I wasn’t with Leah’s father, I went through men like a hurricane. I never felt any deep feelings for these guys, even when they were really great. It just never stirred the same place inside me as my relationship with Leah’s father. The stages of my life I went through with him were so intense: falling in love for the first time, having sex for the first time, moving in together, having a child, and dealing with all the weirdness of getting famous from an MTV reality show. He was part of everything that happened to me, just like I was part of everything that happened to him. We were completely together. It’s just impossible to think of those years without thinking of him. It’s even hard to think about who I am or what my life is without him, because he’s attached to all of those memories.