Picture: Christine de la Cerna
To say that I have a family history of mental illness would be an understatement: I’ve got a long, storied family history of men putting shotguns in their mouths and pulling the trigger. I’ve even got a few female suicides as well. Family rumors were that I had a great, great aunt that took a header off a bridge. One of my parents crawled into a whiskey bottle and died. The other recently became persona non grata after putting a pellet rifle to the head of a newborn. Last I heard she’s living in a trailer out in the woods somewhere, gobbling up drugs and claiming to have one fatal illness after another. Throw in a grand lineage of drunks and we’re a family in the classic Southern Gothic style.
Call it a family curse – a tainted bloodline, if you’re into H.P. Lovecraft – but it’s one that visited itself on me in my teenage years and decided to stick around.… Read the rest
