Freshman Overcomes His Past Through Creative Outlets

Jacob Pillman is angry.

The 13-year-old drags his father’s shaving razor down his arm without wincing. The physical pain is nothing; his torment is mental. You’re pathetic, you’re stupid, no one likes you. Beads of blood form on his now-jagged skin, the patterns on the back of his arm glowing red in the light of his attic bedroom.

But the small, flat blade scrapes merely the surface of Jacob’s skin, removes only a few layers. The attempt, at least for now, seems futile. A shaving razor will not do the trick.

After six precise cuts into his left arm’s exterior, he gets up. He kneels at the edge of his bed and retrieves the two spare blades to his father’s Xacto knife that he had stashed under his mattress earlier that evening.

The slanted tip of the blade is sharp. Unused. It draws blood with the first incision.

Jacob begins up high, sliding the cold edge along the skin near the crease of his elbow, then moves downward, going harder, getting deeper. Cut, cut, cut. His skin is raw, shredded, delicate.

He slits his wrists horizontally across his vein on both arms.

Dizziness fogs his mind rapidly, threatening to take him under, but after a few long moments he realizes that he is not yet dead. He begins to dig at the center of his left arm like mad, deeper and deeper, straining against his vital vein.

The blood loss is too immense for him to stay conscious. Jacob collapses on the carpet in front of him, the blood streaming from his wrists like spilled ink.

“Feel the blood dripping down my arms; I call it a gift, you call it self-harm.” -Jacob Pillman, 2009

The glossy floors of Sylvester Powell Community Center squeak underfoot as Jacob walks casually up to his friends across the fluorescent-lit gymnasium.

“Hey Jake!” a thin boy in a neon green Mr. Fish T-shirt yells.

Kamran, Joe, and Nick sit in a huddle up against the far wall, lounging, gossiping and griping about their teachers after a long day at school. Jacob drops his bag on the wood floor, temporarily exposing his left wrist. The boys eye Jacob’s month-old scars with familiarity, not missing a beat.

“Took you long enough,” Joe says with a shove, though he’s careful not to knock him down and upset him.

Kamran leans over and dives into a conversation with Jacob, before being abruptly cut off by Nick.

“Let’s go see if you can actually lift something today,” he laughs at Kamran, throwing his jacket to the floor and trudging up the stairs to the workout area. “C’mon, Jake.” Jacob follows suit, completely at ease.

His best friends knew the full story of what he was going through: the mental illness, the failed suicide attempts, the drug abuse—even when his own parents did not. His “brothers” know to keep an eye out for him.

Jacob had been “classified as weird” by his peers from a young age, and was made fun of for being different. He was artistic: interested in theatre, drawing, writing, the release of emotion through the creations of his own mind. He used the acting lessons he enrolled in to cope with the harsh emotions he often felt towards himself.

Being on stage did not prove to be enough. When Jacob was 10 years old, he found an old rope in the basement, tied it around the rafters exposed on the ceiling and made a noose. He stood in front of it for hours the first time.

“I realized that life is delicate and it can so easily be gone,” Jacob said. “If I did this, everything could be gone. And in the end, it scared me.”

The pros outweighed the cons, and he made the decision to give things a while longer to shape up before he would take his own life. In the weeks that followed, he lost his great-grandmother, his grades slipped below average and his self-esteem was left shaken.

Two weeks after his first suicide attempt, Jacob rehung the old rope. He stood up on a stool and gently kicked at it with his foot as he hovered above the noose. But yet again, Jacob spared his own life. As he braved forward through his childhood years, his condition of living within his home and at school worsened. He became overwhelmed.

After composing an apologetic suicide note a year after the first two attempts, he popped his recently-prescribed Zoloft pills one after the other, far past the recommended dosage. In a drug-related stupor, he involuntarily vomited the pills, tore his suicide note in half and fainted.

“Suicide is selfish, I’ll admit that suicide is selfish,” Jacob said. “But when you’re dead, you don’t care.”

His mother was the one to shake him awake, trying to make sense of the ripped-up message. Jacob passed it off as nothing, but was soon after sent to a different psychologist to analyze his abnormal behavior.

“It’s a very scary thought to think that he would be so overwhelmed with whatever it is that he’s feeling, fear or loneliness, that he would do that,” his mother, Hether Pearson said.

With the help of the new psychologist as a 12-year-old, Jacob was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a mental illness that accurately attested to Jacob’s instability.

“The reason it’s bipolar is because their moods generally go to extremes,” said Brad McFadden of Mental Health America, a treatment center in Kansas City, KS. “What that means is that at one end of the spectrum, the behavior is considered manic, where they’re on a high. And the other, of course, is depression, the negative thoughts.”

Jacob was set on two different types of medication, one for mood stabilization and another, a new antidepressant. He was subject to therapy sessions to talk openly about his normally bottled-up feelings, sessions that led to his growth as a performer.

“As soon as I got used to it, I got more used to speaking in public,” Jacob said. “Because if I could talk about something personal with another person, I could talk about anything to anyone.”

Jacob had made it through his rocky elementary school years before his next attempt at suicide occurred. In eighth grade, he was more depressed than ever. His newly-formed bonds with boys in his class offered no reassurance to Jacob in his downward-spiraling mental state. In December, he began smoking marijuana. From there, his substance abuse ranged from weed to methamphetamines, his Ritalin pills.

The drug usage and crippling depression sent Jacob back to the basement and back to his only known source of escape.

“Try to imagine what I have done, imagine what I lost; Imagine everything that I’ve done right, but you leave it in the dark.” -Jacob Pillman, 2009

“If we break those fluorescent lights, I bet we could use the shards to slash our wrists,” Clay says eagerly.

Jacob laughs, the sound echoing forcefully in the small, square room. “Or you could drown yourself in the toilet,” he retorts.

“Maybe I’ll climb on top of the cabinets and jump,” Clay deadpans.

“Or we could tie our blankets into a noose around the shower head.”

“We could beat each other with the insides of the lightbulbs,” Clay grinned.

“It’s amazing how many ways there are to kill yourself in a suicide-safe room,” Jacob responds jokingly.

It is his fifth night at Marillac Children’s Psychiatric Hospital. He had only just met his newest roommate, the six-foot-seven schizophrenic Clay, before they began joking about their impending demises.

After his most recent suicide attempt in his bedroom almost a week before, Jacob had woken up alone on his blood-stained carpet with clotted gashes down his arms and wrists, his father’s Xacto knife blades at his side.

“I was so angry that I didn’t die,” Jacob said. “That day was one of the most angry days of my life.”

The following day at school Jacob showed his friend Chris his scabbed-over wounds and was advised by him to see the counselor. At first he refused but was soon tapped out of class and taken to speak with his counselor. Word had spread, and after writing a note explaining the circumstances, he was asked to show his counselor the cuts on his wrists.

The counselor contacted Jacob’s mother from the school office to inform her of her son’s situation. The suggested behavior came as a shock to his mother; she and Jacob’s father had been unaware of his immediate depression.

The next day Jacob was in the hands of the professionals at Marillac, removing the string from his sweatshirt and replacing his shoelaces with zip ties.

“I’m going to try and get some sleep,” Jacob says, turning over in his cot to face the steel-protected window. The two boys have already been up half the night sharing their stories with each other.

“Yeah, okay. Okay,” Clay says edgily, repeating himself, fidgeting with his pant leg. He must be hearing voices again, Jacob thinks. Or seeing ghosts. Despite his new roommate’s abnormalities, Jacob still felt a connection to him; they were both checked into the hospital for an indefinite stay.

“I finally can care, My life is as good as the summer breeze, And I feel free like the air.” -Jacob Pillman, 2010

Jacob devoted the beginning of this year, from Feb. 5-12 recuperating in the 24-hour mental hospital, with access to tutors and psychologists around the clock. He returned home from the facility in mid-February to an onslaught of well-wishing notes.

“As soon as I got home, a week later, I saw a whole bunch of messages like, ‘I hope you’re okay,’ and, ‘Get well soon,’ and, ‘We want to see you again,’” Jacob said. “It actually made me happier. It made me realize a lot of people do care about me.”

The final months of his eighth grade year and the duration of the summer were spent rehabilitating himself, and, now a freshman, Jacob can call himself “stable.” Pearson can see the changes in her son and uses the techniques she learned from his time at Marillac to tend to his needs.

“We communicate better and we’ve learned to watch his moods,” his mother said. “We just have to make sure that he knows that he’s loved and that everything’s okay and nothing’s his fault.”

Having been drug-free for five months, Jacob has pushed his addiction in the same direction as his suicidal thoughts. As was the case in his childhood, Jacob uses different forms of art to find peace.

He has recently begun writing a novel about a high schooler coping with bipolar disorder, a boy who is “trying to survive high school.” The story is drawn from his own personal experience. Bipolar disorder causes Jacob to experience certain peaks in his rapidly-shifting moods, and without taking his medication he feels the full effects.

But Jacob’s own high school experience is not all lows.

“I know he’s good right now,” freshman Kamran Tavakolinia said. “Since the incident, he hasn’t let anything get to him. He’s loving high school and making the best of what he’s got.”

Jacob has continued to pursue as many creative outlets as he can, using the self-expression as an escape from his disorder.

“I see the potential to do a lot of good in the world,” Joe Vincze, a friend and freshman at SM North said. “I think the changes he’s made are mostly the steps he took to improve his outlook on life.”

This past month, he starred as a lead member of senior Riley Watson’s Frequent Friday, “Assorted Ideas,” a comedy film presented in the Little Theater.

Jacob now treats performance as the only rush he needs.

“You know everyone is looking at you, everyone’s watching your every move,” he said. “I just love that feeling.”

Photos by Dan Stewart.