Freak: The True Story of an Insecurity Addict

our things helped me in the decision to publish this memoir. I’d been working on it, on and off, for a long time, but a series of weirdo events happened over the course of a year that tipped the scales and made me decide to just do it. The first one was a mother in Vermont. I was working at a donut place in Morrisville when she came through the drive-through on a slow Tuesday afternoon. We got to talking and discovered that we were both mothers of drug addicts. My son was alive. Hers had killed himself when he couldn’t kick his meth habit. A few weeks later, she drove through again and reached for me through the little window. I hung out over the sill, holding both her hands as she cried. “All I could think of,” she said, “is please God, let Rebecca be there. She knows. She understands.” It was the one year anniversary of her son’s death. Somehow, my relating my own experiences had helped her. The second incident was again drug-related, and I was able to do some good telling ridiculously awful personal stories. The third was my mother telling me, offhandedly, that I had always been a slut. At the age of three, I was already a slut. Soon after that, while cleaning out her bedroom closet, I discovered a large pool of dried blood on the floor, under a pile of dirty shoes, and realized it was my dead brother’s. The next day, an F3 tornado tore through the town and ate the cornfield out back, missing Mom’s house by twenty yards.

After that, I just thought, “Fuck it. I’m publishing the whole gory thing. I’ll be Emperor Claudius when he decided to tell the unvarnished truth about his own family. Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out. No shit. I decided to tell my secrets; to show the world what goes on in the mind of a once-suicidal basket case.

So here’s my story, in all its crazy glory. I hope it can help other wretched fools like me to stay their hand, to find joy, to dig it out of the bedrock of their lives like the vein of gold that it is. I know all about the “fuck you, I don’t want to hear that bullshit” mentality; the disbelief that anyone can possibly understand the depths of your own personal despair. But the gold is there. If a nutball loser like me can find it, anybody can.