Mandy Pister’s gaze wandered along the lakeshore as she listened to the water lapping against the rocks. Her blond hair hung in a ponytail down her back and the frigid air tinted her nose red.

“I love it when there are lots of waves,” said the Weinberg junior. “It’s really relaxing. You can just sit and cry if you want to because no one can see you.

“You can let it all go.”

She pointed further north, to where the sandy beach replaced the white boulders.

Sometimes, when the familiar craving hits, she walks there and sits.

She escapes her quiet room at night, the time she starts thinking. She leaves the box cutter she dragged across her wrists dozens of times. She eases the feeling that still haunts her a year and a half after she stopped slicing her body with razor blades.

“There are times when I can go a whole month without thinking of (cutting),” she said. “There are others where pretty much every hour of a whole week it’s a constant struggle.”

Like millions of young adults, Pister, who was diagnosed with depression at age 15, still struggles. She religiously takes an anti-depressant “cocktail” every morning and sometimes hands her kitchen knives to friends so she won’t be tempted.

Although she has learned to harness her feelings, Pister, now 20, remembers tougher days. The worst were those leading up to Oct. 17, 1998, the day she made herself a hot drink, practiced the bassoon and swallowed two bottles of morphine pills — not considering whether or not she would wake up.

Anything but ordinary

It is almost hard to believe Pister as she talks about emotional lows. She frequently flashes a smile, even while discussing her depression.

“Mandy’s amazing,” said friend Lacey Connelly, Pister’s freshman year roommate. “She seems like the average Northwestern student, but then she tells you all these things she’s gone through, and you realize she’s not average at all — she’s really, really extraordinary.”

Pister, a pre-medical math major and health aide coordinator, plays the bassoon in an orchestra, teaches CPR and frequently works backstage for theater productions. Her cozy room in Jones Residential College is crammed with books and movies, leaving little walking space. Quentin Tarantino’s super-violent “Natural Born Killers” is one of her favorite movies.

“A lot of people are like, ‘You seem so nice,'” she said. “‘How can you love (the violent video game) ‘Grand Theft Auto’ and stuff like that?'”

Others can’t see the long, white scars that razor blades left on her legs. They haven’t read Pister’s angry journals, and they don’t know that the marks on her wrists have faded.

Easing the pain

Pister said she felt her first tinge of depression at 13, when her friends at summer school went home after the first session, leaving her with “an immediate loss of such a good feeling.” She found a solution with her pocketknife.

Worried the large blade might sting like a paper cut, she instead selected the saw blade.

She dragged it back and forth across her wrist, not drawing blood but still cutting the skin.

“When I first did it, it was for attention,” Pister said. “I wanted people to see how much I was in pain.”

She said cutting helped her cope with her feelings, so she continued, even when she went home to Federal Way, Wash.

“The pain was a way to release emotion,” she said. “It hurt a lot, but just like when you push on that wiggly tooth and it kind of hurts, you keep doing it anyway.”

If she cut before bed, she thought, the next day would be a good one.

She knew she had a problem. She recklessly walked in front of traffic and often shared suicidal thoughts with friends.

By her sophomore year, cuts on her wrists had become obvious, so she moved the razor to her ankles, a spot where the wounds were easily concealed. One fall night she swallowed nine Dramamine pills before going to bed — one more than the maximum 24-hour dosage.

When she woke up in a groggy fog, “I wasn’t disappointed that I’d actually woken up,” she said. “It was just like, ‘Oh, another day.'”

The wake-up call

Efforts to solicit help from school counselors failed. One was always busy, and the other couldn’t even remember Pister’s name. After she told her parents about her habit, she stopped for a few months.

But when she started up again, Pister’s parents arranged a trip to the psychiatrist. He dismissed her actions as “a teenage phase” after a monthlong evaluation.

Pister’s despair culminated in October, when her friends and sister noticed her constantly falling asleep. After she broke up with her boyfriend of 11 months, they then knew she had hit a low.

Her parents headed to a football game the next day. Pister rummaged through a medicine drawer and set aside two old bottles of her grandfather’s pills, then left the bathroom and fixed herself a hot cup of Tang.

After practicing the bassoon for about half an hour, Pister returned to the bathroom and swallowed the contents of both bottles.

“I wasn’t really thinking about anything,” she said. “It was something that was going to lead somewhere, and at that point I didn’t care where it led.”

Pister’s older sister, Jessica, came home and found her on the sofa, drooling. Pister couldn’t be awakened, so Jessica called 911.

When Jessica finally reached her parents’ cell phone, they rushed to the hospital. Until Pister’s suicide attempt, they were unaware of the seriousness of her condition.

“The hardest thing was knowing that there was so little we could do,” said her father, James. “When somebody attempts suicide, you think of everything you could do to prevent it or things you could do differently. Often there’s very little you could do.”

The suicide attempt shattered the family’s illusions.

“That was the first time I’d ever seen my dad cry,” Pister said.

Relapse and recovery

A weeklong stint in the psychiatric ward after her suicide attempt was a “bit of a joke,” she said. She often skipped her prescribed medication — an irresponsible habit, she now realizes.

She still cut on and off for years, with her worst relapse her freshman year at NU. That year she cut hard and deep into her lower calves.

“All of my other scars had faded,” she said. “I don’t know why that bothered me, but it did.”

Pister stopped cutting for good in Winter Quarter of her freshman year.

“There are times where every five minutes I’m changing my mind (about cutting again),” she said. “What impresses me is that I’ve been able to hold out for so long.”

The support of family and friends, she said, has kept her from returning to old ways.

“It’s more than just telling a person, ‘Don’t do this, it’s bad for you,” said her friend Connelly, a Communication junior. “It’s giving them an option — instead of going and hurting yourself, come to us.”

Although the scars on her legs will remain, memories will fade with time. Even now, when she flips through the notepads on which she used to jot her feelings in high school, she can’t make sense of her writings. She still faces daily inner battles, but Pister said the ordeal has changed her for the better.

“I listen to what people are saying a lot more,” she said. “People have a lot of their own problems, and a lot of them aren’t going to take the time to bother with yours. I do. I don’t want everyone to have to go through what I went through.”.