It all started when I was in fifth grade, and maybe even partially because my mom got her job at the prison. I don’t know. But that’s when I started getting depressed. It was an interesting changing point in my life–the friends that I had known for so long just kind of dumped me, and I had pretty much nowhere to turn. I can’t say I had any real friends when I was in fifth grade.
They didn’t come until sixth grade. For security reasons, we’ll call them Jane and Janis (real original, right?). Sixth grade was…an interesting year. I was consistently in trouble, and rather depressed. But I was frequently hanging out with a boy who we’ll call Jake (another J…?), and I think it was safe to say we liked each other. Being twelve, we were (childishly) flirting left and right.
Janis was the kind of girl who you didn’t know too well, but she had a mean streak in her. I learned that I was quite a fast runner compared to other females due to my constant need to get away from Janis. She liked to pull my hair for some reason. That wasn’t helping my anxiety levels.
Then, for reasons I couldn’t figure out, Jane went right along with it (though less frequently) and as I didn’t know her well at all, I was scared of her.
This was also the year that I began cutting. I didn’t feel depressed when I did it–more or less, my mood was very flat, but sometimes euphoric. One day, I guess I just kind of snapped, because I started really ploughing away at my arm with the metal end of a pencil. Jane and Janis reported it, and I was sent to the counselor’s office.
He started asking me a bunch of weird questions about suicide, and I answered as honestly as I could. The next thing I know, he’s calling my mom and the principal, nurse, and him are telling her that they need to get me down to the emergency floor of the hospital.
So my mom picks me up, and all I remember is that it was a really tense emotional situation. She’s asking me all these questions that I just don’t have answers to. We had to stop at home, first, to tell the people at the hospital I’d be coming.
My dad was really pissed when he found out. I remember him screaming at me, and shoving me, and then the anxiety was too much and I started panicking, crying, even though I knew it wouldn’t help. Then my mom was yelling, too. I couldn’t figure out what the hell I had done to get in so much trouble, though I had a feeling it was the cutting.
At the hospital, we were led into this little white room with a tv, a few chairs, and a bed. I had to sit on the bed, while my mom sat in a chair reading magazines. It was going to be a while until the nurse came in to perform the psyche evaluation, so I was told to get comfortable. But I just couldn’t. I was so keyed up from the excitement of the day, and a bit dissociated, in retrospect, and I just couldn’t relax.
Mostly, I was scared that if they found anything “weird” about me in the evaluation, my mom would get mad and there would be more yelling and things would just get worse and worse–so after a good four or five hours…maybe it was even 10–i lost count…the lady came in with her computer (a little Dell laptop), and asked me 10 questions.
There were some of them that I was able to tell the truth on, some I had trouble answering because I didn’t understand what the question meant and had to have it explained to me, and the last few that I had to lie to keep my mom from being mad and yelling at me. I knew what was considered “normal” and that I wasn’t–but I knew all too well how to fake it.
So, they found that I was mentally sound and fit to go home–they fed me a sandwich and a gatorade, and by the time we got to the Wendy’s drive-thru (mom was hungry) it was half past midnight. I remember I got a frosty, then we went home, and I was out of school for three days on mental health leave or something stupid like that.
I had to see a counselor, but I only saw him for less than a year before the agency was shut down. He liked to play the coping game. It’s a fancy shrink-game that they use to teach kids like me proper coping skills. I’m comfortable in saying that I didn’t learn anything–I was (and still am) very good at telling people what they want to hear (it decreases the tension in any situation, I’ve found), and I had a good grasp of what was considered “normal” and I’ll say it again–I was not. For correct answers, though, this man would give the kids Yu-Gi-Oh cards. It was the ‘in’ thing at the time.
Then I entered my seventh grade year and met Amanda, Katie and Jennifer–little did I know it, but they would become my best friends and actually stick with me during the trying time. About midway through October, I brought my concerns to the counselor at the school, and about a month later, I was prescribed Prozac through a physician at the nearby clinic.
The rest of the time on the drug is a blur, but I know I was off it by the end of the school year, because what I do remember of it was that it made me jittery and impulsive, a bit aggressive, and my thoughts didn’t make much sense when I got overstimulated. The depression was gone, but that was about it. I ended up yelling at a teacher (who was a sexist and deserved it) because he asked what my problem was–why I didn’t like him. My answer did not please him–all I managed to say was that he was the problem, a bit of stuttering, and some gibberish because my thoughts were running together incoherently and I couldn’t stop my mouth from talking. I left the room, not sure where I was going to go, but with the mental unloading I felt sort of sane.
I do remember being followed by one of the many people who agreed with what little insight I had given into my agitation, and we were going to complain a bit to the office about this particular teacher being such a tool. I don’t recall if we ever got around to it, though.
I was seeing a counselor at the time, but she never found out about this. No one did–except my mother, who received a phone call but didn’t mention it to me until I was having one particularly bad day. And for the incident? I received three days of lunch detention and a strange sort of respect and even a bit of fear among my fellow classmates.
While in counseling, I got a full psychiatric evaluation…that’s what I’d call it, at least. They found that my IQ was 123 (at age 13), but that I also had a bit of ADHD, depression, anxiety, formal thought disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, and paranoid ideation.
I ended seventh grade by getting off of Prozac, and failing every class.
Like all summers in the suburbs, mine was uneventful, but I did somehow manage to gain thirty pounds. It was shocking, but I went through my eighth grade year self-conscious.
I wore the same thing every day, doing whatever it took to conceal my body. I was picked last in every sport for gym (until it came to floor hockey, in which I dominated when on a team with Jane–we’d somehow become friends).
I didn’t talk much in eighth grade. Couldn’t even walk confidently. My favorite teacher was my math teacher, because she knew me better than she knew most other students, but still didn’t know much. Everyone thought I was stupid until it came to one particular math problem. I’d never been good with numbers, but when they were presented with shapes, I was genius. I was the only one in the class who knew right off the top of my head how to find the answer. Simply take the whole circle, find that volume, and then the volume of the smaller inner circle, and subtract it from the volume of the full circle. Then you get the volume to the outer ring. It was so simple.
On top of that, I only had to take 2 or 3 spelling tests at the end of the week the whole year because I knew how to spell practically everything. People were asking me how the hell I got so smart. And, I was still talking to Jake.
Eighth grade was also hard, because I started drinking. Vodka. On school grounds. I didn’t care. I was getting in weird moods, doing drugs, and making things worse. Then, I got caught.
I remember being drunk in a tiny room with cops, paranoid, not sure of who I was or if any of it was real, and panicking, while all the while (this is the funny part) thinking I was doing a good job of talking myself out of trouble. They called my mom, she took me home, I was suspended for two weeks (with a packet of homework to do–got it all done!), and had to attend a class about not doing drugs, and was given a second chance by the state.
I ended up getting charged as a felon, but since the state had a new law for kids under 18, they would dismiss the charges as long as I didn’t get in trouble again before I turned 18. After that, all charges would be erased. That meeting ended with the probation officer telling me she hoped she never saw me again.
I passed all my classes in eighth grade, and we moved out of our house on the last day of school.
That summer was spent cleaning our new house out. It’d been a bargain for a 20 acre farm–120,000. I was happy, but the depression didn’t sink in till later. I realized that yes, I could have horses, but I didn’t have all my old friends.
The only reason I allowed myself to get close to them was because my parents promised me we would never move. We’d lived in a lot of places growing up–an apartment, an auto body shop, a trailer park, an actual house, and then a farm. I’d moved so many schools that I just didn’t get attached to people anymore, and I’d made the mistake of allowing myself that luxury.
Ninth grade was full of near-failure, and one actual failure. I sucked at spanish, got bored with algebra. I was so paranoid and anxious all the time that I ended up getting put on celexa, 40 mg, once a day, because I had started having panic attacks getting called to run errands, and I was losing my hair.
I was also very self-conscious and paranoid that people were scrutinizing every bit of my flesh, and throughout the year I dropped from 170 pounds to 138 by starving myself. I’m five foot six.
It was also the year I started having hallucinations. It started with just tasting different flavors, and even different words. Some of them were pleasant, like blue raspberry, and others were horrible, like the way Vicks Vapo-Rub smells–that’s what I was tasting. This was happening almost every day.
If that wasn’t bad enough, I was so scared of people and so paranoid that I was constantly being judged that I couldn’t do group work. I was always allowed to work alone, and proved to be a very efficient worker. I impressed my English teacher, especially, with an essay I had written on the proper use of the ‘n word.’ He said it was written at least at a junior level, if not higher.
The first auditory hallucination I’d heard, I was in the library, and someone whispered my name. I looked back, and there was a bookshelf behind me (about 4 inches away), and behind the bookshelf, a thick brick wall.
It was also the year I noticed the shadows. I’d see them in school, everywhere, and was beginning to get paranoid about them, too, and panicked every time I saw one, or ten, or a hundred.
I passed ninth grade slightly behind on credits, but doing a decent job for my mental status.
During the summer, working with my horse that I’d recieved for my birthday proved to be more helpful than the medication. If I had any hallucinations, I must have forgot about them.
I dropped 5 more pounds over the summer, starting out my sophomore year at 132–the thinnest I’d ever been. My ribs were showing and I was only eating every other day–the things we women do for vanity.
That year, I had a complete mental breakdown. I became very confused one day, a bit unsure of where I was. I could name the place, but it felt like a higher power was telling me I wasn’t really there, that it was all in my head, that I was dreaming and I needed to wake up. I was generally confused, anxious, almost panicky, and called a hotline. They asked about history of schizophrenia in the family, and while everything’s going on around me, I’m trying to answer their questions and just can’t.
By the end of that day, I was so distraught and so confused that I had to leave school, using the old “I feel so violent right now I don’t know what I’ll do” excuse. I was sent home to face my old man, who was PISSED and almost hit me (sending me into a panic attack…I wouldn’t stop hyperventilating for about an hour), and that was when I got into counseling and everything else.
I started out in counseling as very cold towards other people, hating them because I saw them as nothing more than idiots who only believed in material possessions. I never really saw them as true people.
After a few months, things in my mind started to change. It was gradual, but when I stopped and thought about it, none of it made sense, and somehow, it was all true.
I was hearing voices more often, sometimes commenting on the way I walked (because I have a six inch stride).
I could never really tell what was real and what wasn’t. I got massively confused whenever I lost something. One day, it happened to be a water bottle. I looked for two whole blocks. A couple of people helped me look. I was so confused that I would feel around in obviously empty spaces because hey, maybe I just couldn’t see the damned thing. Maybe it was invisible, but I’d be able to touch it. I never did find it, and I refused to be bought a water from the vending machine. After all, it wasn’t the fact that I just needed water. I needed MY water.
This happened a couple more times with different objects. I’d be left searching the school only to come up fruitless. It would still bother me, even after I’d given up. The water bottle still bothers me, for example…
If that wasn’t bad enough, dealing with confusion and hallucinations (I sometimes felt bugs crawling over my skin–not pleasant), the shadows had become much more prevalent in my life. Suddenly, they could speak to me using telepathy. Though they spoke a different laguage (some of which I can speak), the words came into my mind totally translated. They were angry because a kid down the street from me had killed the brother of one of the shadows about seven hundred something years ago, and they wanted revenge. They can’t exact their revenge, though, because they can’t physically touch the human world. So they wated me to kill him instead.
I always said no, but they would pester me and pester me until I almost gave in, but decided I didn’t feel like braving temperatures of negative sixty-five to walk two miles down the road, kill him, and hide out in the river valley. It just didn’t seem worth the trouble. I wasn’t going to be rewarded anyway for committing such an obvious misdeed. It was still annoying, though.
And a few months after that, I began hearing stranger things–beeps and electronic noises in place of voices (which, when heard, were worse, and would scream at me in foreign languages, leaving me positively petrified), and I came to believe it was cyborgs making those sounds.
Cyborgs were everywhere–teaching at the school, crowd control at the art museum, the cops on the streets, and even my own psychiatrist. I realized that this might seem bizarre to other people, but I didn’t care, because that was (and still is) my reality.
I am now on my summer vacation, and the shadows do not bother me with their words as often, but they still lurk everywhere. Now and then, I get the one that wanted me to kill the kid down the street leering at me and telling me to touch myself, but I hide under the covers.
Almost every other night I’m hearing cyborg noises, and sometimes I can even feel them staring at me through my window, scratching at the wood siding. I hide under my covers and tell myself it’s not really happening.
Some nights, I can’t sleep. I’ve stayed up days at a time. Then I crash and sleep 18 hour days.
My moods have been very flat for the past couple of months, and though my “people skills” have gotten “better,” I don’t care anything for people…the only people I’d jump in front of a train to save are Rick, Jane, and Dad–on a good day, if I wasn’t too distracted by something else to do it.
Occasionally, I do have an elevated day, but it’s not in a good way. I feel manic, almost happy-psychotic, like I can take on the world and do anything. It’s during these moods that I also tend to get hurt…like bitten by a horse, or getting sunburned so I blister, or once in a while, cracking a bone.
Sometimes the “manic” state will last a week, sometimes a few hours, but it usually proves to hurt just a little bit.
Just today I got a little excited over some green milkweed growing in our back pasture. We found 17 plants, which is a big deal because I live in northwestern wisconsin, where these things aren’t even supposed to be found. The excitement wore off, and turned right to anxiety. I’d been jittery all day, unable to do anything about it or think straight, and then I just sort of went into a dead mode after the excitement.
I’ve been told that I’ve made a lot of progress, that things can get a lot worse, but even so, I really don’t think I need worse. I’m not on any medicine right now (thank god, the celexa was fucking with my head) and I passed most of my classes (except french–fail) with B’s.
I haven’t been to counseling for almost a month. I’m supposed to go every two weeks, and my mom thinks that she can stretch the appointments out like this and I won’t get grouchy. Every little bad mood is blamed on my lack of medication, when really, (and no one gets this) it’s because I feel overstimulated and need to be left completely alone for an hour or two. She wants me back on my meds, but I don’t get confused as bad as I did when I was on them, and I don’t want them ever again, even though…i got distracted and can’t remember what I was going to write…
I do have my days when I feel like I’m on drugs (and I’m not), and those are the days I hunker down on the couch and slip away into television land, so hopefully, if I do hallucinate, I’ll be distracted enough not to notice it. That all ends as soon as I’m in bed, though, because I can only listen to music for so long before I have to try to fall asleep (right now I’m tasting nacho cheese–haven’t had that for months). I stay awake because I get anxious, and a little bit scared, though with minor stuff, I can fall asleep. But the cyborgs won’t let me sleep, and neither will the shadows. If it’s just voices and static in my head, I can usually get past it and sleep a few hours.
That’s all I really have to write. If you didn’t want to read someone’s full life story, you should have read the title better.
