I cannot get my thoughts into order. Since stopping the tablets everything seems to revolve around them. The mornings are unbearable. Before, I would take one and feel the machinery begin to move again. I could speak, work, even look people in the eye without much effort. Now I wake with my mind in confusion, as though some pressure were tightening inside the head. The heart races for no reason. Breathing is difficult, always just out of step, as if the body were not properly under control.
At night it is worse. Sleep will not come. I close my eyes but the mind goes on without stopping. Turning from one side to the other, the body aches and the muscles tighten. All the while the same thought circles back, how a small dose would restore the order. If only I had the pill.
It is as though I were suffocating for want of air. Everything comes as noise, and there is no switch to turn it down. The world presses in, hostile and unrelenting. I find myself afraid to speak, even more afraid to go out.
Life without it is not to be endured. Others my age appear to live without difficulty. They go to school and talk easily among themselves. After class they remain in groups, laughing, sharing their private jokes, touching one another without hesitation. At the weekends they go to parties, photographs taken of them smiling with red cups in their hands, arms thrown around each other’s shoulders. They occupy themselves with games, with music, with sketchbooks half filled. They complain of being tired, but it is the tiredness that comes from having lived.
Speaking now feels impossible. The body never rests; it stiffens at the glance of another, as though one had been caught in the act of some crime. The thought of a party is unthinkable. Even to stand in a room with three people is enough to wish oneself gone altogether.
And yet I want it. I want it so strongly that it makes me ill. I want to know what it is to be ordinary, to wake up with some plan for the day, to send a message to a friend, to laugh at a joke. I want to belong to something. To enter a room without feeling I had forced my way in where I was not wanted.
The simple ease which others seem to possess is impossible for me.
Every word I put down has the sound of pleading for pity. As if my own misery were some great calamity, when in truth it is only the failure to cope with life as others manage to do.
Perhaps I take some secret pride in imagining myself too fragile for the world. It gives me an identity of a sort, something to hold to while doing nothing. I hide behind the misery and then expect compassion for it. When it does not come, I sink further into it.
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