I used to ask friends of mine to describe me like an author in a book would. One friend said I have a spine like steel, And unfortunately this makes it too difficult to sit still. I hate these pills that are meant to make me feel normal, but instead make me feel numb. Sometimes I miss the way my skin would crawl, or how the voices screamed, or catching shadows out of the corner of my eye. Unfortunately this also took to tendencies to stand on bridge edges, because people forget that you don’t need water to feel like you’re drowning. I stopped being able to tell if it was you who was making me unhappy, or if I’ve just spent these last 15 years of my life unhappy and not noticed until now. I used to drink a whole bottle of cheap vodka; welcoming the taste of paint stripper, and would take my clothes off in the forest feeling naked and real. Unfortunately this would often lead to getting arrested and deemed a “menace to society”. I love these new pills that don’t change my mood but stopped me from having a period for 3 months until I started having nightmares of screaming floating baby heads and became paranoid that I was pregnant even though I haven’t had sex since before Christmas. Mental health has been something I’ve struggled with my entire adult life. Caught between the feeling of eyes burrowing into my skin and nothing at all. When you’ve felt pain so strongly it becomes a part of your everyday life like the sounds of cars driving past your window, apart from cars it’s screaming a constant screaming the distant screaming it becomes hard to detach from that because sometimes silence can be deafening.