Dropping Out of School - The First Time

It kind of feels too hard to try to explain all the little things that happened after June 17th. There was the drive home. Stopping meds. Living in fear. Being in my childhood room and feeling trapped. Nightmares from stopping medication. Eating less. Being thinner than ever. Not sickly, but for me much thinner. Having my brother tell me he was afraid for me. Him looking at me and telling me I was not myself. You cannot imagine what it's like having people tell you that you are not yourself. My brother told me I was scaring him. It was strange, this thing where people were scared of me. More than anything it made me scared of people - Terrified of people. People lock you up. People put you in handcuffs. Family demands you live as only a drugged up version of yourself.

I heard this message from the outside world. Hey, YOU, you don't get emotions. You are not responsible with them. You don't get to feel. Feelings are your weakness. It's too risky. If you act out, we will lock you up. Maybe forever? YOU must be a shell. You must have a zombie existence. Unless you inoculate yourself from risky dangerous emotions - like love, anger, passion, creativity - then you cannot exist in society - or in your parent's home at least.

Today, in 2019, I think about the one emotion I was allowed - Allowed in full measures and doses - SADNESS. Happiness was a threat that could lead to grandiose ideas (thinking you loved and dancing, painting or singing and thinking you were good at it), No no, not happiness for YOU. But we will allow sadness, a little sulking in your room. As long as you are a sleeping lump of existence you won't hurt anyone.

But it hurt me. It hurt me so deeply. The sadness sunk through to my bones.

My parents made me take medications. I tried to go back to college. I think that was when I tried to get the volleyball scholarship. Maybe. You know, grandiose idea that I was good at sports. I was back in Chattanooga at school trying to understand the last 2 months of hell at my parents. Of days where at any and every moment my mom interrupted my time, demanded cleaning, yelled, told me everything I did was a symptom. Reminded me how I wasn't good at singing, at painting, at dancing. I was not beautiful like I thought maybe I was. I felt beautiful while I was thin and trying to express myself in art. But no she just said I was sick. Sick, sick, sick. Out of control.

She tried to control everything I did.

The psychiatrist treated me like an open and shut case of bipolar on meds for life. No other way to exist.

So I tried to go back to school with these things on my mind. My mom had said that she would pay for school at this point. Apparently she wasn't following through on the no college threat that set this bomb off. And after that hellish summer I went to work in the school bookstore trying to make sense of it all.

People came in to buy textbooks. They asked how my summer was. Each question was an arrow to my soul, because summer was hell and I was still in that hell. There was so much crying. I couldn't focus. I knew I couldn't handle school, so I left for my parent's home without money, hope, desire, anything. I had given up and I was back at my mom's mercy.

Maybe tomorrow I will tell you about the side effects.

Maybe tomorrow I will tell you about drowning the books.

This is enough for tonite.