I love pain. Emotional pain. It's pretty fucked up, to be honest. But a lot of times I purposely listen to sad music to dwell in the humanity singing (though painfully) in my chest. It reminds me I am alive.
Maybe it's because I barely cry. It's not that I don't want to (trust me, I've been dying to let some tears escape) but I've been on so many psychiatric pharmaceuticals since the age of eight that crying is, honest to God, a blessing.
I've been diagnosed with OCD, hypochondria, major depression, major anxiety, PTSD, cyclic vomiting, tics tourette syndrome and, tomorrow, will be tested for bipolar disorder (manic depression). Scientists would have a field day with my brain. Psychologists would revel in the wonders of my tainted neurons.
I'm fascinated with my mental hell(th) as well. It runs in the family. Truthfully, all of these illnesses sort of popped up on their own terms. My OCD was triggered after an event when I was seventeen years old, living with my eldest sister in Michigan, and after my mother and father didn't know what to do with me anymore. My hypochondria occurred sporadically after I saw my sister's best friend faint at Cedar Point (and, blast it, I can't ever go back because of it). Major depression and anxiety sort of go hand-in-hand, I suppose. My cyclic vomiting remains a mystery to this day; doctors couldn't explain it, and the illness is pretty much shrouded in mystery, but I'm convinced it was psychological. My tic makes me absolutely insane; a little noise I make in the back of my throat when I become anxious or restless.
And now, on my own terms, I'll finally be diagnosed with bipolar disorder. We've suspected it for a long time. I finally put my foot down. My last visit at the psychiatrist I brought it to the nurse's attention.
I twiddled with my thumbs but held eye contact. I'm very good at eye contact (ironically enough). Maybe it's because I've been pretending all my life.
"I've decided I want to be re-diagnosed."
The nurse, sporting a pale blue scrub, nodded and typed something into the computer. "We can do that. When do you want to schedule?"
Of course, I had work. I didn't know when I could make time for re-evaluating my mental stability. I had to get back with her. And now, as dawn draws near, and after I almost forgot about the entire circus, I'm recapping my history.
People ask me about sometimes.
And I know where to begin.
But the preface is boring, non-climactic, and barely theatrical. Like mentioned before, the day was hot at Cedar Point and I saw a young girl's eyes roll into the back of her head. She was just dehydrated and thin and hadn't eaten anything all day.
I have photos of that afternoon - before and after the incident. The results are amazingly inverted; one of me, raising my hands with a broad smile in a kiddy roller coaster, and the other, frowning with tears in my eyes, shaking and slobbering, after my dad forced me to pose for a photo. I was absolutely hysterical, dizzy, and confused by the fear paralyzing my body. I wondered why no one else was scared. This was my first panic attack.
Before this, no one in my family had ever dealt with something like this. I mean, I was the poster child for panic after this. My siblings were more or less neurotypical when we were younger. (Or at least that's how I remembered it. Maybe I just thought I was crazier than them. Kinda true.) I wouldn't sleep, afraid of fainting with absolutely no cause. Elementary school turned into actual hell - I wasn't a child anymore.
Once, while suffering from a panic attack, my mother had to drag me from the car in front of dozens of students. They were getting off the bus, or out of their parents' cars, and watching with wide eyes as I kicked and sobbed in the school counselor's iron grip. Once they managed to get me into the building, I retreated to the corner of her office, and rested my head against a wall. Why they kept me there, I'll never understand - I missed half of the school day almost every week.
Eventually, mom got tired and I don't blame her. She'd keep me home because she didn't know what to do. I was too inconsolable to attend to my education. Even if I had managed to sit in class, it wasn't for more than an hour before I'd stumble to my counselor's office, shaking. Anxiety was my plague. When the teacher announced it was time to study math, I'd start crying because I was so awful at it. When recess began, and it was a hot day, I'd stay inside or panic about fainting.
I don't know if the teachers understood. I was so young. But now I think they might have.
My mom used to go to the dry cleaner's every Wednesday. She'd have loads of laundry, mostly comforters (for some reason), and we'd make acquaintances with regulars. I'd obviously go with her all the time. At this point, I had probably missed at least ten or fifteen days of school.
An old woman once told me that, if I missed any more school, the government would take me away from my mama. I've never forgotten that.
In a nutshell, my childhood was the worst. There were problems at home I couldn't face and my mental illness was the root of most of it. My parents were separated and I never saw my father - I mostly just heard his voice over the phone. I endured various hospital visits, tests, and therapy sessions. My first CAT scan was the scariest thing I had ever undergone. It was my dad who took me. When they put my headphones on, and I was lowered into a tube with the likeness of a child's coffin, Keith Urban played in my ears.
Things became easier when I was older, though I dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen. And while it's not very surprising, I face stigma for this all the time. Even one of my friends, who I've known for almost ten years, has teased me about it. You can't escape this.
I don't know how it happened. I was doing fine. Sixteen was hard for everyone, I know, but I snapped one day. I was sitting in math tutoring, surrounded by kids simply reading textbooks. There wasn't anything chaotic (besides the asshat who bullied me mercilessly) happening. But then I felt it.
Panic. An old friend.
What if someone came in and shot up the school? I was completely out of my comfort zone. It was the first time I had experienced dissociation. I felt outside my body and everyone in the room was but a part in a very, vivid dream. I felt the urge to throw up. For the next week, every day, I spent first period in the nurse's office. She was always very apathetic and demanded my mother take me home, even if she worked thirty minutes away.
I changed schools twice, and registered in two online schools, before I finally gave up and dropped out.
I was behind. So much more than my friends. I was still a freshman when they were juniors. My parents were clueless as how to help me. On account of teenage angst and mysterious mental disorders no one knew how to control, I was forced to move to Michigan. There, credited to the love my sister bears for me, I recieved a GED with flying colors - my test scores off the charts.
Back in the winter of 2011, with the financial contribution from my parents (all three of them - thus including my step-father), I was tested in a facility called Brain Balance; an office with a colorful, though medically appealing sign above its door. The logo was a brain separated into two; one side yellow, the other green, both doodled with things like numbers on the left and music notes on the right. I think you already know what this facility specialized in.
My first appointment at Brain Balance was during the evening and I remember this because I recall the night sky outside the window. There was a woman, dressed in your typical office wear (an outfit probably bought at Kohls, to be quite frank), who asked me questions your usual therapist did. But I knew there was something different about this. Something...more thorough. She asked me more in-depth questions like if I had ever experienced a sensation otherwise known as "dissociation". I told her I had and was relieved to learn I wasn't crazy enough to make it up.
Brain Balance basically accepted my case. I was to undergo study afterwards. It wasn't anything intense; just a couple of days a week for three hours and I was free to go home. They had me do what I thought were silly exercises. One was balancing on a beam (which I proved terrible). The other, reading sentences on a computer. I was once spun in a swivel chair until I became dizzy (honest to God). I recall them testing my reflexes, barely tickling the palms of my hand.
What they found was odd; I had never heard of something like it before. They showed me a chart that I could barely understand.
"See this line?"
I nodded.
The woman pointed at the screen. "Your eyes don't dilate when you read and barely do when dizzy."
Okay. Weird.
"Am I autistic?" I remember asking her. This was something my mother had suggested for years but no doctor on Earth would hear her plea. She shrugged.
"Almost," she replied. "You're not technically...but almost."
Not only did my eyes not dilate when I read, and not only was I almost autistic, but they discovered that the left side of my brain was not fully developed.
If you're familiar with the basics of neuroscience, you know that the left side of your brain controls the right side of your brain. The left side also dominates critical thinking, writing skills (weird, considering I can read up to fifty words a minute), and numbers.
At first, I was upset. I thought this made me stupid. I cried in the restaurant we ate in that night. And while staring at myself in the mirror, bleary eyed and sporting wet lashes, a woman begged me to never succumb to such poisonous thoughts.
"You are perfect the way you are. Don't let them tell you you're not."
Afterwards, she disappeared. I believe her to be an angel.
But the more I thought about this, the more I realized how, well, very unique this was.
It wasn't just the left side of my brain that was out of the ordinary. It was my right side too which they found was much more dominant than usual. Because of this, the creativity I bear is almost unnatural. Medically, I was born to be an artist.
Weeks later, after my diagnoses, and after my parents decided that therapy at Brain Balance was too expensive to pursue, I received a letter from the owner who studied me.
"Don't be afraid, Mikaela," the letter said. "You're a person who feels."
Over the years, I've found that the left side of my brain has developed (though the right side of my brain keeps growing stronger - maybe I'll become a freak of nature!) due to my admiration of logistics and the field of astrophysics; something I would have never understood five years ago.
If I could tell myself at fifteen anything in the world, I'd tell her, "How very important you are to this world, Mikaela."
My depression doesn't just go away.
Sometimes it greets me like an old friend and I invite it inside (though apprehensively...with a sigh), and make it tea. My OCD is always here, a permanent resident I've only learned to make comfortable. My PTSD, which stemmed from the death of Norma (my beloved grandmother), only makes overture appearances when someone groans in pain or cries, "Oh my God!" with rapid breath. The tics come and go as they please, and while they're very hard to control, I manage them like you accept a distant relative's stay.
My depression doesn't go away.
But the right side of my brain whispers to me when I forget:
"How very important you are to this world, Mikaela."
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