boy in the jar

I wonder if everyone feels that their own circumstances and suffering are unique? I guess they are and aren’t in a way, right? That’s both the comfort and disillusionment a place like this offers.

I’ve been told by some, usually aggressively, that you need to abandon the dreams you had — life changes. But what if you discover that nothing else moves you, shakes you like the blueprint you had passionately laid out and then learned, embarrassingly, was completely impractical because you had ADD and a >45 minute attention span was too much to expect?

Okay, not enough to kill yourself right? You busted your ass off in college anyway. There’s still family, friends, part-time jobs to be had, countries to be seen. But then about 5 years before you retrospectively learn this, halfway through college, you develop a rather sudden case of OCD, which grows from moderate-crippling in just under 2 years?

Okay, still perfectly treatable, right? But then no one really picks up that it’s either ADD or OCD at first, so you’re inadvertently given a therapy solution which accidentally worsens one and medication which worsens the other to the point of compromising that looming writer’s grant that’s still keeping you breathing as your remaining passion, comfort and self-worth.

Okay, but then you fall into major depression and are robbed completely of the ability to read, concentrate etc. and lose said grant, but there’s only this one kind of medication we can use and you say that doesn’t actually allow you to read and think and semi-function again, so there’s not much we can do sorry.

So for 3 years you watch your life and sense of self disassembling while your frantically search for other possible causes and are rightly dismissed as a hypochondriac. Finally your OCD is picked up by a clever psychologist, but that one medication is tried again and does nothing for cognition or motivation or interest, and neither do these anti-psychotics — in fact they all give you sub-parkinsonian side-effects — and you can’t afford to work or be in therapy and your dad thinks your problem is you’re lazy and you’ve lost practically all friends at this point, so you just kind of watch more and more of your life get eaten up and grow alienated from your confused family.

But you’re still like not yet 25, so what — wait-a-minute, this ADD comorbidity thing makes sense, you present that and find one intelligent psychiatrist who agrees. Except these stimulants kind of suck, they just make you more anxious and stuff and this guy likes to take things really slowly, so you try a host of medication combinations, patiently, at therapeutic doses, for 2 more years, none of which really work or just beset you with really impractical side-effects. At this point, you’re agoraphobic, obsessions and phobic avoidance run every aspect of your life, and meanwhile you’ve been attempting therapy with workbooks which hasn’t been working out at all; you feel like the-boy-who-cried-wolf ‘cos clearly you’re smart enough, you got some As in high school and college, you’ll be fine in life, there’s not much more that can be done for you pharmacologically since you kind of aren’t happy with combinations that don’t really work or leave you even less functional and side-effect-riddled, and you finally just agree to benzos which end up having paradoxical effects and doing things like keeping you up 3 nights straight.

You meet another really, really smart psychologist who says no, you can’t perform therapy on yourself ‘cos you have a personality disorder as well, OCPD, which kind of makes everything you attempt to do to help yourself just worsen your condition in a way. So you can’t afford to see him or work, and your parents come round to the idea finally when you’re 27, but can’t do much to help you out financially, and everyone’s living together in a small house with two small dogs, so you’re beset by noise constantly anyway, from them or your younger siblings fighting or people just yelling.

Then you realize you lost out on nearly all of your 20s, have never traveled, read maybe 6 books in the past as many years, you don’t relate to most other human beings on the planet anymore because these disorders either take over your brainspace at all hours and at best you can distract yourself on youtube or sleep, or if you’re lucky coffee might send you into a mildly manic energy boost and you’ll get to waste your time writing this, hoping *someone* in the world has a similar story? That it isn’t completely crazy to be late 20s, intellectually gifted yet your achievements peaked around age 19. And in fact, you’d trade it all, all of it, just to remember again what it’s like to go 10 or 20 minutes without some stupid phobic avoidant rule filling your head that you have to obey? To take time, or feel at peace, or an emotion or human or get to walk around your block, or take a train into the city and spend time there and not feel imminent, constant, crazy, irrational fear every single second? And the same disorder laughs at you and belittles your achievements and tells you you’re a waste of space because you can’t fight it or live an even vaguely normal existence, and there are very few exterior signs of this going on because you’re lucid and take showers now and then, so professionals or acquaintances or others can have a very hard time picking up just how not-of-this-world and dreamlike and unbelievable your life has become? And you feel like a whiny a– writing this, because there’s *always* someone worse out there, but realize the magnitude of suffering has been immense, but the disorder won’t even let you gather the guts to kill yourself, even though it’s having a constant debate about whether or not that’s the correct solution. And you think you’re special but you’re not and you kinda are but you’re really not. But you secretly hope there might be someone who this reaches and understands.