I remember: Bags under my eyes and a subconscious in a constant state of dread, for that next endless night that was sure to consume me at any minute, any hour, a slow and dreadful whimper that killed me silently. A stomach that had forgotten how to crave, teeth stained with acid. A hollow cave of shadowed space that somehow continued to breathe, if only for not much longer. I was being eaten alive, and there was nothing to stop me from slipping away in some explosive supernova; who knew where the pieces of my mind would fade to.
When I was young an elementary teacher tired from screeching kids and playdo messes handed me a simple packet of words, that joined to make clever antonyms about cats that sat and dogs that ran. This was the day my world first changed. I became enthralled in this new evolution of expression. Every word I learned became an expansion of something greater than myself. A year later I met my first benefactor of words: a middle aged teacher with long dresses and mother-eyes that hated tardy slips as much as she loved to watch children read. I spent two years in her classroom, for much of the time wondering among a maze of seemingly endless bookshelves and slipping into whatever world caught my eye between the pages. I went from struggling with nursery rhymes to thick novels that children twice my age doted over half as much as I did. It was a game that I never stopped playing...something that often seemed to save me from myself.
For many years after that my only disobedience in school seemed to be reading too much: on swings and stairwells, under desks, over unfinished homework assignments. Textbooks
interested me but I wasn’t allowed to bring those home. I found it difficult to sit for so long and remain attentive to ever-frustrated teachers. I wonder if a teacher had handed me a book full of everything we were to cover in class and a little more my relationship with school would have been more positive. But as it was my gradebook looked like it always has since then: a compilation of incompletes and scattered, shining A’s when I managed to sit down and complete some work-page or critical question. My only B’s were from expressing too much creativity within the assignment perimeters. But always my mind didn’t seem to want to work like my teachers wanted it to, and in this way literature became more and more my escape to freedom of expression. Despite five days a week of scholastic instruction, I believe the written words that I uncovered independently were my real teachers.
When I was just coming into adolescence at age 12, I began to lose control of my mind. my thoughts cut me like knives, only subtly at first. but over the course of year I devolved from a creative, energetic kid to a disturbed shape stuck in room corners and below torn furniture, shaking and screaming as I fought some invisible battle with myself. I do not exaggerate. To watch me was like entering some strange psychological horror show; I look back on it with a resolved bitterness. At times I could not communicate, and had trouble even being in the same room with another person. However regardless of my isolation, my mind never rested. In these years, through which I experienced several short remissions in my condition but always a steady uphill slope in severity every time I fell again, I turned from the written word and found solace in writing my own. With this tool I wrote impassioned, overzealous odes to pain, darkness and despair. I began to give form to this horror show I felt devouring my mind relentlessly, and I was comforted to a degree by this small means of self expression. The human mind is resilient, even in times of overall deterioration. Through writing and creative self reflection I was able to handle my isolation
without irreversible sociological deterioration. When I was mentally able I listened to Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen and others coo passionately procured stories of human nature from the pages of their books. I would take time to examine every sensory imagery and literary tact so that I felt their words more than read them. And when I felt my own words form into consciousness, I would reply with my own poem or story, always epitaphed to pain and emotional suffering. Like this those long dead became my best of friends.
It took several years before a Therapist specializing in OCD administered the correct diagnosis and help, and a few more before I regained control (largely through acceptance of fear) of my mind. But from those years a surprising Gem was birthed: My dynamic relationship with literature and writing that continues to enrich my life and bring me closer to myself. 