DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

10/2/16 Free Write

After being hospitalized for clinical depression in my sophomore year of high school, my mind went numb.  Sometimes literally.  I remember laying in a bed in the attic of my old house and watching a movie that wasn’t particularly to my liking, one of the first times that this happened.  My head was propped up, and after a certain number of minutes, the back of my head went numb, almost to the core.  I guess this is what happened after I went through a period of my life in which I later realized that following your heart is as important as thinking what you want, and not following the crowd. 

The months following those days in which I was an inpatient/outpatient at a mental hospital were some that I will never forget, because the people that I spent most of my time with before my hospital experience, I only saw sparingly, after having the opportunity to switch schools and become associated with another group of kids (girls at an all-girl school), if only a little bit.  I saw the kids from my first school in random places, like in the street, as we drove past each other in cars, or at other places, like in clothing stores.  I remember seeing a girl at an Eddie Bauer or an Old Navy that I used to be afraid of because I felt like she was ten times cooler than me; I felt like I didn’t fit in with her crowd; but after my first hospital stay the stigma and stereotype of high school clicks and ignorance melted away, and instead I gained a heightened awareness- of boys.  The girl I saw at the clothing store wore a sea-green sweater and I remember associating the sweater with the type of clothing that the prep- school students wore, and for the first time in my life I didn’t have the phobia that used to infiltrate even the darkest corners of my mind of fads that I never was exposed to in grammar school.  I remember seeing the expression on the girl’s face and thinking that maybe in the next millennium, after my symptoms of anxiety/depression/paranoia that somehow surfaced over the course of one and a half years would leave, I could be friends with the kids from my old high school; knowing that the strongest of these symptoms had already started to relieve themselves.

Another time I saw some of these people was when I went with my mom to her work to help her out doing some chores, such as planting trees in front of her office.  Her office was in an urban area of Chicago, I think some place downtown, set between other places of business.  In front there were square patches of dirt, where my mom wanted to plant some trees, to bring a splash of green to the otherwise bland spot in the neighborhood.  In some other instances I helped her out at her work, doing things like dumping expired medicine in garbage bins, among other things.  One of the first times that I went to her work to do such tasks, my sister went with to help out.  I remember sitting in the car on the way there and looking out the window up to the cotton clouds floating throughout the blue sky, thinking that it was better to be alone and bored than to be with people and feel the hurt that I used to feel when I was part of the crowd, and having relationships with people.  I remember looking out of the window and knowing that things had changed, things had gotten simpler, yet I was more in control of my life.  After my hospitalization my phobia of people had receded, but I had become more withdrawn and more quiet.  When I looked at the blue of the sky and the puffs of clouds it made me feel kind of like I was dreaming, a silent dream in which the thing that maintained my attention was the perfection of the image of the sky.

My mom pulled up in front of the building and parallel parked, so that the right side of the street was to my left.  Before the two boys and the girl that I used to go to school with drove by, I remember knowing that people that I used to go to school with would pass, at that moment, even before seeing them, even before they passed, even before I saw their faces.  I had the feeling that danger would be passing soon, so I gained a heightened sense of awareness and prepared myself, for a few seconds, for these people to pass.  Two cars passed, the first being driven by a red haired boy that was in my speech class sophomore year, the other occupied by a boy and a girl that I remember hearing lived within a block of each other; I recollect wondering why they had not been friends before high school, since they lived so close to each other.

Once I got the feeling of intuition that people I used to know from my first high school would pass, I braced myself and expected the worse.  The two boys that passed, one after the other, had facial expressions that couldn’t have contrasted more.  The first boy to pass, the one from speech class, had the gentlest expression.  His red hair was one of the traits that made me realize that it was him, as he passed in only a few seconds, but I remember all of the fears I held in my heart, my mind, and in my breathing, recede into a complete calm, if only for a second.  His eye held me in tranquility.  I believe that the first boy to pass was who gave me the strength to keep on looking to see the next people to drive by; a boy with black hair who I had never been friends with, and a pretty girl with curly hair who I had been friends with for a part of freshman year but who had gotten too cool for me after groups and clicks started to form.  I remember seeing the look of hate and disgust in the boy’s eyes, and it got to the point where I started to look down a bit.  It was like these two people driving by was what I was expecting, what I was waiting for to get over what had happened at school.  I had never seen such a look of contempt in anyone’s eyes as I did in his, but I felt like it kind of set me free, for reasons that still escape me, for reasons that I only am able to sense when I stop what is going on in life for a moment to look up at the clouds and the blue sky and know that no matter what, I am not alone.  It was the ying and yang that I found that day, for a few seconds as I saw them drive past me; one of love and hate, one of the unknown and the even more unknown. 

After I kicked around the dirt of the brown patches in front of my mom’s work, I helped my mom and my sister with arbitrary chores, and we got in the car and started to head home.  My mom was driving, my sister was sitting in the passenger’s seat, and I was sitting in the back.  I remember feeling preoccupied with thought to the point where I tried to start conversation with prompts that came from the back of my mind.  I started to tell my mom about a dream I had, where we were both, my mom and I, at a concert.  I told a few details of the dream to my mom until my sister intruded and undermined me, asking what was I talking about.  Her tone of voice and her temperament made me feel weak.  It was one of a few instances in which she made me feel inferior to her, and previous to my hospitalization, I would have been angry and defended myself, but my depression got the best of me, so I didn’t respond, except with the sense of hurt that filled the awkward silence among us three.  After my hospitalization, I started to feel inferior to my sister.  Her snapping was one of the first times were if I had been able to see this disposition of hers from I time when I was less depressed, I would have been shocked, but the sense of a fear to stand up for myself because of this new phobia that exposed itself held me back from standing up for myself. 

That day I was alone but with people for the first time, in new ways, both times.  I felt an intuition that I might have called amazing, if it had not led to one of the nastiest facial expressions of all time.  I understood what it meant to not be able to stand up for myself, even among those that I ought to be able to feel best about myself in front of.  I felt like the dirt that felt the confines of a square at the same time that I felt the lack of boundaries of a blue and cloud-filled sky, all in one afternoon, all in one day, all in one lifetime.  

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.