Statistics

A Story by Allison

A cerebral piece I wrote for a class.

The cake I was presented on my twentieth birthday read, “Congratulations, you beat teen pregnancy!” The most significant thing I had done up to that point was something I had avoided.

On my 21^st, it was pointed out that I’d never been caught drinking underage. I had also never been fired. I had never failed out of school. But dodging all of these hapless would-be events led me to reason that my misfortune was simply compounding to unfold upon me at a later date. I was waiting for the statistic of my life to come into play.

Surely this sort of masochistic thinking wasn’t typical, but it became a near-daily topic through which my mind dallied. I knew I’d never win the lotto �" a waste of money �" and I doubted I’d ever appear on the Price is Right. A car accident seemed likely, but in order for that to be it there would have to be a tremendous amount of damage done to my body. Rag-dolly. Early death, in general, was a considerable prospect. I ruminated on adopting a drug habit. I could take the statistic into my own hands. Plus, dying from an overdose left an attractive corpse. Twenty-three, pale, and thin as the needle sticking out of her, everyone would say.

An obsessive morbidity became a part of me. Imagine that getting wrapped around your neck, little kids swinging at it, I said motioning toward a tetherball pole on a nearby playground. Calm down, my friend said with furrowed brows. I was like a dropped egg carton: all cracked up just inside the lid. It takes a little while but eventually you can see something start oozing out.

I sat writing with a pen a few days after. The down-ness in me was very outward that day, and also very inward, so I wrote in order to settle the conflict. I was cross-legged and mostly naked in my room �" I had underwear on because the floor was dirty. I looked at my hands and they seemed smaller. I was breathing hard, I noticed. My whole body looked particularly small. I hunched my back and an unfamiliar shape was fashioned out of me. My shoulders pointed in at each other and a divot formed just above my collarbone on each side. I was slight. Insubstantial. I wondered how my wrists had never snapped off. I considered how all my ligaments and blood and veins and other bodily requirements fit inside the hand-stem that I called my wrist.

My body was browner than usual. Organic. My eyes traced each finger and up my arm carefully, stopping abruptly at the obscenity of my watch. A black, industrial nuisance. It was wrong. I took it off.

I set my arm back on my thigh, but the disconnect between them persisted. Like someone’s forearms were on my thighs, or my forearms were on someone else. I started writing again and my body lifted gently out of itself. I wasn’t worried because I was anchored there with my pen. I pressed harder. The tip of my pen caused the two selves to overlap, so I made sure to keep it down �" which was difficult because it required vigilant cursive �" until I lowered back into me. There was a full length mirror on the wall. I noticed that one pupil had dilated without my consent. I frowned at them both.

A few days later I went to the doctor.

Sometimes it’s like I’m floating out of my body.

Dissociation.

Sometimes I’m really not sure I’m even a real person.

Depersonalization.

Sometimes it’s like I’m looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

Derealization.

Twenty-six percent of American adults have some form of mental illness. Nine and a half percent have a mood disorder. Two and a half percent have bipolar disorder. Median age of onset: 25.

Thereon I found it more difficult to distinguish my actual feelings from the categories in which I was told to put them. I couldn’t tell if what I remembered feeling was what I actually felt, or if it was just what I had read online. Every time my coping method had remained consistent. I stabbed my pen into something to pull me back, to drive out the sharp and messy thoughts, or to keep me from sliding downward into the slowness.

Now that I had the diagnosis, I read the paperwork. Racing thoughts, excessive energy, pressured speech, impulsiveness, high productivity, creativity, high intelligence.

On the other side: physical slowing, mental slowing, fatigue, shame, suicidal ideation, inability to complete tasks. Often occurs comorbidly with drug and/or alcohol abuse.

I began to subtract these things from me while reading them. I took out what I considered adventurousness, fearlessness, enthusiasm. Then the melancholy, the aching, the despair. My writing. My mind. And when I had taken everything out, I was there with nothing. Every part of me was the construction of my illness.

In the following days I began the regimen prescribed by my doctor. Trileptal (Oxcarbazepine), an antiseizure medication with mood stabilizing properties. One pill at bedtime for three nights, then two for three more nights, then one more in the morning for the rest of your life. Omega-3 Fishoil (1,000 mg) and vitamin D3 (2,000 mg) once a day each. Keep a strict sleep schedule. No alcohol. No street drugs. What about prescription drugs? Only if they’re prescribed to you. Will you prescribe me some? No.

So I forged onward into forecasted mental stability. I slept. I medicated. I stayed sober. For weeks, I focused on my regimen and nothing more. Mind-numbingly good choices. Writing fell by the wayside for a few months. I didn’t know that I missed it because with health comes happiness �" that’s what I was told �" and I thought writing was just me battling the dark. It was a side-effect of the sickness. Not something integral, just a coping mechanism.

Months into it, I sat thinking about the way I had been, before the stability and before the indifference. I picked my journal up. I couldn’t remember what I ever had to write about. The ribbon was still in place from the last words I had written. They were scribbled, denting pages behind the ink. I read. I began to ache for the words. The comfort of my sadness was absent, and nostalgia overtook me. I had volunteered myself into vagueness. So for my lack of gloom, through my loss of self, the chemical imbalance, past the pills and the doctors and the diagnosis, I realized that the writing was more to me than I realized, and I reached for my pen again to bring myself back.