They Told Me I Was Gone ~Joshua Dun FanFiction~

My Soul is Freezing

"I really think that you should reconsider going back to medication to treat this Shae."

Maya Armett is my therapist. She's the fifth one in the last two years and the twelfth since I was ten years old. I've only been seeing her for about three months and I'm here once a week. She has short brown hair that's parted down the middle and thin glasses that she looks over instead of through. She speaks very bluntly which sometimes I like but sometimes it makes me uncomfortable. She always wears blazer jackets and khaki pants with sneakers. I don't know how old she is.

"I don't want to go back on medication."

When I was ten I was diagnosed with depression. It's a chemical imbalance in my brain, so it doesn't ever go away, no matter how great things in my life may be. I have good days sometimes, but for the most part there is no escape from this. I am always numb to feeling things. I'm not sad all the time, like most people seem to think, I just really do not care about anything. I don't care about work or school or other people. The only thing that I really care about is reading. Reading and books are my favorite things, and other than tea, they are the only things I really like.

"You need to understand that this is a chemical imbalance that you can't control. Without medication you will never get better, Shae." She pushed.

I stared at her for a moment, not saying anything to her. No matter what she said I wasn't going to go back on medication. It takes too long to find the right one. I would have to go through months of side effects and mood swings and possible allergic reactions. I would have to keep logs to see if things worked and when they didn't I would have to start the process all over again, and again, and again, until one worked, if it ever did.

"Shae, have you thought about going back to school?" She was trying to change the subject, thinking that maybe if she asked me about something else she knew I hated that i would revert back to talking about medication. SHe was wrong.

"No."

"Why not? Maybe a distraction like school would be good for you. You could make new friends and learn new things. College is different than high school, I swear." She cooed. I wondered if she knew that I'm not a child. I wondered if she knew that I could make decisions for myself and I, myself, decided that I did not want to go to school because it would trigger my anxiety.

"I don't like being around people." I answered. It was a simple answer, one that she already knew. I didn't want to go to school and she was fully aware of that. I wasn't the type of anxious person that refused to talk to people, they don't make me nervous and I don't have panic attacks every time a stranger comes up to me. But they do make me uncomfortable. People tend to not understand anything about personal space. They don't understand that I need to be a certain distance away from them and when they do know that, they don't always respect it.

Maya sighed. "You can't avoid people forever." Clearly she didn't hear anything I've ever told her. I don't hate people and I don't intend to avoid them forever, but I don't want to be near them if I don't have to. I like to keep to myself and I don't know why that was such an awful thing.

People are tricky. They pretend to like you, and then they tell you they've hated you for as long as they've known you. They use you, and they don't feel sorry for leaving you behind when they got what they wanted. People are only interested in their own well being, and I understand that, so I stay solely interested in mine by not bothering anyone else.

"I could if I really wanted to." I shrugged. If I did in fact want to avoid people there are a million ways that I could do that. I could work for my father, doing the paperwork for his business and never leaving the house. I could go to school online and pretend i was a mute deaf so that i would be allowed to work from online eventually, too. It's a bit of an elaborate plan, and I haven't really sketched out the details because it's not exactly what I have in mind for myself but I could do it.

She sighed again. "We can talk more about this next week. In the meantime I want you to really think about medication. Maybe if you did some more research you would be more open to the idea."

I ignored her suggestion, thanked her for her time despite her not doing much for me, and I walked out of the room. There were a few people in the waiting room, the little lobby in the middle of all of the offices in the therapy building, and I avoided eye contact with all of them, the way I always did.

I knew I would never go back to medication and I would probably avoid school for as long as I possibly could. If Maya, a stranger to me, thought that she could change my mind just because she had a fancy degree, then she was surely out of her mind. 

The chapters of this story are generally going to be a lot shorter than what I normally write. 

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