it's called a cycle for a reason

i

                                I'm nobody! Who are you?

                                Are you nobody, too?

                                Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!

                                They'd banish us; you know!

                                                                                           -Emily Dickinson

I hate society. I hate how it’s okay for teachers to force students in front of a classroom to present a vapid topic to their obnoxious peers. I hate how those same teachers are allowed to fail the students who physically cannot go to the front of the class. I hate how we’re expected to be ourselves but then when we are, we’re judged for it. I hate how parents expect perfection from their kids - perfect grades, perfect attendance, perfect lives - but they can’t even keep a job themselves. I hate how society contradicts itself. In every manner of the word. 

I remember walking into the oak door of the McHall Building. It was where the after school program that I'd used to be enrolled in when I was like, ten resided. (The rents were rarely home.) As I passed by small groups of kids snacking, I watched all of the little ones stare at me. It was as if I wasn’t human. Like, I was an animal to them. That’s when it started. The anxiety. The panic attacks. I had no control over them then. So I would cry a lot, and, you know, start hyperventilating. Sometimes I’d even throw up. At those times, older students would take notice and they’d try to help, and they even called other students over to help. Once, a girl even screamed for a teacher. 

Time passed, I grew up, and I distanced myself. People noticed that, and they let me go. I stopped caring – or at least I figured that I had stopped. In reality, I was hurt. I thought that friends were supposed to be there to pull you back into the loop when you strayed off of the path. But my friends weren’t there when I began to roam away from everything. 

The thing about being alone, it gives you time to think. About everything. That’s exactly what I did, too. I thought about death, about life. I thought about how the government must be brain washing the youth of America with the imbecilic television shows and what kinds of things ran through serial killer’s brains before they killed someone. I thought about how I’d die and when and why and that’s probably what got my mother to convince dad that I needed to see a shrink. 

So every Thursday after school I drive downtown to the therapist’s office, and I spend an hour or two talking about how my week has been. And my parents are okay with paying $200 bucks an hour. As long as I kept getting the medicine that made me ‘okay’. 

“Nathan Miller,” I mumble. The receptionist is a woman who seems like she’s in her fifties. I swear, every week her hair gets grayer and grayer, and it’s always pulled into an uncomfortably tight bun that seems to stretch her face as far as it could go without ripping. She looks up at me through her unnaturally wide eyes.

“A little early today, aren’t you Nathan?” she says focusing her eyes once again on the computer screen in front of her. I shrug and look up at the clock. 3:15. I guess I was a little early. 

“Is she with someone?” I say looking around the empty waiting room. 

“No,” she said, not looking up at me. 

“Then can I go in?” 

“You aren’t scheduled to see her until 3:25.” I stare at her. My temper flares.