Sound of a Broken Drum

Chapter 10

Syd... what are you doing? Syd... PLEASE STOP.

I don't know what it means to be sane, sometimes. People give me definitions of it. Stable. Functional. Human.

I've always hated that word. 'Functional'. It makes you feel like they're describing a machine. I guess once something is broken, it is no longer 'functional'. What do you do then? Throw it away? Put up with it? Maybe that's the only thing that sets a human apart from a machine.

But I also understood. I wasn't seeing what they were seeing. The times when I don't remember. It is a little frightening to think it has gotten there again. Like when it happened when I was in high school. The principle called my mom and told me I had wandered into the girls' locker room, that I was a peeping Tom. They were going to expel me. I told them it never happened.

Then they showed me the security video of someone walking into the locker room. It was me. I didn't know what to say. I didn't remember it.

That was the first time. We knew something was wrong. Then the second time. I walked into a pool. Almost drowned.

We went to seek psychiatric care to get an opinion, my mom and I. Neither of us understood what it could be. It just seemed strange to us. But it was real.

They did some tests. Observed me. Asked me questions. It all seemed so routine and normal. Until they came back and told me. I was at-risk for schizophrenia. Me, a kid still in high school. Already considered crazy by society.

At first we tried just doing cognitive behavioral therapy. It seemed to work. The episodes weren't happening again. Or so we hoped. My mom and I got lulled into a sense of relief that it was going to be okay.

Then my mom came home one day and saw me. Slicing lines into my forearms with a kitchen knife. That's what she saw. I didn't remember it. All I remember was waking up in a hospital bed with bandages covering my arms. That's when I knew. I had no control over the situation.

They started me on medication. It definitely didn't feel right. I got sick. In fact, it was downright disgusting. And my mind felt different. It changed me. It made me an alien within myself. I couldn't tell what I was anymore.

But I had no choice. I had to do it. For my mom. I owed it to her to make sure what she saw never happened again.

It's not always about giving in.

It is always worse than you expect, the side effects. Go to sleep thinking you will get through this and be up and running, maybe the next day. Or the day after that. At worst, you think you would be able to at least do the small things for yourself; be that 'functional' human just making it through the unease. However, it doesn't usually work out that way.

I don't remember much about the week after I started the medication. It's all there in bits and pieces; me waking up sometimes to see my mom around my apartment. Her hands rubbing my shoulders, soothing me in bed as she tries to feed me liquids. Or her hands rubbing my back as I crouched bent over the toilet, puking my esophagus out. I remember the lurching, the gag reflex. Even when there wasn't anything left in my stomach, it still kept going, imploring more to come out until I started to taste that stomach acid. That sour burning taste that you know when your body is being pushed to a limit. And even then, it wouldn't stop because your body still needed something out. It was trying its damndest to get something out. And you were just there at its will, crouched and waiting over the toilet until your body got rid of it.

If I wasn't over the toilet, I was in bed. I remember at least that felt comfortable. Not so much my body, but the fact that I had something underneath me, supporting my weight as it sunk completely into the frame. It was like being a corpse, just alive enough to be aware that you were a corpse, laid down and completely paralyzed with your mind waiting to go somewhere else. Moving felt like it required infinite strength and I didn't have that. My mom would have to help me get up to go use the bathroom. She even bought diapers in case it ever got to that point. Luckily, we managed. I remember the few moments where I was slumped sitting on the toilet seat, feeling a vague sense of victory in the accomplishment. It was like trying to coordinate the body as multiple different parts as they pulled away from each other, never agreeing on what should happen next. A marionette, bent and twisted in pose, the strings tangled up above him.