Free Boy

Chapter III: Side Effects

"Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves." - Bessel van der Kolk

Trigger Warning: Self Injury, Drug Abuse, Suicide

. . .

When your body doesn't feel like it's in your custody anymore, your brain will not want to care for it any longer. The amount of serotonin in my brain is basically zero to none. I have been laying stagnant and drugged up in my bed for the entire week, in a depressive episode down with a horrible fake flu. Avery would visit twice a day to check in with me and Thomason would deliver my lunch and dinner, which I promised him I would have a bite of but never actually did. It is always easier when your parents know that you're suffering from something, they don't have to know the entirety of what is going on in your life, just enough for them not to ask questions. The consecutive nights of restlessness and the repeated cycle of forcing myself to sleep lead to a successive amount of me pondering on why my life has to be the way it is.

During the earlier stages of my extended fight with depression, everything and everyone in my life were foggy. I have never been any close to a real-life adaptation of teenage angst or the kid who was constantly bullied into the abyss of mental illness; most could say I am lucky and maybe I am. I was a well-behaved kid, still am for the most part. My parents fight as any parents would. I would get into trouble for talking too much in class, sometimes for not talking enough because the topics of discussion amongst boys my age simply don't interest me.

Whenever you are immobile in the state of continual melancholy, nothing seems to matter. Your life losses its significance and so do the things you used to find pleasure in. You hate yourself, your brain, your face, your body and all the parts of you that you cannot control. The self-hatred manifests itself into guilt and the onus is on you to deal with it to your best ability; which is unrealistic, to say the least. Only the inside of me is a mess and when you can't catch something with your own two eyes, people usually ignore it. So I turned my body into a canvas to visually represent that mess. Call it a cry for help.

I like to think my cry for help worked in some ways. My parents got to catch a glimpse of the canvas three months after I started and I was sent into immediate psychiatric treatment. It was a mingle of emotions; mainly relief and internalized feeling of being a burden. What I meant by it helping was that it gave me a chance; a chance at life. Maybe it was not the chance I wanted but I was lucky that it got me to be where I am with Avery and Thomason.

It happened during the night of the Sophomore dance. Thomason was the first person, outside of the comfort of my own house, to see the damages I have done to my body. This is what reckless drinking leads you to do, it makes you confront unwanted situations. He was giving me a ride back home from the dance; Sophomore Thomason is poles apart from the Thomason we have now. He was always the designated driver, the one to hold your hair up in bathroom stalls after a night of intoxicating yourself and the one to tell you to stop drinking when it gets too much. He never used to drink. Woefully, I repaid his good deed by regurgitating all I had in me onto myself and the leg space of his front seat. I could tell he was in a temper about it but never made it apparent; he gets angry at me a lot but it is never plain to see. Which leads to the part where he helped my fragile body off the seat and the clothes off my body. His eyes lay on my wrist and my arm with no initial reaction until the dome light of the car glistened across my body; his hands grabbed onto mine after he tossed my shirt. His thumbs caressed my scars. My muddled mind was not registering a lot of the thing that was going on, despite that, I could feel the tension of his gaze on me.