The Other Me
An ongoing serial about neurosis, beginning with anxiety that burgeoned through my teenage years, and grew into issues also with depression and OCD, amongst other things.
The Other Me
‘Life’s Short Interruption: Part I’ i. In life untethered from psychiatric supervision, free from ongoing medication, I tried to find where I now stood. There was no forgetting this thing. It was scarred into me, just like the surgical scars on my right arm when doctors had operated to insert plates on broken bones when I was sixteen. But that healed. It might never have gotten back to perfect, but it was healed. This felt like it could re-fracture, and there was no forgetting it. It remained there, lurking, inside my head. Some days, I was fine. And some days, I wasn’t. The anxiety would brim, threatening to go from…
The Other Me
‘Interim – Who am I?’ Who am I? It was a question that obsessed me as a kid – I was lying inside a cardboard box in the backyard staring up at the sky, maybe all of four-years-old, when it first occurred to me. But it really harangued me when I was ten or eleven. Usually, it would get to me when I lay in bed. Or just when I was sitting around. Any time I wasn’t distracted, really. My mind would turn inward, ask the question, and try to peel away the layers to get to the truth – whatever that might’ve been. There are the obvious answers, the…