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
‘Falling’ iii. I always wanted to tell stories. As a kid, my imagination never stopped ticking. It drove stories early in primary school into accounts unrecognisable from the truth, and pushed them towards grandiosity when I got into the later grades. In high school, I’d handwrite epics – fifty or sixty pages long. If I watched movies, the movies would inspire me to similar ideas, or even to possible sequels. Ideas always tumbled around in my head. Even fantasies were accompanied with a narrative, a voice in my head that articulated how they unfolded. For a while, storytelling hid behind other teenage pursuits. At one time or another, I wanted…
The Other Me
‘Falling’ ii. I woke in the morning, not sure I’d ever gotten back to sleep, my head pulsing but raw, the way a bad cut feels after it’s been tended. Underneath it, a flightiness, like whatever had filled me last night was a breath from returning. Everything around me was too stark – noises, voices, arguments. I didn’t tell anybody how I was feeling. I’d never gone to my family with problems. When I broke up with my first girlfriend, when I got bullied in high school, when anything happened, I never told anybody. We weren’t close like that. That was a soap reality, something you’d see on TV. In…