The Brain that Ate My Childhood
Although it likely existed, I don’t remember a time in my life where I wasn’t being tormented by my own mind. I don’t remember a time from my childhood where I wasn’t scared shitless of something that was more likely than not, impossible.
That is not to say that all of my childhood memories are clouded with doom. I do have moments taped in my brain that are entirely wholesome, and I play those back often to remind myself that sometimes I was capable of feeling something other than terror.
As early as six years old, I was plagued by a constant overwhelming sense of fear of everything I did revolved around it. There was no reason besides brain chemistry for me to be this way; I experienced no real trauma and wasn’t lacking in any basic need. I was simply a girl with an overactive amygdala and a minimal supply of serotonin.
Because of this, I cried every day of first grade. This is not an exaggeration, nor is it something I did quietly, politely, and to myself in the privacy of a bathroom stall or behind a bus seat. I cried every single day and everybody knew it.
After I arrived at school, my mother—with the assistance of a teacher—would attempt to coax me into the building. Faculty would come out one-by one-and take turns pulling my six-year-old-fingers from the edge of the minivan door. Once my hands could no longer withstand their Velcro-level persistence, I’d be escorted inside, already the inconsolable sobbing mess I had no shame in being. In fact, I did it with confidence. My mom, mortified and terrified by my neurotic tendencies, did her best to say goodbye and guarantee she would be back in only a few short hours. Then the guidance counselor—for whom I am sure had never seen such consistency in a child’s extreme routine—would lead me into her office, accompanied by my teacher, where both sat me down with the intention of cracking the code. They were never successful.
Although it seemed my resistance to my mother leaving me at school was simply a proclamation of my love for her; it was actually the early stages of what would become an ongoing wrestling match with my own psyche.
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My memory of special childhood moments like Halloween don’t exist in the way they should. Dressed in my sparkly red devil costume one year, my mom loaded me into her minivan to go to school that day, where there would be a costume parade followed by a classroom party. As we pulled up to the building, the expected doom set in. I refused to get out of the car and my mom, unwilling to fight my usual resistance, drove me back home without objection. There is no memory of candy and cupcakes, pumpkin carving and spooky songs, only sad little me dressed head to toe in red, not yet able to fight my anxiety with logic.
I have other moments of my elementary school days that just seem impossibly pathetic. Too afraid to join my peers in the cafeteria for fear of being vomited on (something that had never actually happened to me), arrangements were made for me to sit at a table outside of it. A small yellow table and chair were set up daily for me to eat my lunch at. I could invite a friend to join me if I wanted. I didn’t.
There are countless other normalities I missed out on, quite frankly because my brain wouldn’t allow me to enjoy them. It seemed whenever I started to feel the cloak of fear slip off my shoulders, the terror returned to remind me of all of the impossible yet possible what-ifs. I was a kid tormented by all that could happen, and as a consequence of that, missed out on most of what did happen.
I’d like to say that puberty saved me from my brain, gave me relief in the form of something more tangible to stress out about, but unfortunately the changes in my body and mind only exacerbated the already-present instability.
In the sixth grade, I brought a Pop-Tart to school in a Ziploc bag every day. In the beginning of the year, I ate them, and then I didn’t. Still, I kept bringing them, improperly stored, prone to crumbling, for the remainder of the year.
By the last day of school, I had compiled at least forty Ziploc bag-smashed Pop-Tarts in the bottom of my backpack. My mom cringed as she pulled the unrecognizable pastries from beneath binders and books. Why did I make a habit of bringing a snack I knew would be left uneaten and abandoned, swimming somewhere in my bookbag, purposefully ignored?
Because if I didn’t bring a Pop-Tart to school with me every day, something would kill me, of course.
As a child without the correct language to describe what I felt, I assumed my world of smashed Pop-Tarts was ordinary. Although I knew I was more concerned about certain things than my peers, I thought maybe I was just generally more cautious. I didn’t know the word for compulsions, only that I had them. My obsessions weren’t obsessions, because I figured everyone’s ruminations floated with the same intensity. Didn’t other people feel the haunting need to bring their choice of processed snack to school as some sort of unspecified sacrifice? Didn’t other people stay awake worrying about the doom they would face should they forget to take with them, a Pop-Tart they would never consume?
While sometimes my family and I reflect on these idiosyncratic moments and laugh, I’m often saddened by their reality and the large chunk of time in which they carved out of my youth. In many ways, my mental illness took over my childhood and most of my teenage years. As I grew up, the specifics changed, but the reliance on ritual and fear remained, and my recognition of these rituals grew alongside puberty. From eighth grade on, I shredded my cuticles with such intensity that using Purell on my hands would have knocked me unconscious. I consumed Pepto Bismol as though it were an over-the-counter benzodiazepine that could somehow remedy the constant terror brewing in my intestines. In high school, I plucked the perimeter of my hairline until it was spotless, a habit with consequences that linger today in the form of irreversible side bangs.
I remember anxiety firsts more than most of the should-be-significant firsts in my life: my first panic attack at thirteen, when I learned that clawing the back of my neck could temporarily save me from needing to escape the classroom; my first call to the counselor’s office for vigorously scratching at my arms in chemistry class; my first pull over-to-the-side-of-the-road breakdown while driving. I can’t relay the details of my first kiss or my favorite high school memories. The consistent feelings of fear I’ve experienced since childhood have taped over memory that might have been reserved for joy.
This is not to say there were no bright spots in my life growing up. I was lucky to have a family who did everything in their power to support me and shield me from the scenarios manufactured by my mental illness. But the reality that the majority of my youth was plagued by mental illness haunts me and makes me question the possibilities of both my present self and future. Will the internal chaos I’ve come to accept as normal ever subside? Do I want kids? And if I do decide to have them biologically, will they be just how I was, inevitably stung by neurosis from birth? Will I be able to comfort them, shield them from the inventions of their irrational thoughts? Is the passing on of my mental illness guaranteed? And if so, will I be able to prepare for that?
It is possible to live a good life with a brain that does not work as it’s supposed to. I live a good life with a brain that does not work as it’s supposed to. I work hard in therapy sessions, take the medication that took countless other failures to find success with, and only occasionally (about once a week) worry that it has stopped working,
Sometimes I mourn the childhood I did not allow myself to have. I am sad for the six-year-old whose mind would not permit her to sit in the cafeteria with her friends, sympathetic towards the twelve year old whose constant stomach aches made her miss birthday parties and sleepovers. I feel bad for my parents for their forced navigation of my illness, and for turning their bedroom floor into my nightly sleeping quarters. I feel bad for my parents for doing everything they could to soothe a young girl for whom comfort was simply not an option, and for still continuing to do more despite failure. If I do have kids someday, I’m not confident that I would be capable of such compassion, such patience as the kind my parents had.
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It is the week leading up to Halloween and although I am now technically an adult, this does not stop me from seeking the joy that comes with this great time of the year. I buy candy too far in advance and fawn over the diorama style display of a mini haunted town at my local craft store. I make my fiance watch the Charlie Brown holiday special and bake those tiny sugar cookies imprinted with ghosts that everybody remembers. I eat more than I can count and drink warm apple cider as a nightcap. I am sober because of the interaction of alcohol and my prescriptions.
These pieces of holiday enjoyment are part of a routine I have only created in the most recent years of my life. I have given myself permission to experience the things my mind could once not accept, permission to acknowledge that there can in fact be contentment without terror, and if the terror comes, then so be it. I will handle it, coping skills and SSRIs in tow, one emotion at a time.
The brain that ate my childhood is the only brain I have, the same one adored by my lover and appreciated by my students, that surprises itself with answers to Jeopardy and can remember lyrics to songs that aren’t culturally significant. There is some good in its folds.