I was in "Health" after my allergy shot. I think it must have been the fall of 1987, my very first semester in that place.
After each shot, they made me wait fifteen minutes to make sure I wasn't going to go into anaphylactic shock. From being exposed to the allergens, dontcha know. Sometimes a body doesn't cope with that. (My allergist at home would just look in my eyes real good as he gave me the shot, then check them again after dumping the sharp. This satisfied him that disaster was not brewing and I'd be on my merry way. The nurses at school were more cautious.)
Usually I read while I waited, but that day, I didn't have a book with me. I wandered over to a bunch of brochures on a table.
They were the usual take-charge-of-your-health things. Watch out for this, improve that. Since we were all young in this place, the communiques were light on prostate and long on sex, STDs, depression...and anxiety.
I picked that one up.
And saw my life in line drawings: vague creatures, hardly there, peering around corners with fixed eyes while their hands juddered. The text calmly stated what these living ghosts avoided every day--
people
places
things.
Windows opened here and there onto the symphonies of static in their heads: obsession, compulsion, panic, rumination. This is depression, mentioned the text, just with another face.
Was it really. That would explain a lot.
I turned the page.
There was a picture of a prescription bottle.
A voice inside me said "I need that."
It was a small voice, tellingly small. It was unemotional and uninterested in my opinion. It said, "I need that."
I knew it was right. That kind of voice always is. Yet I also knew what I was going to do. I was going to close the brochure and put it down, and I was going to move on.
There were reasons; my family was virulently anti-medication of any kind. As a child I used to gut my way through the most blistering headaches and sore throats because I'd gotten the idea it was unhealthy to take aspirin. You can imagine how ominous a long-term psychoactive medication would seem under those circumstances. I didn't trust that it would help me; it seemed too good to be true, too easy. I couldn't picture who I'd be if it did help. Better the enemy you know.
Those were all true reasons and they sat on me like sandbags. But they got their power from something underneath, something wordless, something without logic or traceable origin. Maybe the disease itself. Determined like a sentient being to preserve itself. Close the book, dear. Walk away. Because your voice can say all it wants, but I am the hand with which you act. I took over long ago. You didn't even know.
The worst was yet to come.
