2024-12-12
A post hoc pooled subgroup analysis of 1573 patients ruled that a statistically significant baseline anxiety by treatment interaction was observed for the Montgomery–Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (P = 0.0152). My body pulses with the same foreign material. Do I belong with them? With each passing day, I feel less and less like anyone. A trial of one. I am watching the vitality of my youth flicker like a candle flame, with pools of discarded and deformed waxy idols melted around me. Depression (Lexapro, Prozac, Zoloft), Anxiety (Ativan, Trazadone, Clonidine), Hospital (We insist you stay), College, TMS, PHP, Buddha, Bipolar Disorder (Lithium, Quetiapine), the Lord our God, Meditation, Diet, Exercise, College (again), PTSD, ADHD. Which Doctor has the strength to weigh these trauma? It is the rare hero that can shoulder responsibility beyond the creeping foundations of “Occasional difficulties in collecting one’s thoughts” or a 4/6 in ‘Lassitude’. Do I have to become that hero to gain entry to life? My experience is here! This is me! I want to shout. I want to sit and describe the way my moods crash like waves, tunneling strange caves and cliffs into my shoreline. I want to pour pages of reflection into the collective consciousness. Don’t you see?! At this rate, we will never keep up! The mind is not a bone. Do you not have a mind? Do you not see how it is all we are?! But I know that 30 bits is the professional standard to share how I feel. The rest must be a side effect.
Or worse, illness.
There is a hole in my chest just above the sternum where the kernel of regretful indignance focuses like sunbeams through a magnifying glass. I insist on rebellion. Not against the misguided ambitions of Doctors who never took a psychiatric medication before and never will. Not against the ‘System’ that I grope at with slippery, fractured attention. But against despair; against the desire to depose my hopeful, loving, imperfect, yet impenetrable constitution. For that, as far as I can tell, is what holds this tired lump of skin together.