The Mental Game
I pushed aside my photo frames of my friends and reached over top the worn out paper backs to close my hand around the one thing I keep coming back to. The little orange prescription bottle with my name on it. It mocks me, with it's mini easily swallowable contents and it's description. "For pain" it says, as if it's that simple. I know for a fact it only covers the physical stuff and really what use is that when it comes to real pain. Sure it can make a headache go away or make your leg stop throbbing or whatever but it doesn't really fix pain. I believe pain is both mental and physical. what's to say that it isn't possible for their to be a disconnect in there somewhere. That's what it feels like to have depression, to feel pain as if it's coming from all over your body, but there is no physical explanation. It's like if you think and know you are still in pain, you are still going to feel it. And that's the thing about medicine and pills. It only works if you believe it will and the only way to believe it works is to take others word for it. What good is that to you when the only person that could really know whether it would work is you.
You see the cycling that's going on here? Because this is my life whether I like it or not. One big contemplation about whether or not to trust myself or people or both. And there is a right answer, even if I'm not quite sure of the question.
So what I did next was what I always did. I tugged on the child proof lid and let 1 tiny white pill fall in the palm of my hand. And just like always I swiftly tossed it into my mouth and swallowed without water or hesitation. To the answer the question I'm sure is swimming around in your minds somewhere, no . I'm not injured and do not have any physical symptoms that would require me to take it. The little white temptations are left over from when I got my wisdom teeth removed about 6 months ago. I was told then, that they might make me giggly and are a little stronger than Tylenol 3, which I had to stop taking because my I fainted every time I stood up. My body is strange sanctuary, abnormal. And i know people faint all the time but what i think is the strange about my particular body is my brain. I actually ENJOYED fainting every time i stood up or got out of bed. Its not to say it was the attention I got for it, because of course my mother always made a fus and every single time she got a little but closer to sleeping on my bedroom floor. It was simplicity of it, of the fall, the unexpected, the piece of mind. And when I say piece of mind i do mean it. The only time you’re brain ever really shuts down is in times of bodily failure, when it needs to give in to something else more vital in order to attempt to fix the problem. The most obvious case of this would be the reach of death, when you don’t wake up after your brain shuts down, but fainting is close enough. You can’t have everything, especially if you are living.
Now i suppose you’re wondering why this is at all important, and the answer is, it isn’t. Not really.
Everyone creates their own sense of importance, so in reality it's all for you to decide.
As i was saying I took the pill and also just like always, nothing happens. Ever since I no longer needed them for pain, they stopped working. And I mean the gigglyness, the good mood, the numbing body feeling, all of it, just doesn’t come. I DONT FEEL IT. A logical answer here would be because my body doesn’t need it, that nothing hurts so I can’t tell the difference. But the mood? Why can’t that come back to me. Thats the reason i take them, thats the reason why everyone takes them. Nobody enjoys pain, it makes them miserable, hence the term. So we take pills to feel better and now I’m wondering if there is such a thing as real medicine. I mean, maybe everything we know about biology is a hoax, all mental, all imagined, all pointless. Cancer? People believe in their own bad luck, while the scanners are really just different shapes because those people have a different shape of brain or are a different species of human. But how do we react to something different from average? They are sick! So what do those people do? Die from sickness. As wrong as these theories might sound and most definetely are, I guess i'll never really know. Not until the last day I faint and my brain shuts off for good.
Ah yes, real question time. Why do I still take them? Hope? Suicidal thoughts maybe? The answer is none of the above. Its curiosity. Have I changed my perspective yet enough to be hopeful again? Because if I go with my crackpot theory as follows: all symptoms of humanity and biology only come from the brain and thought processing, then maybe one day, they will work again. If I’m able to change my brain, then maybe I won’t need the pill to feel the effect.
Who am I kidding?
See I don't think that I actually needed those pills to feel happy, and that is merely because I don’t really feel that way anymore. Not that I won’t have a decent day, i'll smile at others, hand in my homework on time, laugh with my friends at dinner. Its when I come home alone that I really start to realize there is something wrong with me, that there is always something wrong with me. I know every young adult or teen feels this way, I know my perspective isn’t abnormal or freaky, but the thing is to me, it is hard to deal with. I honestly hate when people compare me to others in society because I don’t care about their problems, I care about dealing with my own.
So that was it, I felt nothing as I went back and lied face down on my bed, the familiar soft covers sprawled around me. I sighed, thinking if I could just feel enough happiness to get through the rest of this day, then I could do it for the rest of my life.
So what I did next I thought about for a long time after. If I was going to feel any happiness at all, it wasn’t going to come from a bottle. So I took a deep breathe and shot up from my bed to grab the stupid prescription bottle. I knocked over my picture frames in the process, shattering a picture I took with my best friend at the end of my first year in college. I firmly grasped the bottle in my hand before whipping it with all the force i could muster at my thin glass window. It smashed through the window with unexpected supernatural force and fell quickly to the ground. I ran to the window to see the bottle cracked open with all its contents spread over my backyard. I heard the shouts before I saw my parents. But I only smiled at them, because the window broken before me really showed me how much control I have over temptation and my perspective.
I knew the window could be fixed and it gave me the hope that maybe I could be someday too.
