Prologue

Well, this is me. I don’t really know what to say. A lot of things set me up for depression. A lot of things in my childhood. I know I have lifelong anxiety. Don’t need a therapist to figure that out. Social phobia, a lot of worrying about what others do/may/could possibly think about me, and running scared from their negative thoughts. Whether it was real or not I was never completely sure. I’m a great reader of people. Maybe all those extra novels I read as a kid, with their countless characters and social interactions, gave me blueprints to understand every person I could ever meet. Maybe the anxiety gave me superpowers. The power to understand other’s actions, thoughts, emotions. Even when they’re mostly invisible. Context clues.

The curse. The curse of such a superpower means my own emotions and feelings didn’t matter. Or maybe they just got drowned out in everyone else’s noise. And then it was like they didn’t exist.

Besides that, I’m the only child of a single parent. A single parent that spent her time keeping our problems away from me. Keeping me safe. But she couldn’t keep herself safe from them, my superpower showed me that. So I offered up what I could, words of comfort that only proved her secrets weren’t secret, a few weeks’ allowance scraping the bottom of ceramic pigs. All were refused. So I went rogue. Instead of my useless attempts at assistance, I kept secrets of my own. I didn’t beg for a new toy or a Happy Meal. I didn’t ask to join clubs or extracurriculars, though I accepted them greedily when offered. Most importantly, I learned to ignore my mother’s hardships. No, not ignore. Pretend to ignore. I always saw. Superpowers, remember? I always saw, but I kept it in. We worried in silence, together. Alone.

I was smart. My second superpower. I breezed through school at the top of the class. Academic star. Teacher’s pet. Always eager to please. The kid other kids’ parents always talked about when theirs acted up or got bad grades. “Why can’t you be more like her?” And I found another way to make everyone else happy, to help with the problems I pretended weren’t there. I could do everything that was expected of me. All A’s: Easy. Attendance awards and pleasant comments on report cards: Done. Graduate top in class from middle and high school: You got it. Go to college for engineering because you’re so smart, of course you need a high-paying job: Let’s do it. And that’s where it get’s complicated, because that’s where I can’t deliver. I don’t know why. Too much work for the normally easy A? Too much science? Too much much? I can’t do it. But they’re expecting me to do it. Why can’t I? It’s always been so easy. And what alternative is there to doing? Not doing? That’s failure. An imaginary word. An imaginary world. I won’t be a part of it. But there is no gray area, and I’ve already left the real world of doing.

And that’s where I met depression, my old friend. At the place between the forbidden real and the refused imaginary. Here is where it begins.