Events Before My First Episode

Posted on April 21, 2017 in ADD Childhood Depression Writing/Darkness

I was a tangerine. Sometimes I was a grapefruit. Actually, I was a little boy, living in the summer between first and second grades. That segment of time is blank for me. I can tell you what happened — two of my cousins came to live with us — but that is a fact not a memory. I had to move to my brother’s bedroom so the two girls could have mine. Their names were Ann and Jennifer. My mother fixated on Ann. She kept that focus to the end of her life. That is when I began to feel her resentment towards me for being a boy. That began after they left, but I felt the depression creeping in that Fall while I was in school. The first tears happened that September and the kids, my parents, my brother, and the nun who taught me mocked me. They never went away. Neither did the depression which came with the seasons. The first signs of the heaviness in my brow and the resignation of my body showed themselves. The first difficult weeks of my ADD arrived that same year when I could not focus during arithmetic lessons. My attention fluttered to other subjects. Sister Annette put me next to a bookcase. I read every book which she talked about seas of numbers. I became unpeeled and oblivious.