Page 31 of Needing to Fall
I closed my eyes and sat back in my chair, tipping my head up to the ceiling. Flashes passed across my eyelids as my breathing became labored, and the tight noose around my neck started choking the air from my lungs.
She’s a bit nuts. She has quite a few screws loose. Crazy…
“Reign!” Lynx’s harsh voice snapped me from my thoughts as I gasped for breath, clutching the chair for dear life. “Tell me,” he demanded, something he had never done before with me. I wasn’t scared, but I also didn’t waver.
“Being called crazy, having screws loose. My court liaison would tell my foster parents this when I was placed with them.” I sucked in deeply as my father flitted into my head. “My father would tell me I was just as wacko as my mother.” I shook my head. “But I’m not crazy. I … I don’t know what I am, but crazy isn’t it.”
“I can see how that word bothers you, Reign,” the doctor said as my eyes stayed glued to Lynx, his look on me intense. “It is perfectly normal for you to feel this way.”
I gulped, turning to the doctor. Was it really normal that I felt this way?
“It is?”
He gave me a soft, reassuring smile. “Of course. The word crazy means mentally deranged. Most of the time, people in the world use the word in a joking, light-hearted manner to tease someone who doesn’t take the meaning of the word seriously. Others use it as a derogatory comment to put someone down. You see the word as the latter.”
I nodded. I knew something was messed up in my head—it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that—yet I didn’t want to be crazy. I didn’t want to be associated with that word. It bothered me down to my bones, and it wasn’t what others thought, because I only had Andi who gave a damn. It was inside of me. I wanted better than that.
The doctor continued, “From a medical standpoint, depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain. The medicine helps regulate what the brain isn’t producing on its own.”
An imbalance. That word didn’t seem nearly as bad as someone calling me crazy.
“Taking the meds will help,” Lynx added when I didn’t respond to the doctor, too lost in my thoughts.
I placed my thumb in my mouth and began chewing on the nail again. This had always been a way to calm myself since I was a kid, and it had never gone away.
“It helps keep the calm, the peace,” Lynx said.
My head swam with the word peace. That was what I needed in order to calm the waters inside me.
“So, if I take them, my thoughts will calm?” I asked.
Lynx nodded. “Yep. They won’t go totally away, but the meds will help.”
“But you said you stopped taking yours,” I argued.
“Yep, I did. I also told you why. There comes a point when taking them makes you feel carefree, like everything is finally right … or close to it. Then, you think,I don’t need this shit anymore. I thought it, stopped taking them, and I honestly can’t say if it would have helped being on them when I caught that lying bitch. I don’t know if I would have done anything differently, because I can’t see myself doing so; but that was an extreme situation. Everyday situations, like the asshole who cuts me off with his car, when I normally would fly off the handle, I don’t. I’m able to tap it down for the most part.”
A chilling form of relief came over me. I was glad that Lynx had found help in the meds, but how did I know that I would, too?
“You don’t know until you try, and chances are, it will take a while to find the right combination of medicine for you,” the doctor threw in. “The chemicals in our brains all fire differently. What will work for you won’t work for someone else. That’s why we wanted you to start them when you got in here so we could get the right dosage, but you refused.”
I did. The thought of already being attuned to what I needed made me ache now, though. If I had started the medicine, maybe things would be different.Iwould be different.
“There is nothing wrong with taking medicine. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do,” Lynx stated, sitting back in his chair and crossing his ankles, his arms locked across his chest like he owned the place. “Reign, you’ve gotta take care of you. No more of this going to kill yourself bullshit. They’re offering you help. You need to take that shit and run with it because trust me, you don’t want to have to come back here.” His smirk made my insides relax a bit.
The bottom pit of the void I was in started to swirl, but I sucked in deeply and began to climb up.
“Okay, I’ll try.”
***
The rest of the session, Wrestler McMann talked to Lynx about keeping an even head and going over all the different techniques to sooth himself when triggered.
I didn’t say much. I was still processing my agreement to take meds. I couldn’t believe I had or even wanted to. I had been so set on ending everything after getting out, but now I didn’t want to hurt Andi. If I was really serious, I wasn’t sure I wanted it for myself anymore, either.
I wasn’t anything to sneeze at, and I really had nothing to show for in my life except the fact of being alive, but what if I could be more? What if I could do something to make life better for me instead of living in the same circle over and over again, replaying my past like a broken record? What if I could throw the record in the trash and have a life? What if …?
I was told once by a foster father that the “what if” game was stupid because you couldn’t change the past. “What if” didn’t matter; it was what you did now. Mr. Johnsboid was the only foster father who actually gave me anything I could take with me in life, and those words now meant more to me than I had thought at the time.
