Comity

moving on

It’s funny.  I guess things / events have to be years and years in one’s past before it’s possible to fully appreciate the event’s impact on his or her life.  apparently law school did a number on me.  i did things (and allowed things to be done to me) that i never could have foreseen.  I went nuts.

maybe it wasnt law school itself… maybe it was just that time in my life, but i sure was bananas.  And what’s really sad: there are people that only knew me that way!  And people who’s only memory of me is of a woman who was utterly batshit.  I’m not totally insane—I swear!  Ironically it was the catylist of much of my insanity who once said that I’m only “half crazy.”

As a result of this mental instability, I decided I needed to be medicated.  I started taking Paxil roughly four or five years ago.  As I reasoned to myself, it was necessary.  At the start of law school I was having total and utter mental breakdowns when I went to take my exams.  If I didn’t somehow fix these mid-test meltdowns, I was going to fail out of law school.  So drugs.  Drugs were the key; they would save me from failure.  Shortly after my second term of law school ended, I got on Paxil.

Law school is over.  I limped through it.  I got the dumb fucking JD.  Now here I have found myself as depressed as one could ever be, living a reclusive, solitary lifestyle and simply watching myself get older and life pass me by.  I left Michigan and moved to Manhattan.  Only to sit in my apartment all day and night—an apartment and life that could have been exactly the same had i stayed in MI—and watch life go on around me.  Somewhere along the line I thought it would be a-okay to spend my life in pajamas, eating ice cream all day, never (and i mean ever) showering and watching MSNBC when not sleeping.

I exchanged the crazy for an unbelievably dull, flat mind.  I sacrificed so damn much.  I sacrificed my intellect.  I sacrificed (a genuine) interest in sex.  I sacrificed the ability to read the literature i once loved without falling asleep mid-sentence.  I was given the opportunity to represent indigent clients, but instead I fell asleep in court and made a joke out of it all because I couldn’t feel.

I got bad grades and people thought i was dumb, but really my brain was gone.  I fucked gross men and had no standards because I didn’t care and couldn’t feel.  I was numb so I said awful things and behaved outrageously.

Now obviously I can’t blame this all on a little white pill: certainly there was more at hand.  All I know is I want my mind back—good, bad, ugly or crazy—and I want my body back, too.

So to those of you who have only known me during and post law school: I’m not fucking nuts.  And I’m not dumb.  And to those who’ve known me forever: thank you for pointing out to me that I used to be different, that I used to be fun and I haven’t always been a shell where a real human once lived.