Both my parents were present at my birth. It was a wonderful day for them. For me, it was the most terrifying day of my life. I cried. I howled. Maybe that’s when my manic depression began. According to my mother, I was born a blue baby (due to lack of oxygen). I don’t thinks so. I think I was having my goddamn panic attack. My first.
Well not exactly my first, really.
When my mom’s umbilical chord was still dangling on me, she would pass out at any inconceivable places, and then remember nothing about it when she woke up. I think those few lapses were caused by this lunatic kid inside her tummy— those were my first’s fetal goddamn panic attacks and they knocked her out, mind you.
My proud parents took me home and for the next two weeks invited strange people, people I didn’t know, didn’t want to know, round to the house to have a look at me. I hated it. I cried. I howled, and proceeded to have my third goddamn panic attack.
Little did they know they were nursing a mad baby who cried like a cow and whimpered like a chimpanzee. But not long enough.
At the age of five, I already knew what depression meant. My panic attacks would manifest but I knew how to control them, conceal them in utter silence. It was a sick behavior really, now as I look at it, but I was always alone then so how will I cry and whimper when nobody is going to pamper me?
I took the silence seriously. At any given day, when I was not at school, you would find me either curbed at one corner with the encyclopedias (yes, encyclopedia, now you see how bored I was) or painting with illustration boards (I think I was more gifted when I was younger). The only sound which will tell you I’m at home is my piano (see, I was gifted, until I discovered heroine. More on that later).
My biggest mistake was that I went too far to become manic depressive, and by twelve resisted any form of convention that I think was not applicable to me and embraced those ones which deviate stubbornly and instantly. I like it especially when nobody knows about it but God and me.
And now I’m twenty-one. Still manic depressive and never learned to make friends with strangers, have smoked pot twice, get laid on once (no, I am not a virgin anymore and I’m not kidding here), nearly died every so often when I feel liking it, smokes incessantly until the final day of reckoning absorbs my lungs, and dumped on first attempt (and promise not to do it in, say next ten years, or until I reach New York, whichever comes first).
Thank you friends and countrymen for not forgetting my birthday. Or else I’ll have my redundant panic attacks, again.
20 something, quarter-life crisis, loss of love, name it, nothing's weird.
