I'm sure we've all seen the movies where there's this one little kid, usually a boy. He wears big glasses and suspenders, has a stuffed up nose, complains about being sick a lot, and when he opens his bedside table drawer, there's nothing but asthma inhalers inside of it. When we saw this on TV, we couldn't help but think or say aloud, "It's gotta suck to be that kid," and we all knew we would never want to be like to him.
I started to feel like that kid in the movies when I was nine years old and my eye doctor told my mother I needed bifocals. Bifocals -- on a nine-year-old girl! I was so upset, I burst into tears in the doctors' office and said, "Normal kids don't need bifocals. That's something Grandpa should be wearing!"
It wasn't just that, though. I knew that the other kids at my school would never understand. They already didn't. I had spent the entire third grade, being called four-eyes and watching them make fun of the way I walk because I'd had an operation done two years earlier to correct my clubfoot. Regular glasses were bad enough. I knew that wearing bifocals would only make things worse.
When I went back to school, I found myself subjected to a lot of curious questions from the children who bullied me regularly. "Why is there a line on your glasses?" they asked and so, I did my best to explain the situation. I told them the line was there because the glasses were bifocals, which meant it was made of two different lenses because the doctor said I was far and near-sighted in both eyes. Or, at least, that's how it'd been explained to me.
The kids said the same thing I had back at the doctors' office, "That sounds like something for an old person."
Eventually, though, the kids got over the glasses, and I started to feel less like the kid in the movie. Until around sixth grade, that is.
I knew there had to be something wrong with me. I was almost always sick, no matter what time of the year it was and I spent a lot of my time being depressed. I would cry at home and at school. Sometimes for no reason, and no one ever asked why or how come. But by middle school, I was spending a lot of time in the school psychiatrist's office and when they asked me what was wrong, I told them, "There's something wrong with me. I think I'm sick."
When they asked me why I never talked to anyone or had any friends, I said, "There's no point in trying to make friends. They're just going to make fun of me."
That was all I knew, so it was all I could tell them. Back then, I didn't know about social anxiety or how the mind worked. I did know, though, that not all of the bad feelings could have come from being bullied. Lots of kids were bullied and went on to be happy and sometimes even popular. So even if that was a part of it, I knew there was something wrong with me.
Then one day, I saw a commercial for anti-depressants on television. I didn't understand depression as an illness. Only as the feeling I had that constantly plagued me. I watched the commercial and thought maybe those pills could make me happy. I turned to my mom and said, "I want to be put on those."
I asked my mom constantly to have me looked at by a doctor to see if I needed to put on anti-depressants for two years. I told her over and over there was something wrong with me. I knew there had to be. Normal people weren't unhappy like I was. Not all the time, anyway.
It wasn't until I was a freshman in high school, though, that I was finally able to talk to a doctor. I remember waking up in a hospital in a city two hours away from where I lived. I didn't know what had happened. When I asked, my mom told me, "You had two Grand mal seizures in three days."
I understood immediately. My father had epilepsy and so did an aunt on my mother's side. I must have had it, too.
I wasn't diagnosed right away, though. It wasn't until two months and four seizures later that a doctor determined that my seizures were caused by stress. By then my mother was ready to listen, too, and this time she asked if I needed to be put on anti-depressants. The doctor said, "So she is a little depressed -- so what?"
Then he wrote a recommendation for a counselor who could write prescriptions if I needed them because my medical insurance wouldn't cover a psychiatrist. Two weeks later, I was taking three different types of pills every day. An epilepsy medication, an anti-depressant, and a vitamin.
By then, I had also realized that I didn't just feel like the nerdy boy with a drawer full of asthma inhalers -- I was him.
This feeling is something I'm still dealing with today. Because, I mean, who wants to be that person? Who wants to be that stereotype, taking three different pills a day?
It may sound like I'm complaining, but it isn't fun. Who wouldn't complain -- in high school, my mom bought my a pill organizer as a present just to make my life easier.
Now, I know that I was misdiagnosed in high school. I never had depression. I have bi-polar disorder and social anxiety, and epilepsy, clubfoot, scoliosis, Hay fever. The list literally feels like it goes on forever.
I'm going to start counseling for bi-polar disorder soon, and I know I'm not the only dealing with stuff like this which is why I decided to write about it.
I mean, it's not a part of every nerd's life. We don't all wake up first thing in the morning and wonder if the counselor is going to tell us we have to be put on psychosis meds, regardless of whatever horrific side-effects it might have. We don't all wonder if we're always going to feel like a dated, played-out nerdy stereotype that everyone loves to hate on. But it's part of this nerd's life, and I know I'm not the only one.
I may be a lot like that boy in the movies with a drawer full of asthma inhalers, but that isn't me. I'm still my own person.
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