Lately I’ve become an even more unpredictable ball of jumbled emotion than I already was. Even though I’ve tried my hardest to figure it out myself I’ve had no luck.
So, currently, I am awaiting the first day of my Junior year of high school (which I attempted frantically to get out of) to be mentally evaluated. Finally…It only took 7 years for my mom to wake up and see my growing insanity. Just long enough…
This summer, I knew, would be my LAST psychotic break. That’s when I finally woke-up and realized that having deep conversations with a girl who really wasn’t there and contemplating ways in which I could accidentally die is not normal, and most likely not healthy. So I picked up the phone and called my mom and we resolved to see a professional and to finally stop ignoring my…well…. oddness.
And this is me. ZoeyRenée: The Odd one…
You see, for as long as I can remember I’ve had these…. fleeting desires and fantasies. I’m not sure what initially triggered the ‘Anna’ reflex in my mind but the first time I can ever remember mentioning her name was second grade. Now, I don’t exactly know if it was just my childhood imagination or if that was the official commencement of my lunacy, but after mentioning this ‘Anna’ she never left my mind.
In grade school… and middle school…and pretty much all the way up to the end of Freshman year I was teased, and that emotional damage that they say comes from bullying, yeah well, that’s no lie. I never really had friends. Just a few people I’d talk to and maybe play on the see-saw with but never one of those we-grew-up-together-and-she’s-basically-my-sister type of friendships. And I wanted that. Badly…
I believe that this was the general conception of ‘Anna’. Her psychogenic birth per se. It makes sense (well to me at least… which isn’t saying much…) that the fat, nerdy, button-nosed girl who was constantly moving around would create the best friend that was never granted to her by the gods. And at the time I believed inventing this ‘Anna’ was the greatest idea on earth.
I mean, sure, it was innocent at first:
“Who’s spreading all those rumors about Jessica?”
I heard this girl Anna did it…
“Who do you think wrote that nasty note to Kristin?”
That horrible girl Anna probably did it…
“Who stole all the Show-N-Tell toys from our backpacks???”
Well, whaddya know… It’s that ANNA again…
But soon, ‘Anna’ wouldn’t just be the imaginary scapegoat for my increasingly frequent kleptomania, instead she would become a fully visible goddess-like vision from heaven standing at 5’7″ with long black hair and green eyes. And she came fully equipped with a first, middle, and last name: Annabelle Christine Price, a name I will never forget. She could speak 6 different languages: English, Spanish, Latin, Japanese, Italian, and French. She got straight A’s (never the occasional B like I had), and was captain of her high school’s cheer squad. And to be even more parallel to my life, she dated the gorgeous football team captain and came from a rich, clean-cut, white-picket- fence family.
In essence, she was the me I never could be.
Anna and I would be best friends for many years. To a sick little girl with no direction, this was the greatest thing to ever happen. It was foolproof. I could never be lonely. Anna would always cheer me up, and I would confide in her and talk to her daily, cry to her. She was my best friend.
As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time (not so) alone in my room.
Along with the creation of the mythical Anna, I experienced mood swings from a very early age. Sometimes they wouldn’t exactly be mood swings, but maybe more of a vast shift of desires. Or maybe you could even describe it as ‘temporary phases’.
For example:
From second grade to fifth I was dead-convinced I would one day be a vet…. Then my guinea pig died on Christmas. There went that little dream cloud.
And the guinea pig death (my only relationship aside from Anna) really threw me outta whack and I began to descend in a pit of depression.
I had even written a song about him…don’t ask…
From then on things only got worse
I was convinced I was Nancy Drew for a while… But I couldn’t solve any mysteries…
-dream dead-
I thought I was this amazing fashion designer who would one day own her own label…But I only copied existing clothes… and broke my sewing machine…
-moved on-
I convinced myself (and also my sisters and cousins) that fairies were real and that I would be the first to catch one….But then they all discovered that I was the one who wrote all the tiny notes from the ‘Fairies’…
-kaput-
I believed that (by some miracle from only God himself) that I could actually be a WMBA star….But I fainted after jogging half the mile in gym…
-shot down like a mad cow-
And the worst one yet… I truly truly believed that I was born a pirate and that any day that ship would be sailing toward me to bring me back to the family that was truly mine… My sister called me a loser when I confided in her and I realized I couldn’t be a real pirate…because a real pirate would never be called a loser…
I know, some people are probably thinking that these are normal childhood fantasies and that there was absolutely nothing wrong with me. And yes, in second grade it is normal… I was 14…. and fantasies like this are no longer childhood whimsies, these are full-fledged delusions that all took place over a span of only one month.
Yes. That was a normal month in my life…
So the mood swing and desire shifts started out mild like “Maybe it’s just those puberty hormones”, but as years passed they began getting steeper. Apparently, my freshman year, I would change my college major 3 times a day…. yikes….
By the time you hit 16, the whole pubescent hormone rage should have already leveled off a bit (for us girls at least) and the mood swings shouldn’t be happening as often anymore…Well except for at certain times…. But for me it was different, IS different.. And now we’re back in the present tense and at school I’m not normal. Sometimes I’ll fail a class and not care, other times I’ll study my butt off to make A’s. Sometimes I’ll get no sleep at all and feel great and sometimes I’ll sleep from the time I got home til the next day and it still won’t feel like enough. Sometimes I’ll be exuberantly outgoing and funny, and then sometimes I’ll mope around school feeling like nobody can even see me and that nobody would care if I wasn’t there at all.
Many times, my interests would even change, my very personality! I’ll be film nerd one month, a complete Indie music junkie the next. I’ll be really interested in History and then I’ll be completely sickened by it and get all into Math… Things get so bad people think I’m two-faced and a liar, when they don’t know that I just can’t help it. And some people even come right out and ask me if I have Multiple Personality Disorder, and honestly, I don’t know…
You can imagine what this does to my “Love Life”.
Zoey’s Lips = Virgin.
(When you can’t be one person for more than a month at a time, it’s a real deal breaker.)
And present day: I’m somewhere in between a high and a low, the ‘Telling-It-Like-It-Is’ phase. The phase where I’m a blank slate. A lack of any preferences at all. Normal energy. Normal aspirations. Normal interests. Normal.
Stranger.
In this ‘Normal Range’ I feel like a faceless nobody who will get lost in a crowd. Sure, the break from emotional extremes is much appreciated but at what cost? I lose my originality, my creativity. And I don’t know if I really want that.
But still, it’s been too long, and i need an answer, and I will await my appointment with the Headshrinker and I will anticipate his diagnosis…
Wish me luck (hopefully not imaginary) readers. I’m gonna need it through this recovery..
~Take life lightly y’all J~
-ZoeyRenée