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BY HAMLET WRENNCROFT

In print | Published February 12, 2009

Disclaimer: This column is part three of a ten part series, dealing with the author’s experiences with mental illness. As it contains explicit subject matter, sensitive readers may wish to avoid.

Does anyone really enjoy high school? Oh, I suppose if you looked you could probably find some university frat-wit with treasured memories of getting blasted on straight vermouth and banging fourteen-year-olds without fear of legal recourse. But the rest of us nurture memories of swirlies, stand-ups, vomit and bile. Emotional trauma has become a cherished pillar of American education. Adolescence has escalated, you see, and this makes things difficult for writers. I could have carved pentagrams into my wrists with AIDS-infected heroin needles and my suffering would have no more currency than a very special episode of “Gossip Girl.” Somehow, I am supposed to differentiate between the ordinary, healthy misery experienced by a normal adolescent, as American as God and underage drinking, and the regressive, self-destructive misery inflicted by OCD.

Back in high school I was the platonic definition of the overemotional teenage pantywaist. I had shaggy hair, I wore flannel, my face was like a fleshy minefield. I did not ask girls out but instead stared at them for hours across history class, trying to establish subconscious rapport. I was not emo because emo did not yet exist, but understand that I listened to a hell of a lot of Simon and Garfunkel. And I wrote terrible poetry and I drew bloody eyeballs emerging from wrists, and I would frequently lock myself in the third-floor bathroom and huddle shirtless on the floor, sobbing silently. What a pathetic, miserable fucker I was! But remember, dear reader, my adolescent unhappiness was not caused by the sudden disruption of my biochemical equilibrium by puberty, but rather an entirely different sort of biochemical disruption caused by mental illness. I’m not entirely sure what the difference is, but we should all suppress our (entirely reasonable) loathing for this cringing teenage Gollum, and instead work up some quantum of sympathy, or at least pretend to.

Although my intrusive thoughts only occurred intermittently, my disorder profoundly influenced my behavior. As a young adult I was permitted no uncertainty, academic, ethical, social or otherwise. I expected perfect grades on every assignment; although I was rarely tempted, any hypothetical indulgence in sex, drugs or drink would demonstrate deficiency of character. Failure was intolerable. Strangely, I had significant difficulty living up to the draconian standards imposed by the tiny, petulant Kim Jong-Il who lived inside my brain. So in the absence of self-respect I learned, in my own subtle way, to suck up to adults like an emaciated deer tick. Authority figures were terrific and wonderful, because they would tell you exactly when you did something right. I lived breathlessly awaiting the next gold star, the homework pass, the dinosaur sticker from the dentist that legitimized my acumen with dental floss. I loved Big Brother.

My strategy worked surprisingly well with adults (he’s so polite! such a hard worker!) but was, predictably, ineffective among the edgy-teenagers-with-attitude that were my peers. I may have secretly despised many of my classmates, but the notion that any one of them might have reciprocated my dislike was intolerable. I can imagine myself now, gazing fondly at the snarling, vapid, booze-addled mug of a fellow 10th grader. “Look at that face!” I’d say, and tweak a zit-lined cheek as he took a swig of vodka-and-Gatorade. “I can’t stay mad at you! I would very much like to stay mad at you, because you are a spoiled idiot parasite with no redeeming qualities, but I can’t!” My social anxiety also precluded dating. Romantic advice for neurotic young gentlemen: Girls like guys who are confident. Girls do not like guys who are polite, or gentle, or who supplicate themselves to the merest suggestion of an unacknowledged feminine whim, so utterly and aggressively prostrate as to scab their knees and noses and leave streaks of dry blood ground into the carpet before their potential beloved. My desperation inflicted social paralysis. Overwhelmed by the need for validation, to say the right thing to people I hated, I was rendered mute and motionless, and instead of being shunned I was mercifully ignored.

When I attained moments of relief it was, classically, through videogames. Videogames were comfortably solitary, and more importantly they had inviolable rules. In middle school, with no small amount of shame, I started to use Nintendo’s Pokémon series. The game’s rich, stupid mythology gave my imagination fertile soil to sow; their endless arithmetic of powerlevels and 2x weaknesses fed my OCD like cut cocaine. I would direct my animal slave-soldiers to pummel the snot out of the same hapless digital caterpillar some six-hundred times, until one of them received some fractional increase in power, after which an equivalent increase would require six-hundred-and-fifty repetitions. This would continue for hours, until my hands or my chimerae seized up from exhaustion.

In the classroom I was rarely so consistently engaged, and I learned to time bathroom breaks halfway through each period with clockwork precision. If my teachers suspected drugs or persistent internal distress they never tried to intervene. The bathroom was a refuge from unending, desperate social performance, and it usually contained a mirror, which was invaluable to my ritual declarations of self-loathing. I could leave class for a five-minute hate, spend a few moments gazing at my reflection and dreaming of punching it into shards of bloody glass. And then I could return, rejuvenated, restored.

This was my mantra: I am human shit. I am human shit. It was my lullaby, my litany, confession and penance. It has been imprinted into my tongue, my lips, my teeth and jaw; I repeat it now, softly, and it is like slipping into a comfortable pair of old shoes. I murmured it in gentle tones through each day. I whispered it to myself each night as I went to sleep.

This self-flagellation, any of my vague gestures towards self-harm, were never an end unto themselves. I had been raised, like a good Irish-Catholic, to believe in the redemptive value of suffering, and in the absence of any significant external trauma I was determined to inflict the necessary damage myself. I was accumulating experience points, grinding levels, slowly bringing myself by intervals towards some unspecified end. Hoping desperately that one day I might grow strong and desperate enough to grasp it and then without thinking leap the fence before I had time to stop myself. Level-up. Evolve.

There were a few moments of minor catastrophe, some of which my parents observed. I was taken to an emergency room and then a doctor, and sort-of diagnosed with depression. My new therapist was friendly and swaggering; he encouraged me to take it easy on myself, to open up to others, to care less about what they thought. This was trite bullshit and worthless to me, but it didn’t matter because I’d also started to see a psychiatrist. I am profoundly grateful for the role that medication has played in my recovery, and for the treatment administered to me by competent, sympathetic professionals. This man was not one of them. He prescribed anti-depressants and when these failed to resolve my problems he prescribed more of them. Lacking any kind of definite diagnosis my first psychiatrist decided to toss Effexor at me and see what happened.

Effexor is a motherfucker of a drug. It is the psychopharmaceutical equivalent of nuking the site from space, just to be safe. I slept absurd hours each night and missed traffic lights and slurred my words. But I began, unavoidably, to stabilize. I let myself make friends and fail quizzes. I started to write humorous essays and read them to my classmates at assembly, which my peers and teachers seemed to enjoy, and based on what they said and did I actually began to believe I might be a worthwhile person. In the end, I limped across the stage and took my diploma in a drug-induced haze.

It was over. I had beaten high school. I had won. I had faced my demons and then lulled them into a narcotic coma, I was stable and sane and I would be forever. My family and I told ourselves that everything was alright now. The future was waiting, and Swarthmore. I’ll get back to you on how that one turned out.

Hamlet is a senior. He can be reached at hamletwrenncroft@gmail.com. The next installment of “Trigger” will be published next week.

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