FicWad

When you were a child, you wanted to fly airplanes, high in the sky, seeing the whole world below you. You were never afraid of anything at that age, and you almost always had a smile on your face. You were a hyperactive ball of energy, with a vivid imagination and a thousand-watt smile. Dare I say it, you were actually happy.

Then you grew up. Your living environment grew dark, and you came to know the meaning of casual cruelty, and overt acts of heartlessness from the students at school. The imagination that you had as a young child spun elaborate fantasies, borrowing heavily from stories you were told, things you had read. You dove headfirst into these fantasies as your best escape from it all. You were always seen with your nose in a book, not because you liked reading, but because you wanted to escape, and for a short time, you could throw yourself into the world of those books and all would be right for a while. As time went on, your mind created even more complicated worlds and hurled you headfirst into the middle of them.

But it wasn't enough.

You were smart, and wise beyond your years even as a child, and you knew these worlds to be fake, creations of your own mind. No matter how much you tried to forget, it hung over your head like a stone on a thin rope, ready to drop at any minute. These worlds, these friends, they were not real. They were something that you made up to make yourself feel better. That gave you no comfort, in fact, only adding to your misery, as you thought yourself pathetic as to have to create worlds where you had friends and family who cared, instead of making it for yourself in the real world.

Over the passage of time, things grew worse, and many days, you were forced to question what the meaning of it all was. By the time you were in middle school, you were in love with those criminal justice shows, Criminal Minds being your particular favorite. In fact, you were so enamoured, you decided that when you grew up, you wanted to be an FBI profiler.

But it was not to be.

By the time you were 12 or 13, you had begun to take your frustrations out on yourself. You had experimented with it before, but now, it became your go-to. After several months, you swore off it again, and that was the end of it.

Or so you thought.

In reality, the ball had already been set rolling, and you were going to be taken along for the ride of your life, whether you wanted to go or not. And you were going to go, mind you, because you didn't have a choice. It was your life, after all. It's not like one can just step out of their own life and let it continue without them.

Things would come crashing down around you, the masonry of your comfortable life tumbling down, the shingles keeping life from truly pissing on you raining down upon your head, and kindly watch out for the falling rubble. By the end of it, your life would resemble a rubbish tip, and mentally, you would be even worse off than before.

All under the guise of 'getting help' for you.

You never had asked anyone for help. You never dared to. After all, as a child, asking for help had only ever gotten you nagged, yelled at, told to go do it yourself. But yet here, the past was dug up by the proverbial Resurrection Men, and forced to parade about in front of you in a zombie-like fashion, while both you and your past wished that the latter of you had remained where it belonged, dead and forgotten.

Yes, your past was brought back, and you wished it had never even existed. Within months of the muckraker being hired by the school, you had a record. Not a criminal record. Something that may be considered worse, depending on who you asked. You now had a record of mental instability.

With that record, you knew that your future options had just dwindled nearly to nothing. You could join the Army, or the Airforce, but they wouldn't let you do anything serious. The Airforce, and commercial airlines wouldn't let you fly an airplane. You might not even be able to get a pilot's license. Cross out any jobs that require you to have a mental evaluation beforehand, your record would refuse you entry. There goes your prized FBI position, as well as police, the Secret Service, and hundreds more. Big fancy companies mightn't hire you if they could discover what your past looked like.

That was when you learned the true power that psychiatry holds over humanity.

Never in your life had you dreamt of being a psychiatrist. When you were a child, still happy and carefree, you used to call them "pissy-chiatrists". Now, you wanted to become one. While the subject interested you, you didn't want it to be your living.

You wanted the power that could come with that title.

You saw how badly they could ruin lives, often before these lives had even begun. You wanted that power, to take the rights and freedom from anyone who you so chose, as long as you could make it look like they were incompetent, unstable.

Just like they had branded you.

From middle school onwards, you made it your vow to bring down the institute of psychiatry from the inside out. Nothing could sway your beliefs now, your power-hungry cravings. Not the statistics that you read, showing that psychiatrists had the highest self-prescribe rate of any doctor. Not the statistics that they had the highest suicide rates of doctors. Not the fact that most people considered psychiatrists quite off their rocker for the most part. Not even that book that you read in high-school, which pulled together so much information, showing that the world would have probably been a much better place without psychiatry. Nothing.

You strove only to gain that power that you envied.

You graduated early, with high grades, extra credits, college credit too, all in pursuit of this one goal. You went to a school with a strong psychiatry program. You did everything you could to grasp that power. You figured if you couldn't be happy, you could at least ruin lives on a whim to your heart's contentment. You put every fiber of your being into achieving that goal, that one elusive wish.

By the time you were 23, 10 years after you had first ran into the ugly end of the psychiatry world, you had a doctorate in psychiatry. Those extra courses had paid off. You were now in a practice with another, more experienced doctor. You were making more money in a month than both your parents made in 2 months. You didn't care about the cash flow, however. You didn't care about the fact that you had no mates anymore, that your mobile never lit up anymore unless it was something work related. You didn't care that your self-harm, which never truly abated after your life was blown to smithereens, was getting worse, or that your food issues were getting awful as well, to an extent you had only wished was possible when it first raised it's head back when you were only in high school. All you cared about was the power that you now had.

By the time you were 25, 10 years after you had vowed to ruin lives, you had reached your goals. Hundreds had been in state psych wards, courtesy of you. Thousands more were doped to the gills, with a record almost as thick as a phone directory, and most would never be able to get any of the jobs that you had ever wanted as a child. Your revenge was complete. Yet you kept on doing this, simply because after a while, it became addicting. In your state of semi-starvation, quite near delusional, you considered yourself to be on par with God himself, able to choose who lived and died, and who would suffer.

Yet you showed no one on the outside just how far gone you were.

After all, who was there to show?

The statistics had become true. You were prescribing yourself Xanax and Valium, and doing your damned best to make it look like you didn't have an addiction to the little poisons. And for the most part, you succeeded.

Until one night, you took too many.

Normally, the dose would have been just perfect to send you into a perfect field of numbness. However, these things were figured out by weight. Your scale had been broken for the past two weeks, and you hadn't gotten around to buying a new one. You had upped your visits to the gym, and reduced your food intake once again. Your weight had dropped by nearly a stone. What was enough to send you into a state of delirium for several hours had now become something that was a pinch below a near-fatal dose for your weight.

You lay in your bed, between life and death, in a comatose state. Your body was frozen in place, but your mind was alive as ever, and had begun to hallucinate something terrible. The shadows that had hovered at the edges of your vision for the past several weeks, the whispers you thought you heard when there wasn't anyone around, and all their accompanying entourage decided to make a grand entrance.

You had had imaginary mates when you were younger, in those fantasy worlds you spun. Some of them had exited the story lines, however, and even after you gave up on them, on their worlds, they stuck around, feeding you bits and pieces of advice. Now, one of them decided that he didn't like staying only in your mind anymore.

"What kind of life is this?" He asks you. He was never one for niceties, being blunt often to the point of rudeness.

You don't know what to say. This couldn't be happening. It must have been the pills. You should really cut back on the dose you were taking, even if you were addicted to them. Not that you would admit it to anyone.

"This is the life of a coward. Someone who has given up." He continues.

You know it to be true, but this, like the problems with your food, and sharp objects, and your pills, and your love or lack thereof for life, is something that you would never tell. There are many things you would never talk about, you realize.

He looks at you, but for once, the rage that was always behind his eyes is not there. Instead, you see weariness behind them, and you wonder when that happened. After all, you haven't bothered seeing any of them for years. Few of them ever left the worlds that you left to rot and gather dust. The ones who did, however, remained on only as voices in the back of your head. Almost like a conscious. Something you didn't think you had.

"Why? Why did you give up on your dreams? Why did you give up on us?" He asks, almost as if reading your thoughts. His voice seems sad. This is really unusual for him, and you begin to wonder what's wrong.

"We never gave up on you. You tossed us to the wayside after everything went to Hell in a handbasket."

You hadn't seen the point in continuing to keep all those imaginary worlds running, much less visiting them, especially after you stopped seeing the point in life and only wanted revenge.

"It didn't have to come to this. We would have been there for you."

You scoffed inwardly. Nobody had ever been there for you before. They were just figments of your imagination. Everything they ever said or did, you made them say or do.

"You did create us in your mind. Stole us from stories, or made us up entirely on your own."

You knew it. This was just a bad trip on psychotropic drugs. Happens to a lot of people. Especially when they take too much.

"This isn't just a bad trip. I am real. Some of the others are real, too. When you were a child, you believed in us so much that we couldn't help but become more than your imagination."

You wanted this dream, this hallucination, this whatever it was, to end now. This was getting more than a bit uncomfortable. He must be reading your mind. How else would he know everything that you were going to say before you even got a chance to read your mind?

"This isn't a hallucination or a dream. I'm not reading your mind either. You're predictable, just like you were when you were a kid. You're probably going to question next what your life would have been like if you hadn't turned into such a bitch."

You could only nod, dumbfounded, He was right. You were predictable. Or maybe he could only say that because he had been your imaginary friend for years as a child, and later, the voice of reason in your head.

He reached out, grabbing you by the arm, and pulling you onto your feet. You were acutely aware of the fact that you weren't quite standing on your own, rather he was holding you upright by his grip around your arm, as you were still too drugged up to stand on your own without toppling over.

Everything went black.

Eventually, it began to lighten. You were back in middle school, watching yourself from a distance. This was a bit before you decided you wanted to ruin lives for a living.

"Here is where you didn't make that decision." He said to you. You couldn't see anything significantly different.

The surroundings shifted, like an oil slick in a puddle, and then, you were in high school. You were surrounded by people, and everyone was laughing and chatting away.

"You didn't experiment on people's emotions to see what would happen."

The scene shifted again. You, at home, texting someone, making plans to go out later.

"You didn't overload yourself with so many courses. You had extra time on your hands."

The scene moved yet again. Graduation day.

"You still graduated with high grades, your college placement, everything. There's only one difference. See if you can spot it." He said to you.

You looked at your younger self walking up the stage, and it hit you. Your smile was genuine, not forced and strained. Your eyes didn't have bags below them large enough to pack the kitchen sink in. You actually looked alive. Though it was hard to tell, what with the robes and the cap, you looked like you were of a normal weight.

"You're right. You weren't depressed enough to starve yourself starting two years prior." He said.

The colours began to blur again, and then it spat you two back out, this time, in front of the same college you had gone to.

"You didn't study psychiatry. Instead, you went for law and literature."

There you were, walking across campus, a smile on your face. Somehow, you felt like you were looking at someone else. There was no way that you and her were the same person, separated only by several years.

"I agree, it's a shocking contrast."

Everything moved again, and this time, you were out with some mates, at an art gallery. You realized that at least part of the gallery was filled with art from a middle school friend of yours. You couldn't help but wonder if all this really would have been true.

"I've seen enough." You finally gain the strength to slur out.

Things go black again, and when the darkness goes away, you're back in your room. Your hallucination tosses you back onto your bed.

"All of that could have been real, if you hadn't destroyed your life trying to get revenge on some vague concept. Now, it's too late."

With that last statement, he vanishes, and you pass out.

When you finally come to, it's with a grim resolution.

Over the next several weeks, you collect as many pills as you can. Call in refills at all the different pharmacies that you had your prescriptions filled at, claiming someone stole your bottle of pills that you had refilled just a few days before. You were able to get almost 6 months supply in such a way. You bought up aspirin and sleeping pills like they were going out of style. You helped yourself to a ton of samples from work as well. Not a day passed without at least a single packet of samples finding its way into your purse, and out the door. You figured that if you ever were questioned by the other doctor, you would fudge an answer of wanting people to be able to try the drug before you wrote an expensive prescription, or you were being a modern day Robin Hood, giving the samples to the people who weren't able to afford their medications. You doubted that it would ever come to that, however.

Within a month, you had a small pharmacy in your bathroom.

One day, you left little gifts for the front desk receptionists, and the other doctor that you worked with, completely out of character for you. On your way home, you stopped into a liquor shop. You purchased a bottle of rum, and a bottle of champagne. You were in a good mood. You felt like celebrating.

You got home, and locked your doors, turned down the shades. You didn't want to be disturbed tonight. You ran yourself a hot bath, and poured yourself a glass of champagne. You drank it slowly, savoring the taste, before refilling the glass. This time, pills started to go down with the champagne.

You started with the aspirin, and the milder of the psych drugs that you had lifted. You didn't want to pass out before this was over. When the champagne ran out, you started in on the rum, drinking it in huge gulps, swallowing fistfuls of medications. You didn't want to risk being found alive.

You had outstayed your welcome in this world.

Soon, all the medications were gone, as was all the booze. You stood up from the bathroom stool, unsteady on your feet. They were already kicking in. You didn't have much time left. You stumbled your way into the bathtub, shrugging your way out of your dressing gown. The warm water was relaxing, and you closed your eyes as you let yourself begin to drift away.

Eventually, you drifted so far away that you slipped under the water, and wouldn't have been able to inhale anything save water. But by this time, you were so far gone, that it didn't quite matter anymore.

You left this life at only 26, having left a path of chaos in your wake. You couldn't live with what you had become, and the fact that you didn't have to turn out this way. You couldn't live with the fact that you had become the very thing you hated the most. You couldn't bear the thought that you could have had an amazing life if only you hadn't chosen psychiatry. You especially couldn't stand the thought that it was too late to change this now. So you did the only thing you could have.

Refusing to continue life with the hand you had been dealt, you tossed your cards into the air, screaming "I quit!".

You became just another statistic in the suicides of psychiatrists.

The person that I wrote this for knows exactly who she is.