(W2) Mental History

One day I was sitting with my mother and she just started to laugh about something. She had run into my second grade teacher earlier that week and something reminded her of something my teacher said at the parent teacher conference. Retold by my mother : "Well Nicholas has a unique personality, one day I saw him lying in the grass. I went over to see if he was ok, he looked over at me and said 'Oh...yeah, I am just meditating.' I asked 'What do you mean?' 'Oh, I am just looking up at the trees and trying to not think, it's called meditating.'

I learned how to listen and retain information well, around the fourth or fifth grade they found that I had first grade reading level. I can remember being able to recall the story when it was read to me and for the stories that had to be read on my own, I just talked to my classmates about. If I could get people to tell me what they remembered of the story I could fill in the blanks. I quickly learned that I was getting better grades then the kids that read the books and it took me less time. For all my other classes the teacher would say everything that was going to be on the test, so reading from the book was pointless. The downfall to my abilities to do no work and pull the grades was my Social Studies class, most of the test were straight from the book and no one could explain what they had read, because it was not a story.

My Sister C got me reading and she recognized the talents that I had when it came to learning. She died half way through my eight grade year. I no longer cared about learning, what was the point? School was just the place I had to go everyday and to avoid being lectured about how much better I was then the grades I just made sure to get B's. B was easy to achieve without a lot of effort and it was enough to not be lectured on.

Because achieving academic merit was not the reason I was in high school I started to ask questions. Most questions were related enough and allowed me to learn the information, but socially they made people very mad. Those that placed there Academic Merits as a sign of stature loathed my Socratic questions.

The summer before my senior year I attended a Lead America conference on Law and Trail Advocacy. It taught me a lot about how to apply my abilities and how to be confidant in whatever I want to do. Not to soon after I had a girlfriend and was running Cross Country. The day before practice I contracted mono from my girlfriend. I ran the full season and destroyed my immune system. I started getting a lot of colds and the lack of endorphins from the running got me depressed. The depression and physical illness showed the signs of early bi-polarism. So I was started on 10ml of Abilify. My girlfriend dumped me and I was depressed and sick.

6 months after I started the Abilify I started to get really ill and I went to the emergency three of four times for what they decided was muscle strain. It was hard to use my ability to think out of the box and then make connection to what I was saying. People thought I was funny and odd. It got to the point where I just slept all the time, I physically needed it but it was written off as depression.

I was a reckless 19 year old in Portland, Maine. I started to smoke pot while still taking the Abilify. Early in I could think but not express the thoughts and it removed stress and made me fell good. One of my reformed drug addict friends sat me down and said 'look at you'. And I did, I stopped the Abilify and the pot. I found a huge dept, issues with the family and I needed to clean up. So I moved home and started to deal with my depression.

I found out that I had just not been listening to my emotions and I had been repressing how I had felt. I learned the tough lesson of allowing yourself to stop trying to progress and just give in. In April my father got really sick, my step mother was not taking care of him well and the case worker was overworked at best. I spent the last five days that my father and step mother lived together. I saw what he was going through because he had shut down years ago. I took my father to see his brother and sister before he went to live with my sister. I talked to him as tears poured about things that had happened years before.

I decided that I was not going to be a victim to my undealt with emotions anymore. I used a final project for my English class to write an essay about emotions. I read 'Dance of Anger' and 'Life After Loss' and they confirmed that I was someone suffering from undealt with emotions and gave me tools to deal with my emotions.

-NK