The psychiatrist smiled more often.
“You seem calmer.”
I was.
Because calm was what remained once enough in you had been dulled down. People confuse peace with depletion all the time, and they did too.
I stopped resisting, and I stopped asking questions.
Not from wisdom or acceptance, simply because sedation makes rebellion feel very far away. There is nothing strategic about being chemically submerged. You do not become obedient so much as slow. There is a difference, though institutions like to pretend there isn’t.
I became what they wanted.
Predictable, manageable, quiet enough to overlook again. Strange, isn’t it, how easily compliance can be mistaken for healing. You make a child tired enough, and they call him improved.
After six months, they decided I was ready to leave.
Improved insight, reduced self-harm behaviors, stabilized mood, and a bunch of other elegant phrases typed into a clinical report, as if language itself could certify repair.
I remember reading some of it later and thinking how clean suffering looks once translated into bureaucracy. No one mentioned I had simply stopped having enough energy to reach for my own skin. No one wrote that the urge had not vanished,only sunk below sedation. That would have complicated the narrative. And institutions, little one, love a narrative they can discharge.
They called it recovery because I had become easier to return.
During those six months, I had turned eleven.
At least that’s what the psychiatrist mentioned in passing during one of our sessions, almost as an aside, as if age were just another datum in the file. Nothing more was made of it. No acknowledgment, not even the false cheer adults sometimes perform for children.
I remember understanding that a birthday could pass without anyone marking a life at all.
The day I was discharged, they handed me a prescription and a follow-up plan. Papers in a folder filled with instructions and signatures.
It is remarkable how often abandonment arrives organized.
The car ride back felt longer than the day they brought me there.
I watched the road and had the strange sensation of returning somewhere I had already left. The orphanage looked the same when we arrived, but something inside me had shifted.
The medication continued for a while, until it didn’t.
Institutions are efficient at intake, less so at continuity.
Refills lapsed. Appointments drifted. And then one morning, the pills were simply gone. One system had handed me over to another, and somewhere in the exchange, treatment thinned into neglect again.
Funny how often those two live side by side.
You want to know what withdrawal feels like at eleven?
It feels like your bones are vibrating from the inside. Like ants moving beneath your skin. Like your heart has forgotten its rhythm and is improvising in your chest. It sounds excessive until you’ve lived it. Then it sounds almost understated.
Sleep became impossible.
The mattress felt too thin, the air too warm, sweat soaking through the fabric beneath me. And my thoughts came back all at once. That may have been the worst of it.
The walls of my mind, padded for months, were suddenly bare concrete again, and every thought echoed.
I lay awake, shaking in bed, biting the inside of my cheek so no one would hear. You hide distress long enough, and concealment becomes reflex.
No one adjusted or documented anything.
