The pills were gone, so in their minds the problem was gone too.
That is often how institutions think.
What they no longer monitor, they assume resolved. They thought I was better because I wasn’t self-harming. They mistook suppression for healing. They mistook silence for safety, and somewhere in that oscillation, between straps and pills, between absence and overload, something emerged.
A realization.
If the system designed to protect the broken could restrain, sedate, and release without understanding what it was touching… then I would have to understand myself.
Because they never did and they never will.
The Reflection
Chapter 4
You might need a moment.
I certainly did the first time I wrote any of this down.
Some things tighten in the telling. They ask to be carried a little before they can be set aside.
I told you in the beginning that I wouldn’t overwhelm you all at once, and I meant that. Confessions have their own rhythm.
Push too much too quickly, and you stop hearing what matters. So let this be a small pause. A moment between breaths.
Stay here with me for a second.
You’ve seen a few pieces of the beginning now.
The orphanage. The kind of neglect that leaves fewer bruises than violence but lingers longer in the bones. The psychiatric unit. The restraints. The medication. The way institutions learn to categorize people before they learn, or even bother to try to understand them.
And maybe, hearing those things, there is a temptation to place me in a familiar role. Survivor. Damaged child, explaining himself.
People like categories.
They make difficult things easier to hold. But be careful with that.
Simplifying a wound can be another way of refusing to look at it.
It is easy, when someone hears those kinds of things, to assume that I’m asking for sympathy. That’s not the case. My childhood wasn’t uniquely tragic.
I know people like simple equations.
Good or bad.
Right or wrong.
That pain equals justification. That damage becomes destiny.
It comforts people to think that way. It keeps the world orderly. If something terrible happens early enough, it can become a convenient explanation for everything that follows. A neat little chain of cause and effect.
Life is rarely that obedient.
There are children whose lives begin in places far darker than mine did. Men who endure things that would hollow most people out and still manage to make something gentle afterward.
Pain alone does not turn someone into what I eventually became, and pretending it does would be a lie. Maybe a seductive lie, but still a lie. And understanding is not the same thing as excusing. Remember that.
I am not asking for absolution from you. I am asking something harder.
