Zel-kun’s Words

I spent a good deal of my early childhood in one of two places: In my bedroom and in the hospital.  My parents marriage was on its last legs, and the arguments still echo somewhere in my memory.  As a child, I spent a lot of time hiding from the screaming voices.  I didn’t know what they meant, only that they were loud and angry.

Most kids jump on the bed, I was no exception, up until I was four years old.  I was jumping on my grandma’s bed and for some reason, I jumped off.  I crashed headfirst into the dresser, which had these sharp metal handles, and split my scalp wide open.  Fortunately, I was too young to remember the pain, but I imagine it was quite painful.

I was born with a lazy eye.  While my left eye would function normally, my right with focused on whatever was going on somewhere in the sky.  Because of this, my parents wheeled me into the hospital up in Chicago to get some eye surgery done.  This was done a total of three times over the course of a year or so, the periods in-between I had an eyepatch on.

Sadly, as much as I wanted, my parents woul not get me the parrot to sit on my shoulder.

Aside from that, I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).  I find the criteria for this questionable as I wonder how many five-year-olds have no trouble paying attention.  They put me on ritalin, which I suppose attacked the root of the problem nicely.

The root of ADD is that the mind tries to do too many things at once, and can’t focus on any of them.  There are simply too many thoughts clamoring for attention.  Its like listening to a crowd of people, and trying to focus on what only one of them are saying.

Ritalin (and its analogs), silence the crowd.  The one problem is that its not selective in the thoughts it silences.  It silences all of them, giving an outside observer the illusion that the subject taking the ritalin is paying attention, when in reality its just a stare, looking for the sake of looking.

I remember staring out a window for hours on end.  I looked back on the event that evening and shuddered, for I couldn’t remember thinking anything during the entire time.

Is a human without thoughts even alive?  I’m certain that my childlike mind did not think in so deep a voice, but maybe that base fear was the same.

I spent a lot of time in the long white corridors, being walked or wheeled around.  I remember rooms where a man or woman in a white coat would sit down with me and ask me questions.  In the end, there would often be a needle to draw blood, and several people needed to hold me down to do it.

To this day, I can’t think of getting blood taken without cringing.  Oddly enough, I have absolutely no problem with getting a shot.

This continued through my elementary school years, but that’s a story for another chapter…