Adolescent Pain
Important to remember
(This is an event, from fifty years ago. Life improved dramatically after this period, but I think it’s important to remember.)
I knew something was wrong a long time before I knew what it was—if I even know why now.
When I was 15, an inner anger began to take root, born from the exhausting daily work of trying to pass as normal. I watched the other kids with a quiet envy. They had easy, unblemished faces and cheerful moods. They didn’t carry the humiliation of skin that flared and burned hot at the slightest spark of emotion. They smiled when they smiled, laughed for the right reasons, and moved through the world with an effortless grace I couldn't decode. They weren’t necessarily striking, but they belonged. And I couldn’t figure out how to join them.
One afternoon, the frustration became too loud to contain. Driven by a desperate need for a witness to an invisible pain, I took a knife and sliced a large, jagged X into my stomach. It was a crude, desperate thing to do, but I wanted someone else to feel the gravity of what I was carrying. I walked into my father’s office at the church, pulled him aside, and said, "Dad, I want to die."
He asked me why, and my honest answer was the only one I had: "I don't know."
He went home, conferred with my mother, and they decided I needed a psychiatrist. I wasn't thrilled by the decree, but I went along with it, the momentum of my own distress carrying me forward.
The psychiatrist was a man in his fifties with brown, curly hair and a face deeply pitted with the acne scars of his own youth. My parents assured me he was the best in the business.
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When we arrived, my feet and my mood dragged in tandem. My parents went into his office first for a closed-door consultation that stretched for fifteen minutes before I was called inside. He had plenty of questions, but my mind was blank. The room felt airless and heavy. I began to fidget, my legs bouncing against the chair.
When the questioning finally wound down, he leaned forward, looked me straight in the eyes, and said with absolute sternness, "Richard, you are a sick boy."
The words hung in the air. Did he really just say that? I wasn't sick in the head; I was just allergic to the world. If my system wasn't constantly at war with wood, grass, cats, and dust—if my skin didn't betray me at every turn—I would be fine. I would be normal.
He repeated it, flat and final: "Richard, you are a sick boy."
The insult burned. This man was pathologizing my entire existence, reducing a tangled knot of teenage alienation and environmental torment into a mental defect.
The ride home was conducted in a heavy, suffocating silence. But the next day, my father announced that we were returning to the same doctor the following week. I dug in my heels and said no. Yet, by the time the appointment rolled around, the heavy fog had settled back over me, and I submitted.
The second session was no better. The doctor wouldn't budge from his verdict, clinging to the label of a sick boy without ever once asking what was actually happening inside my head. It was a very quiet hour.
There were no more sessions after that, and the incident was quietly swept away, never to be spoken of at home again.
But I walked away from the experience with absolute clarity: whatever this was, I was going to have to carry it alone.
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