That. Sodding. Book. (Flowers for Algernon)

Goddam it.

What did I have to go and read it for?

On 11:00 on the 16th of April last year I took a pill.

I did not understand what I was doing then. I had no way of understanding what I was doing. What it was about to do to me was something I had no reference frame for.

So dopamine and noradrenaline functioning in the population is a normal distribution, more or less.

Somewhere beyond the second standard deviation downwards from the mean, there is a line. On one side of that line lies 96% of the population. I’m the other side. Probably quite a long way on the other side.

At 11:15, I crossed that line, for the first time in my life.

I don’t know if I vocalised but my first thought was, “huh?”

I was sitting on the loo at the time by the way.

Suddenly I understood. I understood all of it.

That pill, Elvanse, 30mg, a dose that I would barely even notice now, was in a very real way the fruit from the tree of knowledge.

I can’t un-know what I know.

Immediately before that point I was overweight and gaining, abusing alcohol more and more with each passing month, had blood pressure pushing grade 1 hypertension, blood markers that were starting to scream something about Type II diabetes, and was engaged in an experiment to disprove the idea that you can’t live on a diet made up exclusively of wine and cheese triangles.

I was also objectively a really bloody nice person even though I hated myself quite profoundly. I didn’t deserve to.

I am, today, objectively better in pretty much every respect. My weight is ideal. I eat well. I don’t drink alcohol. My cardiovascular health is beyond what a 52 year old has any right to expect. My relationships are so much better. I am not in a hostage situation with my own emotions any more. I am not constantly tormented by my own nervous system and the belief that everyone secretly hates me. I sometimes LIKE myself. I get housework done. I drive better. I move better. I have a new therapist who I get on really well with and who is helping me immensely.

And in a few hours I am going to become that person I was before 11:15 on the 16th of April and I resent that.

What does that say about me?

Tomorrow: repeat. Sunday: repeat. Monday: repeat.

And so on. Speed running (hah!) the bloody book every day.

And I KNOW.

And I can’t ever not know.

And if this is ever taken from me, the pain from wanting it will be indescribable. I’ll also turn to alcohol again within, I was going to say 2 weeks. I suspect it would be more like 2 days.

Medicine does not understand the structural problems in my brain enough to fix them. It found this treatment by accident. It’s suggested that if you start it early enough in life you MIGHT get some baseline structural improvement.

Might.

Some.

We evangelise to those who are the way we were, you know. We know the pain and we so desperately want them to have the ability to be free of it and even love themselves, the way we now can. Most of them find this a bit weird and incomprehensible. I did too when it was me.

“I will look into it when I’m less overwhelmed”

“But that’s what it fixes! That’s like going out into a snowstorm to get something from the shop in shorts and a T shirt and saying you’ll put your coat on when you get back!”

Incomprehension

But even then knowledge has a price, and there are no refunds. Some of that knowledge is knowing that I spent five decades going out into that snowstorm undressed when I didn’t have to.

(Ok, maybe some of them. I was born in the 70s after all)

Would I did it again if I knew beforehand what it was going to do?

Yes. I would. I would be compelled to.

But part of me wishes I didn’t know.

I’d hate myself. I’d get diabetes. And cancer. And die far too early, never understanding why I yelled at the people I loved as I drank myself to death, and tormented by a life of executive paralysis and emotional tempests, while wanting to crawl out of my own skin.

But I wouldn’t have known anything better was possible.