They were always saying ‘Take your medicine.’ The therapists and the doctors, my parents, the counselors– anyone with an opinion about my illness. They all told me about people who started feeling good again, or decided they weren’t actually bipolar, or missed the energy, and stopped taking their medicine and ended right back in the hospital. Back at the visions, back at depression, back at death.
What they didn’t say was how much psych meds sucked. They went over the long list of side effects, but nobody seemed to care when I said yes, the medicine made my stomach hurt and hair fall out and gave me diarrhea and turned everything stupid and flat and boring. The sluggishness, the flat gray of the sky and the old snow, the days all the same, same routine, same people, same dramas. I didn’t want to go back to hearing things and I didn’t want to go back to trying to kill myself, but I also wanted to feel something real and true, life in neon, rather than this dull blanket.
—Juliet Escoria, Juliet the Maniac
