Day 460: 5 Minute Freewrite: Wednesday - Prompt: dividend

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Slacker. Trouble maker. Loser.

The labels haunted her all her life. If her grades suffered, she didn’t get help; she got “Why don’t you try harder? Pay attention. Focus!”

Decades passed before she learned she was not alone. She did try. She tried so hard! Yet no matter how much effort and care she exerted, the lack-luster results disheartened her. If she got the reward of an A now and then, or just a "Good try, nice effort," she might stop spiraling down into self-defeat.

It wasn’t just academic, either. Her personal life suffered. “Poor impulse control” was actually part of the DSM-5 spectrum for her mental “condition,” aka the weird way her brain was wired. Millions of others like her were drugged with Ritalin and Adderall, despite the “suicidal ideation” that was a well-documented side effect, despite the failure of the drugs to “fix” people like her.

She was just a number to the health-care professionals, just another case to check off every three months with follow-up visits to make sure the medicine wasn’t killing her or causing her to kill anyone; just that it kept her subdued, kept her flaming passions and manic bursts of energy from finding some socially unacceptable outlet.

Just a number.

A dividend.

Was she a dividend, though, or a divisor? A divisor is the number by which another number, the dividend, is divided.

She was fractured, fractioned, divided, whatever way she looked at it.

I am the remainder, the result of a DNA equation gone wrong, she told herself. Then: No, no, that is not me talking, that is the Ritalin talking. I should be dead, she thought; then, no, no, that is the Ritalin talking, and I must not listen.

She took the last Adderall in the bottle and cut it into pieces of diminishing size. Each day she took a smaller and smaller dose. On the last day, she would not suffer the indignity and go through the bureaucratic waste of time refilling a “controlled substance.”

The bottle was empty now.

She felt empty too but she would find a way to rein in the impulses that had her saying the wrong thing, alienating friends and family, disappointing teachers and supervisors.

There had to be a way out. There had to be a fix to her “condition.”

Next month, she’d find it. For now, she pulled the bottle from the recycle bin and called her shrink for a refill.

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