When I was in sixth grade, I was very ill. Wait, no. That isn’t quite the truth. I was moderately ill for a long time. It never felt like illness to me– it felt like what I now know as depression. Gray days filled with antibiotics and naps and occasional soup, with day time television and so much boredom, but time moving both quickly and slowly. I couldn’t muster the energy to do anything resembling a productive use of time, but I’d be shocked when the day ended anyway. Eventually, my tonsils came out and my low grade fever disappeared, and everyone expected me to go back to school. I had missed an entire quarter of the year. My mom said my face had been gray and then it was golden. Going back to school terrified me. I’d been essentially alone for months, and I’d grown accustomed to long days marked in mostly half hour increments. I Dream of Genie, Bewitched, Hogan’s Heroes, The Price is Right, Family Feud, The Young and the Restless (thus began the darkest of hours), News, Guiding Light, Gilligan’s Island (like the sun through the clouds), The Brady Bunch. He-Man, Gargoyles, and finally my family home again. My neediness for them annoyed them and I knew it but I needed them so much, and I knew that the way I clung to my mother disturbed her and she thought school would be the answer.

In the early weeks of my illness, a bunch of my classmates came to the fence that separated our elementary school from the lot where our broken and leaning house stood (barely) and shouted at me to come to the window. They waved and smiled, and when I remember it, I still choke up both for their compassion at such a rotten age and at what I was losing out on, as weeks of 6th grade might as well be eons.

The first day back, or maybe more like the end of the week, I felt like I’d given school a shot and it was time to return to my regularly scheduled television events. I remember that when I asked to go to the nurse, my teacher asked to talk to me outside. We sat down on the steps, and he said, “I know it’s hard, and I know you’re scared, but you have to do this. You just have to. It’s time to be at school again.” And I cried and cried because I didn’t want to be there even though I needed to be.

Being alone is a very comfortable and very dangerous state for me. Especially surrounded by prescriptions for medications that don’t seem to work for me. This August, I have been a child again, growing roots on the sofa and awaiting what is next, grateful for the dog’s head on my lap or my feet, and for his need for exercise that prompts me out of guilt to get up from my coma to venture into the world outside of my house. This is why I will never be a novelist and would never be a good artist. I need my profession of choice to force me to talk to other humans all day long. I hate it, and I need it.