I was five years old when the labels started stacking up. Bipolar disorder. ADHD. Dyslexia. Alexithymia. The doctor’s name was Dr. Christensen, and I can still see him sitting across from my parents as I played with toys in the corner of the office. He told them I would probably never live a normal life. I remember looking up at their faces, pale and stunned, as if they had just been given a terminal diagnosis. They didn’t understand what it meant, and neither did I. What I felt, even as a child, was fear and disconnection.
From that point on, my life was no longer my own. Pills, patches, blood tests. Every two to six months, something changed. A new side effect, a new chemical adjustment, another attempt to make me “fit.” Instead of growing up with space to learn who I was, my childhood was controlled by constant medication changes and school systems that didn’t know what to do with me.
By high school, I had been pulled out of regular classes and placed into “curriculum assistance.” Later, I was stuck in NovaNET, which felt like the land of misfit toys. Finally, during my senior year, they placed me in an academy for neurodivergent kids. It was so poorly run that it went out of business. Most days, we just watched movies. None of it gave me tools to live. None of it helped me understand myself. It only reinforced the idea that I wasn’t going to make it.
But even then, something in me refused to accept that. If the doctors and schools couldn’t give me consistency, I was going to find a way to build it myself.
Living Like a Lab Rat
By my teenage years, prescriptions ran my life. At one …
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Author: Nick Baum / High Times
