On December 12 I finished my extended nine month Roaccutane sentence. It grieves me to see how optimistic I was about this treatment at the end of last year. I thought I was ready. But I quickly found that my extensive research was inadequate in protecting me or even readying me from the deathly call it unleashed. Further to my mounting grief was the necessity of an elongation of the treatment. In the time where my body should have been free and healing as I prepared for exams, I was still wilfully poisoning it for sheer vanity.
This year has been one of real hardship for me. My final year of school, confounded doctors, mystery illness, quitting my job and roaccutane. If this year had forced me to deal only with the first three issues then I think, no, truly believe that this would have been a different story. But I gambled with roaccutane at the wrong moment. Quitting my job was one of many harsh side affects that I grudgingly accepted. I danced with a killer and it nearly cost me everything.
I wanted to achieve in school this year. I did. Never before had achieving been so important, in the grand scheme of things. Unfortunately this desire ebbed away until it was a mere trickle that occasionally sparked to life, but only ever briefly. I was consistently battered by roaccutane who, as I now understand, threw the book at me. No other roaccutane patient that I know personally suffered as I did. I was in constant pain. New constant pain. And I was forced to learn to live with it; except I couldn't. It frightened and tortured me at the same time and my mind began to rot. I got handballed from specialist doctor to specialist doctor and ultimately received no answers and many years I will never get back and my mind continued to rot. I fed myself despair and anger, hurt and resentment, fear and pain. Happiness didn't come easy anymore. It was forced or faked. Who wants to achieve when their daily victory is dragging a broken body out of bed? My academic year, on the whole, was overtly average for me. My marks occasionally slipped here and there. On more than one occasion I saw fit to end it all. In term three it was very much over in my mind. Scarily, it was very much planned and only a matter of time because I couldn't repair the rot in my head and I was tired of living with it. So very close.
Then my only lifelong dream was realised and I forced myself to make it for this wonderful horse, and for this wonderful horse alone. I even rallied for exams throwing myself into study with a final almighty effort.
And though I had no real business setting expectations, I failed to meet them. I know that I am my harshest critic, but if I'm not kicking my butt then who is? And I was so disappointed with my end result. To sit here and know that the potential to be better is very much there is haunting. And I know it's just a number. I know no one really cares. I know that I have a long line of reasons and excuses for not achieving my best. But I do care and it doesn't lessen the sting of falling so far short. Nor the sting of fighting on for what is, in my mind, inadequacy.
Life can and will go on. But I don't know where to go from here. Roaccutane finally finished, but it's yet to fully leave me and won't for sometime yet. Truthfully I am no better now than I was in school. My mental serenity is so precarious and unpredictable that I know I won't be this level for long. The rot in my head is still very much there. The pain still sounds it's voice. The sleeplessness still rears it's ugly head. I am, at the end of the day, nothing that I wanted to be. Only I now have clear skin.
- Sky
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