ALEXITHYMIAC ON THE RAILROAD TRACKS

personal narrative for last year's english class dealing with excoriation disorder and my autistic lack of feeling, kinda cringe but thought i'd share

I felt the crescent-shaped slice of my fingernail puncture my flesh. I saw my fingers pinching, gouging, carving the skin off of my upper arm. My mind went blank. When I came to full consciousness thirty minutes later, my arm was inflamed and beading with blood. I tried my hardest to feel some form of shame, some remorse, any emotion at all, but I felt nothing.

Alexithymia: when a person has difficulty experiencing, identifying, and expressing emotions. I found this word after frantic Google searches, attempting to discover what was wrong with me. I learned that alexithymia was a common side effect of the medication I took to repair my generationally-addled brain. The irony laughed in my face. By silencing my throat-ripping panic, I had chemically stifled all other emotions that I was once capable of feeling.

My therapist explained this phenomenon to me in my favorite language: numbers. She said that though I have an unusually high intelligence quotient, my emotional intelligence was behind those of my peers. She told me this is why I have trouble in social situations, why I don’t get invited to parties, and why I have trouble making friends at school. As she continued describing signs of low emotional intelligence, my heart sank at the accuracy. This was the first time I’ve been bad at something important. I can solve math problems worthy of college students, or memorize every flag of every micronation on our planet, but I’m terrible at something as simple as emotional empathy.

The truth is, I’m not sure how to make this essay feel reflective of my emotions. I can’t describe what it’s like when I have an occasional bout of anger, sadness, or happiness. I don’t know how to put into words what it feels like to have your emotions taken away to keep yourself safe. However, I can describe the sensations I replaced my emotions with.

The night I had the full realization of my alexithymia, my mind ran rampant with distress and negative thoughts. I stared into the bathroom mirror at midnight and saw a boy in front of me. He had brown hair, blue eyes, and a tiny zit on his forehead. I was vaguely aware that this was my body, that this body received electric signals from its nervous system that I could feel in my brain. The word “feel” was enough for me to latch onto. I inched closer to the mirror and took the boy’s zit between my fingers, and popped it, just as I had done dozens of times. The relief from feeling something, anything at all, the hit of dopamine when the zit gave way and burst, sent adrenaline through the body that I saw.

I dug in further with my short, brittle nails. Holding open the boy’s already-bleeding wound with two fingers, I used my other index finger to scrape its blood out. I gouged further and further into the wound, until I felt the slippery dermis layer underneath my finger, and my nail wasn’t sharp enough to pierce deeper. Suddenly, my vision refocused on its full face, rather than the now adequately-sized hole in its forehead. I saw its pupils dilated and its breath even and smooth, like a deer in the path of a freight train. The boy looked the exact same as it did upon entering the bathroom, with the exception of the bleeding, gaping wound above its left eyebrow.

I flicked the lights off and speedwalked back across the hall to my bedroom. I fumbled on the top shelf of my cabinet for my Band-Aid stash. Placing one across my forehead, and lying exhausted on my bed, I finally felt a semblance of pain. It was a slow, throbbing pain. I knew that this was my heart pumping blood to the area of injury, sending platelets to fix my attempt at feeling. I fell asleep, with the emotional capacity of a piece of roadkill.

Roadkill. A mangled amalgamation of dead tissue and dried blood, left out for the public to view day after day. It does not speak nor feel. Passersby feel a shallow pity for the thing, but ultimately say to each other;

“It chose to run into the road, what are we supposed to do about that?”.

I choose to gouge at my skin. I choose to see the blood spill from my forehead and I choose to cover my arms in a constellation-map of scabs. As I go through my days nearly silent and unfeeling, passersby feel a shallow sense of pity. They think it’s a shame that I can’t bring myself to fully “participate” in social events, they think it’s a shame that I spend most of my time with myself in my bedroom. They pity the fact that I can’t feel a full range of emotions, but ultimately say;

“He chose to take that medication, what are we supposed to do about that?”.

I live the life of walking roadkill, on display for the unblemished to glance at and walk past. They take one look at my blank expression and dotted arms and utter a quick prayer before leaving me on the railroad tracks.

When I awoke the next day and dragged myself to the psychiatrist, my mother inquired about the bandage on my forehead. I told her it was a zit. Once I was alone with the psychiatrist, I told her about my night with the boy in the mirror. She told me that cranial excoriations were common among dermatillomaniacs like myself. She prescribed me NAC pills for my excoriation, and said it would help silence the urges to gouge my skin off.

Ever since then, I have remained emotionally numb. The pills helped with the urges, but have done nothing to restore my feelings. I make every decision based on thoughts and logic alone, and have close to no emotional empathy. I still take the time to get under my own skin, time to cleanse myself. My shirtsleeves are dotted with blood, and my brother thinks my arms were attacked by mosquitoes. The girl sitting next to me in chem class probably assumes (rightfully) that I’m neurotic of some sort, as she sees me turning and scanning my arms and wrists for blemishes to scrape off during our lecture on electron configuration. My mother is frustrated that my condition refuses to improve. My brothers feel pity for me. My friends feel sympathy, but don’t know how to help. But me, I feel nothing, like the deer on the tracks. I feel no guilt, no sadness, no despair over the freight train that took my livelihood so young. I feel nothing.