The idea of reality has always been something that I never questioned, never even thought about. It wasn’t until I hit the seventh grade when I began using books as a way to escape my own reality, a way to strip away my everyday life in order to be absorbed in a world that wasn’t my own. Pretty soon, this idea of reality, and the newfound knowledge that I could leave it, left me slightly addicted. If I didn’t want to be somewhere, I could fully and completely shut my surroundings down by opening a book. I could get myself into a sort of meditative state, where I couldn’t hear people speaking to me, where I couldn’t feel my heart beating, sort of like an out-of-body experience.

Later, this desire to leave reality blossomed into a need for a way to escape (the screaming resonating off the walls of my house, the drunks stumbling down the stairs, my hands shaking while I dialed 911 on Christmas Eve and the cops questioning me). I found how easy it was to resort to drugs as a means of losing my awareness of what was happening around me. And in our society, finding escape is so goddamn easy, I could get my hands on anything at anytime.
After effectively finding ways to completely block about periods of my life (and realizing that I did in fact lose entire large chunks of time) I began the search to find my way back to reality again. I know in class people discussed how everyone’s reality is different, and I do agree with that. While spending much of my time intoxicated on whatever I was able to get, I had absorbed myself into a new reality, I had built my own form of release. I consider my true reality as where I would be if I wasn’t intoxicated, wasn’t escaping, wasn’t trapped by the thing I originally thought was freeing me. Pretty soon I became desperate to get back to my reality, get back to where I could acknowledge my parents, my friends, things that were real that I had seemed to have lost my grip on.

Then again coming back to my own reality left me at the hands of a drug addicted society. Without being able to handle (hide) from things that I fucking hated experiencing, I was quickly diagnosed with a list full of psychotic disorders and pumped full of medication. So now my reality, (the one that is making it so I can think clearly, go to class, interact and socialize; hell even write this damn blog) is only a distorted version of what it would be. My need to escape a dependence on drugs led me to a society-approved addiction that turns me into what can only be described as a robot. My brain releases specific chemicals when the medication tells it to, locking itself in a routine that leaves me in a new form of imprisonment. Yeah, I have the ability to stop taking my medications, but I can’t help but think that my real reality is not one that I want to live in anymore. That even trapped in this body that suffers the shitty side effects of my meds, I’m much more afraid of going back to my reality than to continue the robotic abuse.