Brain Drops. Jeannie Tyrrell

      Chapter One

      Disregard Complex

      Many moons ago, I would exchange notebooks. They were filled with such beautiful ideas and plans for characters and stories. I shared them with two out of the four friends that I had in school. I do know the sharp teeth of escapism began to sink in when I was in elementary school. But I can’t really remember that far back. We moved around way too many times during those years, and parts of those memories are completely lost to me. The memories that still have some traction in my head are from high school and onward.

      I was present for my friends and very present with the world through the characters that I created in those notebooks. I was a million times more expressive and honest when I wrote something down. My friends were equally expressive. We all seemed to indulge in this great escape.

      Outside the escape, I see now that I had no real personality. Was I being myself? It seemed like I was locked up in a coma. None of those thoughts occurred to me until I was physically hit in the back of the head. That was the first moment in my life when I noticed that I was not present.

      I was bullied constantly throughout elementary school and high school. Every single day I went to school, I had a fellow human comment on the shoes that I wore, my unplucked eyebrows, my weight, or my unorthodox mother. Then, when I least expected it, one of the punk kids at my school beamed me right in the back of the head with a rock.

      The lights went out, and my journey into escapism began. It was a long and treacherous road out. I needed the fantasy because it was seriously a break from all the torment. On one side of the spectrum, I was told that I had birthing hips, or I was way too fat to do pull-ups. On the other side of life, my mother was in and out of the hospital, and my stepfather was on his merry way to prison. I witnessed and dealt with extreme domestic abuse when I was at home, and I also had to deal with severe mental abuse when I attended school.

      So I had built up a very tight-knit and comfortable world of amazing escapism just to keep me going. Fantasy land was the only place for me to truly escape. It was my only joy in the world because the people, the comments, and all the cruel questions were literally everywhere. None of it was going to go away.

      So how did I get out? Before I hit you with some logic, just hear me out. I believe when a child grows up in an abusive household, they enter a protective bubble. They are not truly present. My siblings and I have been here in the world with you. But our conscious state was lifted upward when we were very young. That is never going to change.

      We will be there until our time on this planet runs out. It had to be that way so we could watch over ourselves and protect one another from above. Social programs, educators, and protective systems failed us from the start.

      As far as I know, we only had each other, and we only had ourselves. But we didn’t know it. So, at times, we really hurt one another. We weren’t really there for one another. I love my siblings, and I never intentionally meant to hurt any of them. Some things haunt me to this day, and I’m sorry. I will only share one memory. I coerced my younger brother to take the blame for a foolish prank that I committed. He was reprimanded in the cruelest of ways, right in front of me. He was so young, and I’ve never forgiven myself for it.

      I escaped that guilt with the help of fantasy. All was forgotten when an entertaining animated film about some stolen cats was put on for the hundred millionth time. I danced to the songs, laughed, and basically pranced around the living room like a blissful idiot.

      My behavior when I was a child can be defined in a much fancier way. According to the book This Virtual Life: Escapism and Simulation in Our Media World, Andrew Evans explained a vast mixture of escapism types. There is the type called avoiding,