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Alone, Against the World

© John McManamy

"The crowd was on it's feet, cheering wildly. My God! I could only think. There's going to be an encore!"

This is the second of five articles that chronicle my lifelong struggles with depression and mania:

It was me, alone, against the world. There was no other way to describe it. It was around age 11 and 12 when I noticed that I was a lot shorter and skinnier than the kids my age. Then they all started sprouting hair in funny places and talking in deep voices in knowing ways, and the realization struck with Biblical force:

My God! I really was different!

It was like those dreams everyone seems to have of turning up in public in just your underwear. If only it were just that. If only the shame and embarrassment were for just one day. If only I could just go home and reach in the closet and slip into my leg and pubic hair the way I could a pair of pants and grow six inches and return to school and blend in and say things like, eat it raw, like I really knew what I was talking about.

No, I was doomed to show up for school in the equivalent of my dream underwear every day for the next three years.

My inner immune system invented its own respite from the terror of school and the outside world. Just when I knew I could not ever possibly board that school bus one more time, my body would give out on me. My throat would constrict and flare up, my nose would heave up great gobs of green bloody snots, and I would cough the cough of the dead.

Then the healing would start. There in bed, or on the couch under a million blankets shivering in a sweat-induced micro-climate of Vicks Vapo-rub fumes, my strength would come back. Slowly. Over several days, a week, more. Then one day I would get out of bed and get dressed, too far behind in my school work to ever really catch up, but nevertheless ready to take what the day offered, one day at a time.

It was in one of these states of suspended animation that I found myself gulping down chicken soup and watching John Glenn's tickertape parade in New York. I felt a warm thrill flow through all eighty or so pounds of me. To see the earth as only God and a handful of men had ever seen it - one day it would be me. I still had the power to dream.

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