A Shadow Creeps In
1981
That Other Me is a series that explores the immediacy and intimacy of various mental health episodes I’ve experienced throughout my life.
Today in class, the teacher teaches us how to write a limerick.
Five lines. Lines 1, 2, and 5 rhyme. Lines 3 and 4 are shorter, and should rhyme. We’re also meant to draw a picture.
As most of the other kids play around, I can only think I want to get this right. My limerick isn’t just a limerick. It’s a story – a man tries to cross a stream but falls into a pool of mud. The picture shows him sitting there in the mud.
I fix on this task. The other kids no longer matter. I just want to tell this story. The picture has to be good, too. I’m an okay drawer. Well, maybe a little bit better than okay. I’ve always liked to draw, although most of my pictures are based around football.
When I’m done, I study my work. It’s not just five lines. There’s a world in here. I wonder about the man I’ve written about. Who is his family? I’ve decided he was going to the store, although I’m unsure why he had to cross a stream. But I feel there are people with him in here – people yet to speak to me.
The bell goes for lunch. It’s raining outside, so we stay in the foyer between class rooms. Once we’ve eaten, we drag out board games, or talk about stuff that’s important to eleven-year-olds – like TV, football, and who might like who – or chase each other around.
The other Grade 6 teacher, Miss Jackson, finds me and asks me to come with her. There’re just the two Grade 6 teachers, their classes side by side. My teacher is a man. Miss Jackson has taken me for a couple of individual classes and seems nice. Naturally, because she’s a woman, she also seems less stricter than our teacher. But I’m worried now because she’s asked me to go with her.
She leads me to back to my chair and points at my limerick, asking if I did this. I tentatively tell her I did. I’m worried that I’ve done something wrong. Back in Grade 3, a group of us had to write about a circus show that played on TV the previous night, and one of the kids drew something naughty. When the teacher saw it, she told us off, and told me she was disappointed in me – not the others, just me. Maybe I’ve disappointed this teacher, too.
But she then tells me how much she loves my limerick and my picture, and explains ways I can improve the writing. She tells me I can be more descriptive. I listen, taking in her words, but more than anything taking in how happy she is. She really likes it. She didn’t do this with anybody else.
Just me.
When she goes, though, I try to work out something else that’s gotten in my head along with the praise. Doubt. Her praise made me feel good, but now I’m not sure it’s real, and in being unsure, I wonder that if it’s not real, then maybe I’m not good enough to be getting real praise, and if I’m not good enough, then what does that mean about me?
Something falls on me then – it might be some blanket that’s invisible until it covers me, and now that it covers me it’s not so invisible, and there’s something that’s already in my head that it’s bringing out.
Everything’s darker, and the happy sounds from the other kids playing are so sharp that they cut me so I know I can’t get too close, because I can’t be that happy.
I have to stand out here.
Alone.
Because I can’t fit back out there.