A few months earlier, the anti-depressants he had been taking since adolescence to manage his condition had stopped working. His doctor had prescribed him new medication. Those pills made him feel worse, even worse than before he had started treatment. The noise in his head was as loud and fast as his adrenaline heartbeat. He couldn’t settle. He couldn’t sleep. He wasn’t eating. The noise in his head grew louder and louder.

He was sick of it. The noise in his head. The troubles of his body. The pills. Having to accept words like managing and coping as poor substitutes for what he really wanted: to live, with ease, like a normal person.

So, he made up his mind. He was done with being broken. He was going to fix himself.

About a month ago, he had started weaning himself off his pills. He hadn’t consulted his doctor, whom he had lost faith in after his last experience. He decided he was through with being a lab rat. He researched the weaning process thoroughly online. It seemed straightforward enough. He felt empowered. He knew it was going to be a challenge, but he chose to believe in himself for a change. His will to live med-free, in and of itself, seemed like more than enough to carry him through the rough patches.

As he weaned, he replaced the pills with all the advice that had been bestowed upon him over the years, solicited and unsolicited, welcome and unwelcome, alike. He went for power walks in the sunshine. He tried laughter yoga. He ate turkey, salmon, and dark chocolate to the point of revulsion. He took his vitamins. He even considered eliminating gluten. Every day, he wrote a list of the things that were worrying him, followed by a list of all the things he was grateful for. He tried to stop taking life so seriously. He got into the habit of smiling, even when there was nothing to smile about, as a way of tricking his brain into thinking it was happy. Fake it till you make it became his personal credo.

At first, he had felt optimistic. He was doing it. He was his own placebo. He was fixing himself. By the third week, the false homeostasis began to fail. As the last traces of medication dwindled from his bloodstream, his symptoms had resurfaced. The noise in his head was the same as it had always been. He couldn’t settle. He couldn’t sleep. He stopped eating again.

He had tried to fix himself, with everything in him, but he had failed.

It was crushing.

The noise started to whisper he would always be broken.