Page 26 of Marked By His Hunger
Different offices. Different doctors. Same outcome.
“Serena, what you’re experiencing isn’t real.”
“Serena, your mind is trying to protect you.”
“Serena, we’re going to help you feel better.”
Better meant quieter.
Numb.
It meant pills that dulled everything—fear, yes, but also color, sound, thought.
It meant drifting through life like I was wrapped in cotton, disconnected from the very thing they were trying to “fix.”
Because the medication didn’t make it stop.
It just made me doubt myself.
And that was worse.
For a long time… I believed them.
Believed that I was broken.
That I was unstable.
I believed that something inside me had snapped the day my parents died and never quite fit back together again.
I learned to smile when I was supposed to. To nod at the right moments. To say I was feeling better even when I wasn’t. I learned to keep the truth locked down so deep that even I started to question it.
Because if everyone around you insists you’re crazy long enough?
Eventually, you start to wonder if they’re right.
Aunt Gabby and Uncle Patrick weren’t cruel.
Not exactly.
They were just afraid.
They were afraid of what they didn’t understand. Afraid of what I might become.
Afraid of the way the world would look at them if I didn’t fit neatly into it.
So they did what people like them always do.
They labeled me.
Managed me.
Contained me.
And they told themselves it was love.
By the time I was an adult our relationship was so strained we barely spoke above the perfunctory.
And when this acceptance letter arrived, I could practically feel it.
