Chapter 1

My mind and body wouldn’t calm down as I threw myself around my bed, trying to get comfortable enough to fall asleep. I had watched the clock on my phone go from 10:09 to 11:21… 1:01… and now 2:18, checking social media each time for no real reason. All I could think about was that I needed to wake up in four hours to get ready for work. My brain simply wouldn’t shut off, and I wanted to scream in frustration. I realized I could scream. I could scream as loud as I wanted and no one would know. No one would care. I was there alone. All alone.

My alarm sounded somewhere under my pillow. I swatted around trying to find it and knocked my phone to the floor. It was 6:01 when I finally picked it up, swiped the alarm off, and headed to the bathroom. I pulled my dried, drool-encrusted hair off my cheek and opened Facebook while I sat there. Nothing new. I switched to Instagram anyway. Back to Facebook. A reel turned into another reel, then another. I wasn’t even interested in what I was looking at, but I kept scrolling. I completely lost track of time.

The alarm went off again.

6:45.

Panic hit immediately. I needed to be ready in thirty minutes. Thirty minutes to shower, put on makeup, get dressed, make coffee, and get in my car. Thirty minutes. How did this happen almost every day? Where had the last forty-five minutes gone? I could barely remember anything I had just looked at. Why couldn’t I just get ready like a normal person?

At 7:00, another alarm sounded. Tears began rolling down my face as I frantically washed it and grabbed the dry shampoo from the counter, trying to hold in everything building inside of me.

Twenty minutes later, I was mostly ready and backing out of my garage. I rummaged through my purse and found the orange pill container near the bottom beside a few lip glosses and my set of keys. My mind drifted to when we actually had to put keys into the ignition instead of just pushing a button. The thought barely finished before the car’s warning system went crazy and slammed me to a stop as a couple of kids rode their bikes across the sidewalk behind me.

All the way to work, I worked at catching my breath, but my mind kept building new versions of what could have happened. What if the car hadn’t stopped? What if I had backed out two seconds faster? What if I hadn’t looked up? The possibilities multiplied faster than I could push them away. By the time I pulled into my parking space, tears were building in my eyes again. The worst part wasn’t what almost happened. It was realizing that I couldn’t seem to control anything happening inside of me.

I reached into my purse and pulled out the orange pill container.

MALLORY OWENS: Sertraline 200 mg/tab. Take one daily.