Latest Stories
Most recently published stories in Psyche.
I Am
Where do I begin? I don't really feel I have ever “fit in”. I know I have “fit in” but I never really FELT that I did. I have always had this feeling of being outside of what was going on around me. It feels as though I am staring through a looking glass. Like I am the constant observer of what is going on around me, not the willing participant. I tried for many years to actually feel like I fit into our current society. Ironically enough, the copious amount of drugs I used to attempt to do this only created the opposite effect. I became more of an outcast of modern society. It is only recently that I have accepted the fact that I do not think like the majority of people. And I have become completely okay with that. I spent many long nights researching why I think or act the way I do. I know from studying the MBTI that my personality is the rarest for a female. Maybe that is it? I was determined to be gifted at the age of 11. Maybe that is it? I could come up with theories as to why forever. I do very much like thinking in theory. It quite possibly be a combination of all of the theories I have mulled over back and forth. Frankly, it probably is. However, at the end of all this theorizing and constant back and forth of why am I the way I am, I discovered something truly important. It does not matter why I am the way I am. I just am. It does not matter if it was nature, nurture or a combination of both. It simply does not matter. The only thing that matters is that I am. I am that I am. And I am completely content and happy in that fact.
By Andrea Capitano5 years ago in Psyche
Disordered
Another child is talking to you, But the lights are too bright, the books and shelves and feet and voices are too loud, the colours are too brilliant. It all melds together into one noisy, tyrannical soup, surging towards you and entrapping you in the chaos.
By Elyse Williams5 years ago in Psyche
Symptoms of Inattention and Women With ADHD
ADHD affects both boys and girls equally; however, boys are more likely to be diagnosed and treated since they are diagnosed earlier in life. When boys are diagnosed with ADHD, it is usually because they have neglected their schoolwork and socialization activities. In addition, girls are less likely to be diagnosed because they tend to perform better than boys in school and play more sports. Because both genders have the potential to have ADHD, females are diagnosed with this disorder at a young age and have more treatment options available to them than their male counterparts.
By Cynthia Dean5 years ago in Psyche
It’s My Life
Well, well, where do I begin? Oh, Hi everyone. My name is Casandra, but everybody calls me Cassie. I am a single mother of 1, 9 year old boy. My life has never been easy. I can’t remember my childhood at all. When I turned 2, my father went to prison for 11 years. When he got out, my whole life flipped upside down. My father raped me around the ages of 13-15. I didn’t know any better, I thought that was what father daughter bonding, love and affection was. I willing allowed him to do so because he twisted my mind into thinking it was a normal ordeal for a father to have sex with his daughter. I started having problems at school, with my mother, and my siblings. My mother kept two jobs to provide for us. That left me to make sure they got home from school safely, make sure they ate after school and dinner also, make sure all homework was done, and ready for bed at a decent time. I had to grow up very fast and it prevented me from having a normal childhood. My bother and sister were allowed to go to birthday parties, sleep-overs, out with their friends to do normal kid things. I felt alone. I started to become a very rebellious person. Until one day, I found out I was pregnant at the age of 17. I was scared out of my mind. At the moment, I was sexually active with 3 people, my father included. I gave birth to my son and 1 of the 3 men I believed to be my son’s father agreed to taking a DNA test. It turned out he wasn’t the father, broke up with me, and I never heard from him ever again. The second man blocked me on all social media and wasn’t willing to take one at all. I was too scared to even tell my mother that my father has been raping me for years. So currently to this day, I have no idea who’s the father of my son. My conscience is constantly telling me my son is my brother also. When my son turned 6 years old, something in me just snapped. I was broken and nobody understood me because I wasn’t willing to allow anybody in to comfort me. I left my hometown for good. I gave temporary custody of my son to my mother. I hardly see my son at all, unless it’s on FaceTime. I am far from an unfit mother. I help him with homework over the phone, I send money whenever I can. I’m there for him just not physically, even though I know that’s what he needs. I moved two states away to start a new and better life for my son. That has been very hard to do. From me not having a childhood nor being a teen when I was a teenager, I got caught in the fast life of drugs, clubs/bars, sex, and etc. it became very hard for me to save money on my own. I felt a void that needed to be filled in my life. I starting dating, thinking if I can find someone to love me for me, then we can get a house and a car together. I felt like I was living in fantasy land. It finally clicked in my head that i needed to focus on me and my son and that’s exactly what I did. Now I have my own car in my name. I’m focusing on a home now, so I can be a better mother to my son. Things are a bit troubling for me, but all I can do is keep my head held high and keep pushing forward.
By Casandra Butler 5 years ago in Psyche
The Great Debate of Grade 9
Up until grade 9 started, it had just been my parents I figured weren’t understanding me. Now I was starting to realize that even kids my own age also weren’t. Often times, something made perfect sense coursing through my head, so I was always at a loss for why we were on different pages. It was losing its context when coming out from the cortex and through the speaker box. My brain was going to fast for me to convey everything. I’d see the words forming a sentence, floating around in my brain-scape. I’d try to grasp them, but I’d only be able to get a few before the next sentence came.
By The Passionate Autistic5 years ago in Psyche
Armour
I remember showing up to my university campus on the first day, and feeling like I did not belong. Like a foreign object stuck in the human body, I felt as if my presence was not welcome, like the very institution of tertiary education was trying to eject me.
By Kyle Ashleigh Robinson5 years ago in Psyche
Feathers, Coins, Animals
Finding myself alone at 3 am, finally releasing my emotions that I had hid from my kids that day, questioning myself, "Again, why do people die so soon, and in a sad way?, he was just getting home to his family? Why in front of his kids while they were playing out in their little playground, WHY? My brother's death in 2004 hit me hard, just because he was full of life, loved his kids and enjoyed his life every single day with a smile and spunk.... he was basically the strongest one that kept the family together after our father passed away just 4 years earlier to a heart attack. I knew my dad was ready to go, he worked so much as if he didn't want to rest and do nothing to avoid the hurt he had deep inside. I don't know what he loved the most, working or his cancer sticks as he called them, along with his cold ones while jamming to his "corridos" aka Mexican music which told their stories which basically described his life in Mexico. These 2 men in my life that are somewhere unknown, with so many theories and beliefs about Heaven, and where do we go after death, I found myself questioning, demanding answers that I seemed to never of found.
By Colourful3motions5 years ago in Psyche
Remember to Breathe
My life has been a journey of healing with many, MANY broken chapters before finally stepping into a path that I can be fully in love with; although admittedly, I am still working on discerning what that path is. I developed the sense early on in life that I was not meant to be here—that life mistakenly spit me out in an existence that I didn’t belong in and I had an overwhelming sense of the walls closing in all around me, trying to snuff me out in some cruel cosmic game. I was terrified at the idea of not being here anymore, but I desperately believed the world would be better off without me. My introvertedness came more from a fear of stepping out of line and drawing the arrows of hate and disgust of others who were clearly, in some way, inconvenienced by my existence. I’ve found later in life that I’ve had this ongoing tendency to hold my breath or start breathing extremely shallowly in unknown situations as though I was trying to make the least amount of physical moves necessary to get through without drawing attention to myself. Still, I would dream of a world where I DID belong. I used to pray, first, that I would go away and fade out of the existence I was sure I wasn’t right for so that the overwhelming loathing of the world would no longer grip me in Every. Single. Thing. That I did. I am one, like so many before me and around me currently, who has spent hours upon hours upon hours wrapped up in soul-crushing suicidal ideation and a desperate need to appease the world through alleviating it of my existence. I spent so much time believing that the world would somehow be better off without me in it. Thus the short breaths to attempt to do as little damage to the existence I was forced to appear in—kind of like how some say that if you were to go back in time, even the flapping of a butterfly’s wings would change the course of events to come—I was trying not to make more of a mess than my existence already had forced me to make.
By Sarah Lynn Jones5 years ago in Psyche
