Broken...

I feel broken. I have felt that way since freshman year of college. That was the year I developed my cat and dust allergies, and the year I developed lactose intollerance. Add a daily pill to my life. And optional pills if I want dairy (which I pretended for so many years didn't work because I couldn't deal with another pill in my life). Then, the next year revealed depression and ADD. Enter another medication - twice-a-day. (I eventually got it to once-a-day, sure, but the pill still exists.) In my mind, I was now even more broken.

Really, if you count discovering a need for glasses in my senior year of high school, I've felt broken since 1998. That's 7 years. Perhaps that's another reason for my obsession with normalcy. I yearn for the days when I didn't know any of that existed. (Oh, it probably did - at least the depression and ADD.)

And, it didn't stop with sophomore year. Junior year, I discovered I couldn't breathe very well when I ran. Enter a new medication: an inhaler that I use when I exercise to battle my exercise-induced asthma.

I feel broken. I feel negatively abnormal. And I've never really come to terms with this feeling, I don't think.

"Broken." The word is festering inside me.