Dramatic Child Stars

Five.

Ryland,
July 17th, 2021
8:39 pm.

I was put on Ritalin when I was 8 years old. That was a bit more than a year after I started the tv show. I'd already been acting for several years in small commercials and other minor parts. I played someone's baby in a high production movie when I was barely 2, but I don't even remember that one. Nobody knew it was me. It was a smaller part. I didn't even get called back for the sequel. My mom still carried me up the red carpet at the premier though.

It's hard being a medicated child. I don't think it's talked about enough, but growing up with something else heavy in your brain is really fucking difficult. You're never truly yourself. You don't even know what it means  to be yourself honestly.

Also I didn't have ADHD like they thought I did. I was told that as an adult when Percy made me see the psych doctor for my 20th birthday. I just had child star syndrome. That's not an official diagnosis in the DSM or anything a doctor will actually tell you, but it's real. It's a real bitch of a disorder too. It's that thing that happens when you're barely old enough to dress yourself, but somehow you're also the most important person in the room; the most important person in your family honestly. Maybe the most important person in the world. Who knows? You definitely don't. You don't know anything except for that people look at you more often than you think it's normal to look at kids.

Anyways, fuck Ritalin. Fuck any of those stupid little pills we give to kids when they act too much like kids. Fuck people who don't bother to notice when their kids behavior dramatically changes all at once. Fuck parents that notice, but blame and drug the kid for it. Fuck parents in general actually.

Fuck my mom.

They took me off the Ritalin when I was 18. Pills like that require regular drug testing when you're an adult. I failed their drug test. "Things like this have a high addiction potential Ryland. Keep your nose clean and come back in a month and we'll try again. It'll be okay."

I didn't go back. Ever. I didn't go back to Percy's psych doctor either.

I always start with the pacing before making the worst decisions by the way. It's like a toxic trait of mine honestly. I can't just do hard drugs casually. I need to be obnoxious and nervous about it first so that everyone around me is also uncomfortable. Maybe that's my intrinsic desire for attention acting up. I'm not really sure.

"Are you actually going to do that, or are you just staring at it?" asked the man standing next to Joey.

"Leave him alone," Joey said. "He just has anxiety about it. He'll do it when he's ready."

We were standing in the nameless guys garage. I had no idea what his name was. He was a friend of Joeys presumably. Apparently Joeys  tent had actually been in his backyard for a few days because the water levels were too high to camp up by the river. He had a lot of friends already crashing in the house, so Joey was easily welcomed. Also it wasn't actually his house. It was a vacant house. They were squatters. We were all squatters technically, considering we were all also in the house. I'd learned all this about the housing situation while taking Joey to buy drugs.

Well, I'd taken him to buy shoes first. He'd asked me very candidly and desperately to help him buy drugs, and I'd decided to buy him shoes as a precursor to the other thing. His were just looking so decrepit. I thought that if I was going to buy narcotics for a 19ish year old, then I ought to make sure he had decent shoes too. That was my good deed to offset the bad one. That meant Joey had new shoes and then we met a drug dealer and I bought pills and coke. Now we were here.

Squatting.

Coke makes me nervous. I've known this the entire time. It's not an elusive fact about myself. The first time I did it, I literally sat on the floor holding my chest like my heart was liable to explode while my costar sang a lullaby that talked about the stars. She pointed them all out in the sky to me. She was nice as far as adults giving drugs to 18 year olds go. She was nicer than I probably was anyways.