A Beautiful Kind Of Pain

1

Empathy had always been my kryptonite. Try as I might, I was never able to sympathise with anyone about their issues. I wasn't cold-hearted, or cruel, or at least not in the way people assumed. From the outside I may have appeared like a numb, empty statue, a shattered shell of a human, but I knew I was something more.

Maybe I'd have questioned it, if I'd realised sooner. To me, being dubbed a dead man walking was almost like a death sentence. The words that had slipped so easily from my mouth before, I now struggled to form my lips around. So perhaps if I'd taken a little time away from my stupor to contemplate what really made a dead man walking, I'd have picked up on it. That I wasn't like the rest of them.

Mother and Father, among many others, observed my behaviour at arm's length, not really giving it too much thought. Maybe they, as I did at the time, simply reasoned I was moody, or a generally grumpy person. Maybe if it had stayed that way, the civil war I fought hard in against myself wouldn't have happened. But of course it had to run deeper than that.

Unlike most taciturn pre-teens, I seemed to not display any emotion at all. This isn't entirely unusual; for example, you get people who obscure their true colours behind a mask of indifference, choosing to remove it only around certain people whom they fully trust with their lives. They live their life in the shadows, hiding away their blossoms and letting them wilt, refusing to break their stony facade until the lines become blurred. I wish I was just one of those people. I wish there weren't more to the tale.

I had very slow reflexes, to the point where I was supernaturally clumsy; constantly tripping over my own feet and knocking vases off tabletops. No film, no matter how sad or empowering, was ever able to draw a tear from my eye. My parents tried and failed my entire life to tease a laugh out of me. Combine all of these symptoms... and you have a dead man walking.

Soon enough my parents started to suspect something. I think it was my brother who first brought it up. He had been given an online school assignment, in which he was to research rare or lesser-known mental illnesses, write a report on one of his own choosing, then present back to the class with it. After many hours of surfing the internet - I wouldn't be surprised if most of that time was spent playing computer games... then again I wouldn't be surprised at anything - he drew up a shortlist of the oddest syndromes and delusions that he could find. The list included:

Capgras Delusion

Alice In Wonderland Syndrome

Alien Hand Syndrome

Stendhal Syndrome

And at the bottom of the list, scribbled in tiny chicken-scratch print, was Dead Man Walking Syndrome. At the time, I believe only five people in the world had been diagnosed with it, so many scientists and neurologists doubted its existence. Mother and Father took a brief glance at his list before Noah reminded them of that last scrawled line. The two took a long, hard look (possibly because they needed a magnifying glass to even decipher the hastily-formed words), before exchanging a mutual expression of frustration.

'Honey, you know Dead Man Walking Syndrome isn't real. It's just an excuse for all those moody, clumsy teenagers in the world. You had better take that off your list, if you want to be accurate.' But Noah was insistent, repeatedly demanding that it did indeed exist, and that he believed I was showing symptoms of it. Of course, Mother and Father were shocked at the accusation, most likely scorned that he thought a stoic nine-year-old could have possibly contracted such a life-changing disorder.

But as the weeks turned to months and there still was no change in my behaviour, Mother and Father began to doubt their initial response. Noah's suspicions were later confirmed when they finally decided to take me to a GP. While the doctor was unsure due to my  young age, she told my parents that she was relatively certain of her diagnosis. Dead Man Walking Syndrome, also known as the Zombie Disorder - though this was mainly a teenage slang word for it.