In “My Medicated Self” by Noelle Henein, I unexpectedly found a piece of myself. For eight years, the author has had to take pills everyday for their condition. Eventually the unmedicated side of her disappeared with each pill swallowed. Taking the pills made her “acceptable” and a perfect “cookie-cutter version” of herself that wasn't entirely her. Noel wondered whether she was “walking, running, singing, crying, feeling day after day as someone not [she is] not? As a mask of piles and prescriptions, a face finally acceptable to people who know?” This leaves her with the question and her choice of who she was. Noelle decided that she was a combination of her non-medicated self and her medicated self, not defined by drugs and tests.
    I also struggle with how much my medication makes up me. Whenever I need it, I'm too scared of the memories connected with it to touch it. The second a new medicine was shoved in from in front of my face, emotions and moods burst everywhere as distorted memories fooled me. With each pill or lotion I shoved away, I also shoved away who I was and how I acted without the help. I don't want to be the person stuck in a medicine induced stupor nor the person acutely aware of pain and burning up. I'm not the child crying from fear of medicine nor the bitter, complaining teen I am right now. Like Noelle wrote, “And for now, that is enough.”