Legal adulthood arrived in the form of a trash can.
Most people turn eighteen and think about buying lottery tickets, voting, getting tattoos without permission, or finally being able to tell their parents that the law no longer gives them control. I thought about prescription bottles. There were enough of them to fill the bathroom sink, each one containing a different chemical explanation for why I had never been allowed to feel like myself.
For most of my childhood, doctors and my biological mother had treated my personality like a disease. If I was angry, there was a pill for it. If I argued, there was another pill. If I had too much energy, could not sleep, questioned authority, or refused to sit quietly while adults lied about me, those were symptoms. Everything led back to the same conclusion: Something was wrong with Jeremy, and Jeremy needed to be medicated until he became easier to manage.
My eighteenth birthday ended my mother’s legal power over my medical decisions. It did not erase the years of damage. It did not give me back the childhood I spent walking through a chemical fog. But for the first time, the final decision belonged to me.
I stood over that sink and looked at the bottles. Seroquel. Clonidine. Trileptal. Lamictal. Guanfacine. The labels carried my name, but the treatment had never felt like mine. Each bottle had been prescribed by someone who saw me during an appointment, listened to another adult describe me, and made a judgment about what chemicals should alter my brain. I was the person swallowing the pills, yet I had the least authority in the room.
I opened the bottles and dumped every pill into the trash.
I did not taper. I did not call the doctors. I did not ask permission from the same system that had spent years ignoring my objections. I quit everything at once.
That decision was dangerous. I understand that now, and I am not advising anyone to copy it. Several of those medications can cause serious problems when stopped abruptly, especially after long-term use. A person coming off psychiatric or seizure medications should work with a qualified medical professional who actually listens to them. I did not have that relationship. I had a lifetime of being managed, restrained, labeled, and sedated. At eighteen, caution felt too much like continued surrender. But it came at a price. Realizing that my childhood psychiatrist was full of shit due to her own chosen ignorance gave me a contempt for any mental health care which caused me to dismiss the things I did need help for because I had never seen what treatment for those would feel like. This would come back to bite me in the ass many years later when the FBI would use it to fabricate a terrorism case. But thats for another book.
The pills hit the trash with a sound that was almost disappointing. There was no thunder. The mirror did not crack. No doctor burst through the door to stop me. A decade of chemical control ended with a handful of little taps against a plastic garbage bag.
Then my body began collecting the debt.
The Brain Comes Back Online
The first stage was physical. I sweated when the room was cold. My hands shook. My muscles felt restless, as though my body wanted to crawl out of itself and run in five directions. I would lie down exhausted and discover that exhaustion no longer meant sleep. My eyes stayed open while thoughts crashed into each other at full speed.
Sleep had once arrived because chemicals knocked me down. Without them, nighttime became a confrontation. I stared at ceilings. I watched darkness turn into gray morning light. My heart would race for no clear reason, then slow down enough for me to wonder whether something worse was happening. My body had adjusted to years of outside commands, and suddenly those commands were gone.
Clonidine and guanfacine affect blood pressure and the body’s stress response. Seroquel can heavily sedate a person. Trileptal and Lamictal are often used for seizures or mood stabilization. I had stopped all of them as casually as someone might stop drinking soda. My body did not consider it casual.
The emotional effects were worse.
Anger did not return politely. It came roaring back with ten years of accumulated interest. Small irritations became personal attacks. A misplaced object could make me furious. A dismissive tone could send heat through my entire body. I would feel an emotion before I understood what had caused it, and by the time my mind caught up, my body was already prepared for war.
Then the anger would disappear and confusion would take its place. I would sit there wondering whether the emotion had been real, whether it was withdrawal, or whether the drugs had hidden something that had always been inside me. My moods could shift so quickly that I stopped trusting them. One moment I felt more alive than I had in years. The next moment I felt like my skin was too tight and the world was making too much noise.
There is a specific terror in realizing you do not know where your personality ends and medication begins. Most people develop a sense of self gradually. They learn what excites them, how they process loss, what kind of pressure makes them angry, and what calms them down. I had been medicated since early childhood. I had no clean baseline. I could not look back and say, “This is who I was before the pills,” because the pills reached almost as far back as my memory.
My mind was waking up, but waking up is not always peaceful. Imagine being dragged out of a ten-year sleep while alarms are going off and strangers are arguing beside the bed. That was what my thoughts felt like. Everything arrived at once.
I began noticing connections faster. One idea would lead to another, then to something that appeared unrelated until my mind pulled the pieces together. Problems that once seemed flat now had depth. I could picture several possible outcomes at the same time. I could anticipate how people might react and then adjust my approach before they reacted.
That kind of thinking had always existed in me. The medication had not destroyed it, but it had placed weights around its ankles.
The same mind that made me difficult in a rigid classroom later made me effective in business and politics. I do not think in straight lines. I see systems, weak spots, incentives, escape routes, and contradictions. When everyone else accepts two available choices, my instinct is to ask who decided there were only two. That trait has allowed me to create order from chaos because chaos does not look random to me for very long. I start seeing the structure underneath it.
As a child, adults rarely treated that as intelligence. They treated it as opposition.
Jeltreta Holds the Line
My biological mother could never understand how to channel my rage. She helped create much of it, then used my reaction as evidence that I was defective. The more I resisted, the more dangerous I appeared. The more dangerous I appeared, the easier it became to justify another medication or a higher level of control.
Jeltreta was different.
She was my adoptive mother in every way that mattered. She did not need a biological connection or a court order to recognize what was happening inside me. She saw that the anger had a source. She understood that I was not some evil kid who woke up each morning searching for a new way to ruin everyone’s day. I was carrying fear, betrayal, humiliation, and years of having adults make decisions about my body while insisting they were helping me.
When my anger surged, she did not immediately threaten police, doctors, hospitals, or punishment. She let me speak. Sometimes I was loud. Sometimes what I said came out tangled because my thoughts were moving faster than my mouth could organize them. She listened for what was underneath the volume.
She did not excuse every behavior. That distinction matters. Understanding someone’s rage does not mean giving them permission to hurt people. She would tell me when I was wrong. She could call out the bullshit without reducing me to the bullshit. That gave her credibility with me, and credibility was something doctors had burned through years earlier.
She would help me slow the moment down. What had happened? What did I think it meant? Was I responding to the present situation, or was I responding to ten previous situations that felt similar? Could I do anything useful about it right now?
Those questions gave my anger somewhere to go. They turned a blast into information.
That was the guidance I had needed as a child. I did not need adults to erase my intensity. I needed someone to teach me how to aim it. Energy without direction can destroy a room. The same energy with discipline can build a company, organize a movement, or force an institution to answer questions it has avoided for years.
Jeltreta helped move me off the collision course I had been traveling. She did it without demanding that I crawl back to doctors and beg them to numb me again. She recognized that withdrawal was temporary, even when it felt endless. More than anything, she trusted that there was a real person underneath the chemical chaos.
That trust kept me from doubting myself completely.
There were moments when taking the pills again would have been easier. I knew sedation. Sedation was familiar. A person can become attached to almost any cage if the cage removes uncertainty. Freedom is harder because freedom makes you responsible for what you do with your own mind.
I stayed off them.
Days passed, then weeks. The sweating eased. My hands became steadier. Sleep returned in pieces. The emotional swings began losing some of their violence. I still had anger because the anger was real. Medication had suppressed it; medication had not resolved it. I had to learn what caused it and what I could do before it took control.
Cold turkey did not transform me into a peaceful person. That would be a clean lie written for an inspirational poster. I remained intense. I remained argumentative. I still had a talent for finding the exact nerve in an authority figure and jumping on it with both feet. But I could finally examine those qualities without five medications distorting the view.
I discovered that I was not empty underneath the diagnoses. I was fast.
The Gift Hidden Inside the Problem
My natural mind processes information in a way institutions often hate. Schools tend to reward linear thinking. A teacher gives a question, a student follows the approved method, and the student reaches the expected answer. Bureaucracies work the same way. They create steps, forms, chains of command, and narrow definitions of acceptable behavior.
My mind looks for the door nobody mentioned.
That does not mean I am always right. Intelligence can produce spectacularly stupid decisions when anger is driving, as the BB gun charge had already demonstrated. A fast mind can race directly into a wall. Speed becomes valuable when it is paired with control, and learning control took much longer than dumping pills into a trash can.
Still, coming off the medication allowed me to see what had been buried. I could improvise. I could read a room quickly. I could hear someone explain a rule and immediately identify the exception they hoped nobody would notice. When a plan collapsed, I did not freeze for long because my mind started generating alternatives.
Those traits later helped me survive situations that would have flattened people raised in safer conditions. They also made me a successful businessman who could enter disorder and see how to organize it. In politics, that same mental speed let me challenge people with better funding, stronger connections, and entire institutions behind them. They expected me to follow the normal script. I refused to acknowledge a script existed.
For years, the adults around me had tried to drug that quality into silence.
They were focused on the symptoms that inconvenienced them. I talked too much. I questioned instructions. I reacted strongly when I believed something was unfair. I refused to perform respect for people who had not earned it. Those traits created real problems, but they also contained useful information about who I could become.
A skilled adult would have asked how to teach me discipline without destroying the engine. Too many adults simply wanted to shut the engine off.
The medications reduced some behavior, and there may have been moments when a medication had a valid purpose. I am not claiming every psychiatric drug is evil or that nobody benefits from treatment. Some people need medication and receive real relief from it. My issue is with a system that medicates a child before it honestly examines the child’s home, trauma, fear, or need for stable guidance.
A pill can change behavior without changing what caused the behavior. That difference is massive. I take medication for depression, anxiety, and PTSD now. The difference is those are actually helping a legitimate problem not simply trying to cloak what society considers a problem.
If a child is furious because home is unsafe, sedation may make the classroom quieter. The home is still unsafe. If a boy cannot focus because his nervous system is waiting for the next threat, medication may make him easier to teach for a few hours. His body is still waiting for danger. When adults celebrate the improved behavior and ignore the source, the child learns that their pain matters less than everyone else’s comfort.
The Boys We Medicate
Energetic boys create headaches for systems designed around sitting still. They move, interrupt, compete, test limits, and sometimes turn pain into aggression because nobody has taught them another language. That does not mean every energetic boy is healthy or that every diagnosis is false. It means behavior must be understood in context.
Context was the first thing missing from my treatment.
The doctors saw charts. They saw reports from my mother. They saw a kid who could become angry and defiant. What they did not live with was the manipulation, the instability, or the experience of having my reality rewritten by an adult with authority. They did not see how maddening it was to tell the truth and then watch the person causing the harm become the trusted narrator.
Once the medical record labels a child, later doctors often read the label before meeting the human being. The old diagnosis shapes the new appointment. Resistance to the diagnosis becomes another symptom. Complaints about side effects can be dismissed as noncompliance. The system becomes nearly impossible for a child to challenge because every protest is converted into evidence supporting the system.
That is one reason body ownership became an ironclad principle for me. Whoever controls your body controls more than your comfort. They influence your energy, thoughts, emotions, memory, and willingness to resist. A child cannot meaningfully consent when refusing the pill brings threats, punishment, or forced treatment.
Turning eighteen gave me legal ownership on paper. Emotionally, I had to take it.
I do not believe a doctor’s title makes the doctor my enemy. I believe titles do not cancel my right to ask questions. What is this medication supposed to do? What are the risks? What happens if I stop? What alternatives exist? How much of this diagnosis comes from my behavior, and how much comes from the environment around me?
Any professional who becomes offended by informed questions is telling you something useful about their priorities and competence.
Real care includes the patient as a participant. Control gives orders and calls obedience recovery. I had lived under control long enough to recognize the difference.
Owning the Decision
The timing of all this was messy as hell. I was dealing with the BB gun charge, finishing my remaining school credits from home, losing my FBLA position, and trying to understand who I was without medication. My public identity had fallen apart just as my private identity was returning.
That combination could have destroyed me. It nearly did.
I could not blame the medication for driving the car during the BB gun incident. I could not blame withdrawal because the incident happened before I dumped the pills. I had made a reckless decision, and I had to own it. At the same time, I could finally examine the emotional machinery behind decisions like that.
My rage had never been properly trained. It had been suppressed until it leaked around the edges. Medication made me slower, but it did not make me wiser. Punishment made me cautious around certain consequences, but it did not teach me judgment. Jeltreta’s guidance began doing what chemicals and threats had failed to do. She helped me connect emotion to choice.
That connection later became central to how I operate. When a crisis hits, I feel the surge like anyone else. Sometimes I feel it stronger. But I have learned to ask whether the next move creates leverage or merely provides relief. Immediate relief is where terrible decisions live. The BB gun incident gave us a few minutes of satisfaction and months of consequences. Quitting medication gave me weeks of suffering, but it returned control of my mind for the rest of my life.
Both decisions came from defiance. One was petty and destructive. The other was deeply personal and, in my case, necessary. The difference was purpose.
This is how I began separating resistance from rebellion. Rebellion says, “You cannot tell me what to do.” Resistance asks, “What right do you have to control this, and what happens when I refuse?” One is emotional reflex. The other can become strategy.
I did not understand that distinction perfectly at eighteen. I was learning it through impact. Every mistake left a bruise, and every bruise gave me information if I was willing to look at it.
A Personal Risk Inventory
Taking ownership of your mind requires more than rejecting outside control. You also have to examine the people and habits that keep handing control away. The friend beside you, the feud consuming your attention, or the institution defining you can alter the direction of your life.
A simple risk inventory would have saved me from plenty of trouble. Look at each association and ask what you receive compared with what you risk. Some friendships provide trust, honest correction, opportunity, or support. Others offer a few minutes of excitement while carrying catastrophic legal, financial, or reputational consequences.
Identify the people who encourage conduct they would never accept responsibility for themselves.
List the worst realistic consequence of following them into their next bad idea.
Compare that consequence with the actual reward, without dressing temporary excitement up as loyalty.
Cut ties when the downside can destroy your future and the reward is little more than approval.
The same process applies to institutions. A doctor may offer useful treatment, but you still evaluate the risk. A school may offer another route to graduation, as Principal Conroy did when he let me complete credits at home. Taking responsibility does not mean passively accepting the harshest outcome. You admit what you did, make restitution where possible, and search for another legal route forward.
That is strategic restitution. You repair what can be repaired without surrendering your entire identity to the mistake.
Genuine loyalty does not require foolish complicity. A true friend can tell you to put down the weapon, turn the car around, leave the argument alone, or question a treatment that is harming you. The person who demands that you risk everything to prove your loyalty is not offering friendship. They are recruiting you as insurance against facing consequences alone.
Ask yourself which petty feuds are draining your focus right now. Ask who benefits from your anger. Then ask whether you are protecting your future or gambling it for the approval of people who will disappear when the charges arrive.
What Remained
After the worst of withdrawal passed, I was still me. That was the great discovery.
I had not vanished without the medications. I had not become the uncontrollable monster implied by years of warnings. I was rough around the edges and overloaded with unresolved trauma. I also had intelligence, humor, ambition, and a mind capable of seeing possibilities other people missed.
The drugs had never fully erased me. They had muffled me.
Once the fog lifted, I understood why institutions had always found me difficult. My natural intensity does not submit easily. I question narratives that depend on silence. I become suspicious when powerful people insist that obedience is for my own good. Those instincts later shaped the political activist who stood against governors, police, prosecutors, and federal agents. They shaped the businessman who could walk into situations everyone else called impossible and begin sorting the pieces.
Fearlessness did not appear from nowhere. It grew each time I learned that an authority figure could be wrong, a diagnosis could be incomplete, and a threat could lose its power once examined. By eighteen, I had already survived years of people claiming they knew my mind better than I did. Dumping those bottles was my declaration that access to my body would no longer equal ownership.
I would make many mistakes after that birthday. Some would be far more serious than anything I had done in Belleville. Freedom does not guarantee wisdom. It merely returns the decision to the person who must live with the result.
That is the burden nobody advertises when discussing autonomy. If you demand ownership, you also inherit responsibility. You cannot reject the doctor, ignore the institution, follow your own judgment, and then blame everyone else when your judgment fails. You must study the risk, accept the consequences, correct course, and keep moving.
I dumped the pills because I needed to know who existed underneath them. The answer was not a cured person. The answer was a person who had never needed to be erased in the first place.
My anger needed direction. My energy needed work worthy of it. My mind needed room. Jeltreta gave me guidance without demanding submission, and that difference changed the course of my life.
The bathroom trash held years of prescriptions. The person standing above it held something the bottles never could.
I held the final say.