Code Void

“Pick which statement fits you the best: Do you like to work with people or do you find people annoying?”

Wow, there’s not a lot of variation in that question. I picked “find people annoying” because that was the truth.

“Do you think that you can have great personal growth or do you think that you will always be sad instead?”

In my current state, I could barely understand the strange, weighted way of the questions. I looked at my hand, gripping the little plastic pen and tried to move it along the bright screen my test was being projected on. Why was I taking this test, what was the point of it? The other students around me had been excited to learn about their personalities, so much that they could hardly wait to take the government mandated test, but I didn’t really care. Just like everything, I found that things would only be what they were and could not be described as anything else. Maybe this view caused me to believe that personal growth was just a myth, but it really made me wonder if it was even worth knowing my personality. In all senses of the word, I was a worthless person. I tried to move to the next section, but we were discouraged to skip questions, even temporarily. The way we completed the test was being monitored, such as the length of time spent on a specific question or if we skipped sections.

“Multiple choice: What do you do to relax?
a) Watch TV
b) Hang out with friends
c) Exercise
d) Do a creative project
e) Do more work”

I choose e automatically, feeling nothing about any of the other options.

“Who do you want to be when you grow up?
a) A doctor
b) An artist
c) An engineer
d) A media professional
e) I don’t know”

I choose e again and continued with the test. I didn’t think I could grow up, so who I would be didn’t matter.

It took a long time for my results to get back and, for a long time, I was worried. Any kid without this personality categorization past the sixth grade was considered an anomaly. Such mistakes would get a person sent to a special school. I didn’t want to get sent to a special school. As my classmates learned their personality types (charismatic, curious, cautious) I became even more anxious to know my score. Finally, the results were uploaded to my school records and came with a warning that got me called to the principal’s office. “Depressive, Gretta,” said the principal, looking disappointed.

“Depressing?” I asked, not understanding the nature of the statement.

He showed me the digital readout of my score, which said “Depressive” and had a couple of red alarm symbols scattered all over it. At the top of the file it read “code void” like an emergency code. I wondered if there was a protocol for this, for me.

“Is that my personality type?” I asked.

“Yes. What did we ever to do you to give you a depressive type?”

“Nothing, no one ever did anything to me.”

“Then you’re ungrateful?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did you parents do something to make you depressed?”

“No, no one did anything, they treated me very nice.”

“Then what’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing, I’m just me.”

“Then why did you score depressive on the test? We usually only see that in abuse and trauma survivors.”

“Is the trauma of living enough?”

The principal seemed to get big and red and I got scared, so I averted my eyes to stare at the carpet on the other side of the room. “You should be happy,” he said in a voice that seemed to be barely controlled.

“Maybe,” I answered indecisively, looking at a particularly clean spot of the carpet, free of dirt and dust. I looked at my hands. They were perfectly smooth because my mother put lotion on them and manicured my nails.

My family took care of me, that was not an issue. I never felt unloved, I never felt unhappy, I just felt nothing. I went to school, was a model, quiet student, then I went home and sat reading books from which I gained no meaning or purpose. There was no should or shouldn’t about them, as was related to the rest of my life. Nothing mattered and nothing has direction.

“Well, we’ll have to prescribe some sort of treatment plan for you. I mandate that you get involved with something at you school, a club or a sport.”

“If you think that will help.”

“I only want to mitigate the terrible danger you have put yourself in by deciding to be depressed.”

“I didn’t decide,” I answered quietly, now looking at a matrix of pointless awards on the principal’s wall. Did he get those because he decided not to be depressed?

He handed me a packet and told me to show my parents, but that I wasn’t allowed to look at it. I left the office feeling like I was in a trance, that instead of moving through air, I was moving through thick syrup. Would my parents say the same thing the principal had said? Ungrateful child, lazy, useless, selfish. I didn’t know and I was anxious.

I opened the packet as I waited on a bench outside the school to be picked up. On the top was a letter to unassuming parents. My parents were not unassuming. It read: To the parents of Gretta,

Your child is a depressive. Her depressive nature is so strong that it is labeled Code Void. This personality type is considered dangerous to social order, which means that, left untreated by mandatory social modeling and happiness counseling, she will develop thought patterns that will damage other people. Her tendency to not care about anything means that she is liable to disregard her own life and the lives of others and that, in all ways, important markers of success don’t matter to her. She will have no goals an aspirations and instead, decide to be a hedonist looking for cheap thrills. A drug addict, a teen mother, a failure. If you do not step in to stop her from developing this terrible personality, you will find your daughter to be an embarrassment.”

Was that really all I was destined to be? A failure? I closed my eyes and turned the page. Statistics about people like me who didn’t have interventions. I saw where I ranked on a depressive scale. There was Code 2: Suicidal, Code 1: Driven, and Code 0: Void. Void meant that nothing mattered, not life, not death, not arbitrary goals, not success. I had, apparently reached a point where I was this numb so that I could not even hide my feelings. Later in the packet, I read a theory that depressives were slowly losing their souls, a process difficult to reverse. All through it, I wasn’t surprised. I knew people like me weren’t allowed to be in public because we couldn’t smile. Because our lack of understanding of meaning and reversal of purpose were infectious and our dead, emotionless stares scared people. We were impossible to love.

I hated the idea, so I took the packet and tossed it in a trash can. At least I could have the nice fantasy that someone could love me, instead I realized that my entire being was wrong and to love someone was to hurt them at the same time.

However, they were right when they said that I thought nothing mattered, even if they didn’t realized that these thoughts were no fault of my own.