Before I Fall Apart

What are you supposed to do when your life suddenly turns on its head? What are you supposed to do when that time comes right before the tutorial for life is finished? Granted, the tutorial we’re all offered tends to be a pretty bad one, but how are we supposed to know the difference until we reach that next stage and realize how poorly prepared we were?

Imagine having your family put all of their hope and belief in you from an early age. You’re smart, you do great in school without even trying, you’re a far better writer than anyone else your age. You struggle with depression and anxiety as most teenagers do, but you have this constant reassurance that you can be greater. Everyone tells you how great you can be, and how confident they are in you. You don’t have much else to live for yet, so you want to reach those expectations. You want to give back to those who have helped you along the way, and you decide to go ahead and be the best you can be. Then you have a seizure right before graduating high school. No family history of epilepsy, no signs or symptoms previously. Sitting on the beach with your best friend and your mom, eating chips. Blankness. You wake up in an ambulance, confused, sore, blood in your mouth from a ravaged tongue. You ask the paramedic what the hell is going on, and he smiles sadly at you and says “You had a seizure, bud.”

The next few months you have a few more seizures, you go through testing, you start some meds you really don’t want to take. You never actually learn anything about your seizures, but life has to go on. At first, it isn’t really a big deal. To you. Your mom is freaking out, but you just earned what’s essentially a full-ride scholarship from a top-ten public university, paying out around $20,000 a year. That money is something you weren’t counting on before your preparations for college, and it promises a much easier life for you and your mother.

So the seizures are just another struggle to push through on your path to greatness. After all, everyone believes in you.

So you ignore it, and you push back the issues that it causes. You don’t take your meds. You have a seizure your first semester in the shared bathroom, and administrators assume you’re on drugs and search your room. You have more seizures your first semester, and you retreat into yourself. Your depression and anxiety are getting worse, but you pretend nothing is wrong. You’re becoming a functional alcoholic, and you aren’t even 21 yet, but when you’re drunk you don’t have to think about how your brain doesn’t work properly. You drink yourself to incoherence every opportunity that arises. Your tendency to get wasted beyond belief drives away the girl you met in class and started dating after your first year ended, and your confidence shrivels up. You just can’t admit that to anyone, even yourself.

This is around the time you realize your memory isn’t nearly as good as it used to be. You used to memorize material near immediately, and now you’re having a hard time remembering what’s due when. Your confidence is lost and your depression is constant. You can’t make friends on your own because your anxiety makes it impossible to speak to people like a normal person. You don’t spend as much time with your friends because you’re too depressed to leave your room. You show up to classes on a bare minimum schedule, because being seen in public is too much. At home, everyone thinks everything is going fine. In reality, you’re ordering in too much and gaining an obscene amount of weight, and barely keeping your GPA at a passable level.

This is the first two and a half years of college, and somehow it gets worse. Eventually, you swap out the drinking for marijuana, and you start taking your meds after your doctor calls you out directly for not even making the effort. He makes a point that strikes deep into your core - you won’t be cleared to drive until you go a certain amount of time without a seizure, and the meds can help. By now you feel like a burden to everyone you know. That freedom of mobility is something you’ve been craving for so long, it becomes the singular reason to take your meds properly. So you do it. You may smoke pretty often, but at least you aren’t blacking out to escape constantly. You go a few months, then a year without a seizure.

Nothing changes. You’re still broken inside. Your confidence is shattered and it won’t come back. You can’t bring yourself to spend time with your friends so you lock yourself up in your room so they can’t judge you. You’re desperate to stop being the way you are, but you’re afraid of taking the steps you need to escape the prison your seizures crafted for you. Your memory is getting worse, still. You’re struggling along through classes, and your constant thought is “what if this just keeps getting worse?”

You don’t want to struggle like this forever.

The next year passes, and you graduate with a degree in a field you don’t know if you care for, with no experience, in the middle of a global pandemic and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Thoughts of suicide run rampant in your mind. They’ve been there the whole time, just barely keeping out of the light. You have to keep pushing on, though. Everyone believes in you. It would seem their belief was misplaced, though. You can’t find a new job when you come back home, so you spend four months with no income. You get your driver’s license, after two years of no seizures, and five years of waiting. A month later you have another seizure after trying to go about your day on three hours of sleep. That doesn’t even count the fact that you’re terrified of cars now. Every time you’re in a car you’re giddy with anxiety deep in your bones that you can’t explain. Is it a hope for someone to crash into whatever side of the car you’re in, to end your miserable reality? Or is it fear for the same thing to happen and hurt the people you care about, or a fear of being deprived of a chance at the future you were promised? Regardless, you can’t drive until you go a few more months seizure-free. That freedom you were so desperate for has transformed into an inexplicable dread, not just for you, but for the people around you. Nobody knows how much pleading goes into every “drive safe” you use to say goodbye.

So here you are, an anxiously depressed emotional wreck. Every day you have to resist the urge to curl up into a little ball and cry yourself to oblivion. Getting out of bed is nearly impossible, and you have to consume as much media as possible to distract yourself from facing the hard truths of your situation. Thinking too hard about difficult circumstances gives you a headache, and you live in constant fear of triggering a seizure through stress. How are you supposed to be great when you live like this? Bravery is supposed to be borne of fear, yet how do you use that bravery when you’re afraid of your own biological functionality on top of the outside world? You’re letting everyone around you down, and you can see it in their faces when they ask why you aren’t working. You can hear it when they ask what your next plans are.

You’re just so tired. So very, very tired.

Your only refuge is a little black notebook you got a few years ago for your birthday. You got it when you were more of a poet than a mental disaster, but you can still write down poems you hate about the cards you’ve been dealt. Odes to your depression, expressions of your anxiety, rants against the unfair reality of life. Part of you wants to hone your craft as a writer before you fall apart. Maybe you can become a great writer before you can’t remember what room you’re in and why. Maybe your brain will keep functioning long enough for you to release a popular series, popular enough to make the money to take care of your mom after you’re gone. She deserves some kind of security, for always believing in you, even if it’s clear as day that you’re broken beyond repair. You write down ideas for novels in that little black notebook, too.

That last-minute gift idea that went a year or two without being touched is your rock. It’s the last handhold you have, dangling on the edge of a cliff. It might just be the difference-maker, you know? With it, you can try to work through the unpleasant confines of your negative mind. With it, you can pull yourself back over the edge. One small notebook, a place of comfort and relief and progress and reflection. The blank pages are thankfully indifferent, only patiently waiting to be filled. It seems strange, to pin all your hopes on something so mundane.

Then again, weren’t many hopes placed on you?