when your brain hates you

exactly 15 days ago I underwent one of the scariest and most humbling 47 minutes of my life.

if you’ve never experienced a head CT scan, allow me to walk you through it.

you have to sit perfectly still in a painfully narrow, white tube (that can barely fit an adult); with a helmet over your head that successfully ads to the overflowing sense of panic, otherwise known as claustrophobia; all the while you’re forced to listen the loudest, most bizarre alien machine sounds barraging through your ear drums.

you’re alone, you’re scared shitless and you find yourself negotiating with yourself, with God, and some other God, just to be ok.

you think to yourself, “stupid ungrateful brain, do you know how many books I read for you? I thought we were a team.”

but, time flows, as time does,
and after 47 minutes (or was it 3 hours?) you get out thinking the worst has passed, at least that’s what your girlfriend tells you, and now all you have to do is wait…
for 14 agonizing days.

you are now Schrödinger’s cat, meow.

imagine watching a dubbed movie where you can still hear the original audio in the background, barely above a whisper,
that whisper becomes your daily internal voiceover, only yours is yelling, so much so that you can’t actually hear the dialogue anymore.

the googling, the worrying, the ever-present fear…

the one thing you cherish most about yourself, your imagination, turns against you, building worst case scenarios faster than you can stop them,
of course you know you shouldn’t, of course you do it anyway.
stupid brain.

from the second you do that scan, anxiety becomes your daily affirmation.
every day becomes a mix of desperation and hope.
every day you try to forget, and not to forget.
your mind has a mind of its own.

after exactly 14 days, with your girlfriend’s hand in your hand,
you log in to see your results.

relief

“sometimes I wish I could save you from your mind” she says.

me too babe, me too.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

today is day 19 of the year, there are 346 days remaining of 2023.