it comes down to the art of living on

Well, the first day of classes went better than expected. Or at least, better than I expected. All 4 of my professors (5 classes, 1 prof for 2 classes) are nice men and I think that all of my classes, with the exception of math, will be fun and non-boring. Except for math, they're all upper level courses that have more work than I had in any of my classes way back when. Hopefully I will be able to pace myself and not get burned out while trying hard not to get behind.

Being on campus today felt weird. It was the first time I'd been there since September 27, 2005. Why I remember the exact day, I don't know. Oh yeah, it was the day the world fell apart. As I was walking the halls, the memory of that day came flooding back to me. I had my first seizure in the parking lot of the school that day and as it was dying down and I was trying to figure out who I was and where I was, my best friend texted me from our chemistry class telling me our professor was going to drop me if I didn't show up. I had already missed almost every class because I was already sick and didn't know it. I remember being freaked out about having to tell my parents I'd been dropped from a class, so despite the agonizing pain in my head, I decided to stumble in to the building and sit through class. Everything was moving in slow motion, sounds were muffled, and it all looked blurry. I must have looked terrible as I entered the classroom because just as I opened the door, my friend and our professor ran over, pushed me out of the room and shut the door. I couldn't tell them what was wrong because I could hardly speak, so the prof told me to go home and not to come back until I was coherent. I walked back to my car and never went back to school.

In the long months following that day as I tried to come to grips with my crumbled life, I pushed away anything that had to do with who I was before that day. I didn't want to go back to the castle I lived in or see my apartment, I couldn't look at any of my cute decorations and kitchen stuff that made my place homey, I couldn't talk to my friends, I couldn't listen to the same music or watch the same movies, I couldn't read any of my books from school or go back to the school, I couldn't ride in my car, I couldn't go downtown, I couldn't wear my old clothes, and I couldn't look at any pictures of life. I pushed everything away in a huge effort to forget everything that had made my life fabulous. In the back of my mind though, I thought I was waiting to get better, to be cured, and then I would go back to all of that. I seriously thought that I would lie in bed, wait to be fixed, that I would be magically healthy in one day and then I would have my life back. On September 27, 2005, I also thought that I would be fine in 6 weeks.

As time has worn on and almost 120 weeks have passed now, reality has set in and I know that I cannot sit on my bed waiting for the day when I'm healthy again. It has occurred to me just in the last several months that I may never be healthy. It's possible that I will live the rest of my life like this, and sitting on a bed is no way to live it.

So with the help of my family and church family, in the last year I've been trying to take steps to live a somewhat normal life in spite of my problems, and to try and create a life around me that will allow me to function but still be flexible enough to handle my problems. That probably makes no sense, but it's late...

Anyway, in the last year I've been purposefully exposing myself to some of those things I was pushing away...parts of my old life. I wanted to try to deal with them and accept my life the way it is now instead of trying to bury my old self and never think about it again. I was becoming emotionally stunted by being content with bitterness and not accepting life the way it was.

I'm going back to school knowing that I'm not the same person I was on September 27, 2005, but also knowing that I can't bury myself by avoiding that school and everything else. Although painful, going back to school on the same campus, in the same classrooms, with some of the same professors, in the same car, listening to the same music, and buying DrPepper from the same vending machines, are just a few of the steps essential to me moving on.