Back in 2020, things were fucked up enough. Trump was President, and I was working on my Masters, desperate for some skills to help make things less shit in the world. Then I had my first seizure. And then we all know what happened with the COVID shit. Early on, the seizures were few and far between, so they were mostly just a scary thing to distract from my usual thoughts of gender and all that nonsense (more on that later), but of course seizure had to become more frequent and concerning as time went on.

I obviously went to the hospital after the first seizure. Or, well, it was the first confirmed seizure. I’d had another incident a while back where I woke up and had fallen on the floor. At the time I just…got back in bed. But in retrospect it was probably a case of a more serious incident. A roommate also swears she heard something previously that, in retrospect, was probably a seizure. Regardless, the first confirmed seizure got me to the hospital where they asked all the rude but understandable questions about whether I’d taken any drugs. Then they did the swarm of tests, some of which I didn’t remember, which probably should have clued me in. That’s when they found the cyst. Or tumor? It turns out the terms are interchangeable which I did not know, but which would be nice to know before people start to blab all over the place about your noncancerous cyst. We fondly (or not so fondly) named mine Dinkleburg, which is a name that’s always said angrily.

There’s much more story to be told about my brain nonsense, but for now, let’s just juggle all the bullshit pieces of “individuality.” So they are the seizures. At the same time, I was wrestling with gender and wound up settling on nonbinary. I don’t really have much to say there. Just. Gender is stupid and made me feel weird. Those two pieces would be more than enough on their own. But if you rewind a little further to my undergraduate years, I’m discovering my asexuality. And somewhere through all of that is my mental health—or lack thereof. A fun mix of depression, anxiety, and OCD.

Oh! And I almost glossed right over the part where I was in the doctor’s office for something totally unrelated (I seriously don’t remember what at this point), she saw a lump, and just like that I was being treated for thyroid cancer. Because when you’re already being treated for your brain cyst, why not throw in some surprise thyroid cancer?

If I could give all this up and go back to being boring, I’d do it in a second. The truth is, I’m still boring. I’m just sitting here watching Hallmark movies with a tube coming out of my stomach. I genuinely worry people think I have Munchausen or am just looking for attention. Hell, I might think that. But I don’t want attention! I want to crawl in a hole! The goal of this blog is just to give me a place to vent.