I struggle to look back on my past.
To remember the girl I used to be.
A practical stranger, who looked at the future and felt butterflies in her stomach. Someone who felt excitement and wonder at everything that awaited her.
She was a girl who couldn't wait for the future.
Looking back now, at that child filled with hopes and dreams, this feeling of sadness washes over me. I look at her and can only describe what I feel as sorrow as I now hold the knowledge of the life that awaits her.
I truly don't intend for this to be a monologue lamenting my life.
I'm extremely grateful for everything that I have accomplished, the amazing moments I have lived, the friendships I have formed all over the world and the incredible journeys I have been blessed to experience.
However, there is a part of me that wishes I could go back and be that girl who thought the world was at her feet and anything was possible.
The hardest part to accept is when I travel back through my memories and watch as her dreams are slowly shattered, knowing I possess absolutely no power to change the adversities that await her.
The funny thing is that it's probably harder to relive it than it was to actually live it.
Because I now have a bird's eyes view of every decision, every action and reaction that caused her to become this. To become me.
For the past year, I have been advocating for people with narcolepsy and anyone else who needs the support of someone with a louder voice to break through the noise.
I can be that voice. I want to be that voice.
I will be truthful with you though, this journey is not an easy one.
There are sacrifices involved that most people don't see.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe I take it too seriously. I can't really answer that, to be honest.
But if I can no longer be my own hero, maybe I can be someone else's.
One of my biggest fascinations has always been listening to people's stories. I truly value listening to what someone else has lived, experienced, and learned in their own personal journeys.
It's as though for that moment, I can completely step outside myself and appreciate the struggles that someone else has endured.
It's a humbling experience.
Throughout this year, I have told my story more times than I can count, to the point that I can't even hear it myself any longer.
I prefer to listen.
But there is one important element of this entire endeavour that I have not yet disclosed, and that I feel is an important part of this story I have been sharing with you, and that is the inspiration for this blog's title, "Life in Flashes".
Let us rewind to October 2019.
I have been working between 10 to 12 hours a day for almost 3 months. I've been sleeping no more than 5 hours each day. I eat breakfast and fail to remember to eat again only at the end of each day.
It's 2 am on October 15th 2019, and I'm catching up on an endless stack of paperwork that I wasn't able to attend to throughout the day.
Suddenly, a flash of something catches my eye, and I sit there staring into the air for a long minute wondering what it was that I had failed to see.
Getting back to my work, there it goes again, and I think to myself that it was probably just a mosquito...however it is strange as I am usually the first person to feel whenever there is a mosquito in the room.
I pay no mind and get back to the task at hand.
A while later, my vision is losing clarity and I feel as though I can see various little specks flashing before my eyes. I blink and they vanish. I look away and they reappear. I felt slightly itchy all of a sudden, but again I pushed the feeling aside.
I'm beginning to blink more than usual, a familiar sign that the tiredness I evade all day, is threatening to finally overpower me.
Against my will, it triumphs and in a flash, I'm waking up with my head on the "oh-so-important" papers I had meant to finish that night.
The rest of the day, it feels as though every time I blink, I lose minutes of my life, having absolutely no memory of how I got from one place to the next.
And so "Life in Flashes" was born.
The "flashes" I was seeing, that I thought were mosquitos, were actually the beginning of a very dangerous decline.
The next 4 days consisted of a string of hallucinations of believing that my apart apartment was infested with insects. Four days of feeling bugs crawling all over my body, incessant scratching and uncompromising paranoia.
If you have never had the displeasure of experiencing a hallucination, then I will describe to you what it feels like.
You probably know what it feels like when you sense a foreign entity making its way, slowly up your arm. Every prick of its 4 legs (or more) legs, involuntarily marking their trajectory one at a time.
Imagine this feeling and multiply it by one hundred.
There's one on your arm, one on your leg, another reaching the extremities of your lower back and quickly joined by another and another. And no matter how much you struggle, twist, contort and wrestle, it's pointless.
Can you picture this for the next 96 hours of your life?
And even when it stops, the remnants of this trauma will trigger your paranoia for the next 2 months.
Your brain will continue to send signals to your body as though they were still present.
And once you finally understand that none of it was real, even though it felt so frighteningly so, you will never again be able to trust anything that your body shows or tells you.
The mind is undoubtedly a fascinating organ.
The power it holds to construct and deconstruct the world around you is extraordinary.
This is why, when I look back at my younger self, knowing that this is the life that awaits her, seek to understand my sorrow...for this is not the life she envisioned.