The Bowie baby doesn't allow sad.
The first rule of a good story is that the thing you think is the monster is never the real monster. 2025, apparently, took a masterclass in narrative structure.
The year kicked off with a simple, almost cliché, villain: cancer. Uterine. The kind of thing that has a clear story arc. Diagnosis. Panic. Surgery. The Big Fight. I went in, they brought out the robots and the lasers, and they cut the poison out of me. Full hysterectomy. Scars and Steri-Strips and a pathology report that screamed, "You're clean! We got it all! You win!"
And for about three weeks, I was a god.
For the first time in my adult life, the engine wasn't rattling. The background noise of imminent-fucking-death that has been the soundtrack to my life since I was a teenager finally went silent. I felt immortal. I thought, "This is it. I'm finally healthy." I actually believed the story was over.
Spoiler alert: that was just the inciting incident.
The real story started when the neurologist got a look at the pre-op brain scans my cancer doc had ordered. Just a safety check, you know. Make sure the overhead wiring is screwed in tight before you start renovating the basement.
Turns out the whole goddamn building is condemned.
Here's the thing about your brain. It's just meat. Wetware. And my wetware, my OS, is shot to shit. The neurologist put the pictures on the screen, and it was a goddamn Jackson Pollock of things that have already died. Little white stingrays of nothingness. Warped diamonds of dead zones. What the reports call "severe for age small vessel disease," "old lacunar infarcts," and "intracranial atherosclerotic disease."
Translation: The plumbing in my head is rusted shut, and it's been causing a series of strokes for years. But the damage is so weird, so "extreme for my age," that she's pretty sure there's a second gunman on the grassy knoll. Her primary suspect is Multiple Sclerosis.
So now we're in the second act. The part of the story where the hero realizes the monster was just a distraction, and the real horror is that the very ground she's standing on is toxic. The cancer didn't matter. It was a fake-out. A cheap jump scare before the real villain showed up. And the real villain is my own brain, which is actively, methodically, bricking itself.
The euphoria of being "cured" is gone. It's been replaced by a quiet, clinical acceptance that I'm on a clock. And it's ticking fast. Making it to 50 feels like a stretch goal now. The language buffer in my brain is already glitching—the aphasia, the memory holes, the inability to focus. Sooner or later, the file is going to corrupt for good.
This is the new map. This is how it is.
So here's the plan. The Final Act. I intend to keep teaching my writing courses for as long as I can. Guiding other writers through the architecture of their own stories is something that still sparks a light in the middle of all this. But that light is dimming. After I get these next few terms wrapped up, I'm done.
I'm cashing in my chips, going on disability, and I am going to write...while I can. I am going to bleed on the page until my cognitive function is a dial tone. I am going to finish as many of my own broken, beautiful things as I can while I still know what words are for.
What this means for those reading this, my friends, my colleagues, my people: you're going to see the glitches.
I will repeat myself. I will post the same meme three times in a day or five times in the same week because my memory is a sieve. I might write a comment or a message with a word that makes no sense. My brain is going to lag. I am asking you, just once, for this: if you see it happen, just know that it's a symptom of the wiring shorting out. A little grace goes a long way.
This isn't an apology. It's the user manual for my new, faulty operating system. I am not asking for pity. I'm just letting you know what to expect as I try to land this plane with one engine on fire.
The clock is ticking. Time to get to work.
My new terrible haircut!
No comments:
Post a Comment