The Beginning of Everything

the midst of a rainy day, somehow walking, somehow having had the foresight to hold an umbrella, heading to the school to get the kids and shepherd them home, my brain congratulating me on having such a brilliant idea, for doing the things a parent is supposed to do, getting her children from school, bringing an umbrella on a rainy day. I’ll find myself standing, making dinner, and discovering that we have run out of butter, and then walking the two minutes to the corner store and remembering once I get there that I was there to buy butter, like a normal person who buys butter at the corner store when they run out of butter. These are normal things a person should do. But I should not be doing these things. I should be lying in bed, flat, preserving what little cerebrospinal fluid I have, allowing gravity to help it pool in my head, support my brain, keep it even slightly cushioned. I should not be standing, the fluid draining, my brain sinking, bruising, a fish out of water, dying. But I am overtaken sometimes by the desire to accomplish things, to organize, to make things right, to power through, to be okay, and after lying flat for twelve hours, eighteen hours, twenty-four hours, I feel the rush of overconfidence, the boost of having my brain irrigated even somewhat. And so I find myself in the kitchen, for instance, standing, at least for brief periods, preparing snacks, or wiping counters, or feeding cats, or making dinner, or putting things away, my arms and hands moving like someone else’s arms and hands, my body moving through the motions like a remote-controlled robot, an artificial intelligence passing almost as human.

I am aware that these are bad ideas, and yet I’m so frustrated by being flat, so helpless with pain, so frustrated and trapped-feeling that I am energized by the sheer rebelliousness of these bad ideas, which are not actually bad at all (or even legitimate ideas, in the true sense of the word) for a normal person. When I am flat, and lulled by the presence of a little fluid between my brain and skull, I am as fooled as I am when I am walking and in motion. The diversion of a momentary respite from the worst of things fills me with misplaced confidence, and for a moment I am full of plans, full of thoughts, full of guilt and shame and terror, full of ambition to get out of bed and back into my real life. Full of resistance to the notion that this could possibly be, at this moment and maybe for the foreseeable future, my real life.

I could ask someone else to go to the store. I could ask someone else to pick up my children on a rainy day. And I do, as much as it makes this my real life to ask favors of other people, as much as it is an admission of defeat to acknowledge my helplessness, the fact that I need things, that I have needs, that I need help, I do. But I still keep trying. I stand up for longer than I should. I make a rare attempt at dinner and an even rarer appearance at the dinner table with my kids, sitting with them even as I can feel myself crying from being up, feel myself getting dumber the longer I’m up, all of us laughing at the way I forget words, or say wrong words, or mean a thing I couldn’t articulate, or articulate a thing I didn’t mean. And then I retreat again to the darkness of my room, shrouded in curtains to block out the light, my bed piled with pillows I can’t use as I lie flat, flat, flat to counteract having been upright for so long.

One day, seduced by the idea that I need to go to the store again, ignoring the fact that I could easily order what I need from an app on my phone, compelled by the immediacy, the fantasy of being able to get the thing I needed by myself, without help, I decide to go to the store. But this time, I come up with what my brain assures me is a fool-proof plan: I will write myself a shopping list. This way, even if I find myself disoriented when I get there, butting up against the fifteen-minute time limit of my ability to think with admittedly limited clarity, I will have information at the ready, alerting me to what my purpose is. I would not return home empty-handed. Genius! My brain congratulates me as I open up the Notes app on my phone and type instructions for my future self.

I walk to the store the way people talk about driving on autopilot, the car taking you where you need to go even though you yourself are daydreaming, or talking to a passenger, or otherwise not thinking about your destination. I make it there, and, predictably, feel the usual overwhelming rush of information overload. The lights, the exhausting amount of information to take in, the vertigo of so many products on so many shelves in so many aisles. The pain is overwhelming and feels like a punishment—How brazen of you, how prideful, how foolish of you to think that you could do this—and as if on cue I feel the tears beginning to stream down my face, my left arm disappearing.

But then my brain remembers: You wrote yourself a note! I take out my phone, triumphant and relieved and congratulating myself for having been so forward-thinking as to provide such crucial information for Future Me, who is now Present Me, crying in the middle of a Walgreens, unsure why she’s there in the first place—only to open the app and be confronted with the truth of what I had written. I stare at it, trying to comprehend it, for surely I had been more thorough, I remember being thorough,