' 1. I read the online account of a man who, after fifteen years of hitting gascid – nitrous oxide and acid in tandem – developed a B-vitamin deficiency. This may sound rather benign, but it made him begin to lose feeling in his fingertips. The numbness spread up his arms to his core, and he was soon paralyzed. After what he summarized as the better part of a year of ‘psychological horror,’ he emerged from the episode fully functional again, but with one caveat; he had fried his neurons so badly that every single incoming sensation from each nerve in his body was received by his brain as agonizing pain. He has spent the last fourteen years enduring this. He has tried to commit suicide several times, simply to end his constant physical suffering. He is still here today. His will is stronger than I can imagine; I was afraid while reading his story.
2. The guy who said ‘all women want in a man is confidence’ wasn’t ugly or poor.
3. Once, I chugged enough coffee and energy drinks on a long-empty stomach to experience a moderate overdose, to the tune of something between five hundred and seven hundred milligrams of caffeine. This may sound rather benign, but as I laid on the floor of my high school’s bathroom, convulsing, I had, up ‘til that point, never lived through a more unappealing chemical episode. The nausea was all-consuming. At two thousand milligrams, I would die outright. At the level I had ingested, my heart beat three times every second for five and a half hours. During the peak hours, I could have sworn I hit a steady two hundred-plus beats-per-minute. I hammered out a several-page text to my father with the same haste, cataloging my plight. My heart probably aged fourteen years, enduring that.
4. There was a time in my life when I stopped looking into mirrors. It took me seven years to develop a coping mechanism. Ten years after that, I found myself spending minutes with eyes locked in the mirror, examining that foreign face. Some call it confidence. That behavior scares me more than anything else in my life.
5. I stopped looking at your familiar face a couple years ago. I was afraid of your gaze begetting your touch, and those lightning bolts of pain shooting from each of your fingertips, through the front of my torso into my spine. I am afraid to tell you that you’re hardly on my mind as much as myself these days. I am not confident that I could tell you this, were I given the chance. My heart is facing its midlife crisis now, and I am still figuring out how to treat you like an adult would.