When I was young,  school was my place. As an awkward oddity I found solace in words and reading.

Wasn't long 'til I was being called brilliant. Those days were some of the few times in my childhood life I felt strong and confident and worth something.

I was sent to an advanced school. I ate books like candy. I had a passion for knowledge and wisdom.

So what happened?

As my head got cloudier, I fell more and more behind. Well, behind for me. I was still an AP kid, so nerdy and there. But I was also quiet and, for AP, pretty average.

I stopped excelling in sciences and math as much as I used to. Everything got so much blurrier around then. As my head got more and more uncontrollable, the less brilliant I became. And the more I hated myself for it.

I could barely take time to feel everything but the raging inferno of emotions that was slowly taking over my life. I had learned to lie too well about it, so well that it was nearly my entire being by the time I finally got to stopping it.

For years I had to accept going from brilliant to average, and I accepted it as just my place. That I excelled in youth but dropped off and being good at writing would be my last, final brilliancy.

Then, nearly a decade after things began to go nuclear,  my head began to cool.

I sometimes fear how clear everything feels, how the touch of my fingertips on my keyboard still feel beautiful but in a less insatiable way. How the sky is blue and everything makes sense and how my mind craves to know more and more.

I am excelling. I am standing in front of classes that I am clearly not as qualified for and doing well. And, by god, the whole beauty of it is that doing well does not correlate to this buzzing going on in the back of my head as if its about to explode. I just feel it. This energy coursing through me that loves to know and remember and learn and do everything in my power to make everything I do wonderful. Its like magic but I know its not, its me. I didn't know "me" could be brilliant anymore. I was nearly certain "me" couldn't. I was a writer, and I was content.

But now there's this thing inside me I haven't felt in years, that has two wide eyes and wants to feel the world. Its curious and strong. I didn't think I was that strong either. I thought I just knew emotions and pretty words.

I sit here, though, and I am brilliant. It feels so arrogant and cocky to say, but I'm me again. I'm the little girl who got lost in the fire, but I thought she burned and died.

Yet as my head finally cools and the ashes fall, she reemerges and she's like some unbelievable phoenix inside my soul.

I thought I had to accept I could never be anything like the brilliant little girl that got swallowed by a monster inside of her. That I had to accept losses like I accepted losing everything I loved in my life for 18 years.

But I don't have to lose everything. I don't have to assume all that is lost is gone.

I am reading, and I am learning, and I am growing. There is this new growth in the old, weathered forests of my consciousness. It didn't have to resign to its ways, it can be anything. I can be anything.

Because finally, after years of forgetting, I am brilliant.