They called it a storm in my brain,
but the thunder started years before lightning.
It began in a house with no safe corners,
where footsteps were forecasts
and silence meant brace.
I learned early how to leave without leaving—
how to fold my spirit into a small, hidden drawer,
how to let my eyes go vacant
while the world burned too close.
My mind built a trapdoor
so I would not feel the fall.
It worked.
Until it didn’t.
Years later, in classrooms bright as interrogation rooms,
my body would flicker like faulty wiring.
Desks scraped back.
Whispers sparked.
I’d wake to a circle of faces
looking at me like I was a spectacle—
a glitch,
a performance.
She’s faking.
She just wants attention.
She’s crazy.
Crazy.
As if madness were a costume
I chose to wear.
Doctors with polished shoes
and eyes that never quite met mine
spoke in careful tones.
“Psychogenic.”
“Conversion.”
“Stress response.”
Some said it gently.
Some didn’t.
Some said it like accusation—
like I had orchestrated the convulsions,
like I had written hallucinations into my own script.
They did not see
the small child in the locked room of my chest,
pulling the fire alarm
every time the air smelled even faintly like the past.
Because the seizures came like ghosts—
no rhyme, no reason.
In grocery aisles.
In math exams.
In the middle of laughter.
They stole my muscles,
stole my breath,
replaced the present
with flickering film reels of before.
Vivid.
Merciless.
Hands that weren’t there.
Walls that dissolved.
Voices bending into shapes
only I could hear.
Hospitals became revolving doors.
White lights.
Beeping monitors.
Paper bracelets with my name misspelled.
Psych wards with locked windows
and group therapy chairs in a circle—
as if pain could be solved by geometry.
“Ground yourself,” they said.
“Stay in the moment.”
They didn’t understand
that the moment
was the very thing
my body had learned to survive by escaping.
I was bullied for falling apart.
Mocked for shaking.
Avoided like poison.
As if trauma were catching.
As if resilience were measured
by how quietly you break.
For years I fought my own nervous system—
a civil war under my skin.
I hated the lightning.
Hated the blackouts.
Hated the way my body betrayed me
just when I needed it steady.
But slowly—
so slowly it almost felt imaginary—
I began to listen instead of wage war.
The seizures were not enemies.
They were alarms.
Old smoke detectors
still screaming about a fire
long since extinguished.
I learned the geography of my triggers—
the tilt of a voice,
the scent of a room,
the way certain shadows stretch at dusk.
I practiced breathing like a ritual,
feet pressed hard into the floor,
naming colors,
naming dates,
naming the fact that I am here
and not there.
I am here.
I am sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—
not six.
Not trapped.
Not powerless.
The storms still come sometimes.
Healing is not a straight line
but a weather pattern.
Yet I no longer drown each time.
I have gathered tools like lanterns.
Therapy that listens.
Friends who stay.
Words that untangle memory
from the present tense.
And when the lightning flickers now,
I speak to it.
Thank you for trying to protect me.
But I am safe enough to stand.
I am not weak
because my brain learned to survive.
I am not crazy
because my body remembers what I wish it wouldn’t.
I am not a liar
because my pain is invisible.
I am someone who endured
and whose nervous system loved me fiercely—
even when that love misfired.
The child who built the trapdoor
is no longer alone in the dark.
I have found her.
I hold her hand
when the air grows thin.
And together
we are learning
that staying
can be an act of rebellion.
That breathing through the surge
is its own quiet victory.
That a life interrupted
is not a life erased.
The storm may visit.
The lights may flicker.
But I am more than the weather in my skull.
I am the house
still standing.