Normal? Sure.
10 years ago I sat in a snowy cabin in the remote wilderness of Western Montana, having seizure after seizure after seizure, and questioning the nature of normalcy.
My grip on reality had long since severed, and the words you’ll read that I wrote then don’t always make the same sense that they did to me then.
I want to share them with you because now, we have words like neurodivergent, and a focus on mental health that doesn’t MANDATE shoving everyone into a box. But a long time before our culture was that forgiving, I was finding that forgiveness for myself.
I wrote my first essay about why to reject normalcy when I was 11 years old. This one, a monologue on my own experience of seizures and drugs and reality, was written when I was 24, almost 3 years before I would receive the life altering brain surgery that would stop my seizures and eventually free me from medication.
At this moment the question is one of normalcy, reality, and truth.
You see, I was diagnosed with a neurological disorder at age three...
and at age three it really means nothing to you. You do not feel odd, out of place, or unusual.
You do not feel diseased, or disordered. You are you.
Just you.
Time goes by and society and doctors and parents all tell you you are broken, your brain doesn't function right, don't you see?
“Can't you see, that your normal isn't normal?” they say, repeated like a broken record skipping in that broken brain of yours.
Inside the diagnosis of “epilepsy” the types of seizures seem uncountable, and the medical world seems as ready to add to the list as the psychological world seems ready to add to theirs! Generalized, tonic-clonic, tonic without clonic, clonic without tonic; partial, simple partial, complex partial, psychogenic, psychic, and status epilepticus. The terms go on and the more you study the more you learn just how broken you are.
How very abnormal you are, how far from reality you are, how far from the truth of everyone else's existence you must certainly be.
But you see... you've been this way you're whole life, so this is normal. To you.
When I was a kid and my parents told me I had had a “seizure” that night, a word that had become common but still meant little to me... it may as well have been like someone telling me I had snored that night. “Well, that sucks for you since you had to deal with it, but I don't remember it at all, * Yawns * Good morning!”
You get put on drugs, serious ones, with serious side effects; now you're not normal because your brain is all mis-wired and because you're on drugs... your reality is skewed from many different directions except to you it just is.
The actual drugs I was taking at this time, twice a day every day.
It's just normal.
One day at a young age I started having “petit mal” seizures, as they were called at the time, where my hand would lift up and I would drop things. Well, even I knew that was pretty not normal...
Time passes. Your reality adapts. I became more and more conscious of more and more events... I started becoming completely aware inside of tonic-clonic seizures, the kind you see on TV, without being able to pull myself out of them. I started being able to pull myself out of them sometimes.
Odd vibrations would course through my body as I pored deeper over the pages of a book I was reading and, in truth, they felt amazing. The misfirings of electricity, very abnormal, would begin in my fingertips and work their way like a masseuse down my fingers, up my arms, and into my shoulders, and then fade.
I would smile, shrug, forget the amazing novel I had been so intrigued by only moments before, and let the feeling take me as long as it would; an orgasm in my fingertips.
And I guess... I guess this was a seizure. Why the “I guess”? Because you can't really, really know unless some electronic thing hooked up to your brain can confirm “abnormal brainwaves”
But what is abnormal, really?
My medical records from doctors oh-so-interested in my case because of the very unusual conscious nature of my seizures put quotes around my descriptions as though they've disregarded my reliability.
“Light, airy feeling” the records say
“Vibrations through the fingertips” they repeat the words that have come out of my mouth.
They put them in quotes because they have asked me to describe something that is impossible to describe... a seizure. Something as normal to me as smell or sight is to you. How would you describe the experience of smelling? It’s nearly impossible.
Me, this young, 20-something, irresponsible looking female, and I'm using words like “esoteric” and “rising above the world” to describe something to a doctor.
Great. Totally Normal.
At some point your brain gets so fucked up trying to discern what's related to your brain disorder and what's related to the drugs you're taking versus what is just normal for a normal person that your sanity drops to a lower level than it was when all you were was “epileptic”
Yes, I have odd waking-dreams; very lucid, it's true... regular psychic experiences and predilections.
It shall be a normal day and here I'll be, sitting in my chair, and I'll feel grasped, beginning in my chest, and lifted high above where I had chosen to sit myself. It is pleasant, as are many of the “abnormal” experiences that I have.
Not just that... my new heightened sense of smell is something to be hyper-analyzed; do normal people dream like this? Is this reality that I'm living in, or am I in a seizure right now that's allowing me to continue walking around and talk? Things flicker, and sometimes that's just how it happens.
The lights will begin to blink and a sudden wave of emotion will overtake me that shouts “Get out, get out now;” do normal people experience this? Or am I in a seizure right now, or some side effect? Is this reality?
What is reality?
Doctors taking in every piece of information with one direct motivation: Normalcy. My entire life this was the aim. One drug to control the seizures with another drug to combat the side effects of the first, attempting to create a sense of “normalcy” for me, right?
My reaction: “Well yes, it has perhaps stabilized my mood swings but... what if some of those mood swings were just, you know, normal?”
Science does not know how to react to such a thing. “Shouldn't you be happier not doing that?” “Isn't this the most helpful to you?”
You can't look at seizures and call them abnormal and not look at everything surrounding them, leading up to them, and causing them and not call those abnormal.
So you can't, then, look at me, and not call me abnormal.
And yeah – I probably have something similar to a tumor in my brain that's causing it all. That sure is what it's looking like.
But what is normal, after all, if not just what you were born being? Having seizures is normal for me – I can explain it no better. Those light, airy feelings I described are normal for me. This is my reality, odd seizures, weird dreams, and strange depthful relationships to the esoteric as well.
