The Year My Brain Broke

(a fragment from the middle of a recovery I didn’t know I was in)

People saw me walking and talking and assumed I was healthy.

Even when I pointed out how my neck looked too skinny, or how my bottom lip pulled to the left, or how I couldn’t remember what I did yesterday—it was always met with minimization.

That’s not to blame them.

They were doing what humans do.

Hell, a doctor once looked at me and said, “Well, you look fine.”

(Only one person ever told me I looked like I had cancer.

They were right. Thanks, Art.)

The truth is: I was slowly dying.

Physical signs of anemia started in 2018—

right in the middle of some of the darkest years of my life.

• My dad died in 2016.

• Mathis, my dog and best friend, died in 2018.

• My mom followed in 2019.

That three-year stretch didn’t just break my heart.

It shattered me.

And somewhere in that mess, the anemia began eroding me from every angle—

physically, mentally, emotionally, socially. Quietly. Completely.

The day my bicep tore off my radius in 2022 was the slap in the face I didn’t know I was waiting for.

Until then, I’d been living in a joyless, numb world.

Hyperfocused, maybe. Productive, even.

But empty.

The tattoos I was making were finally what I had aspired to.

But they didn’t feel like they were mine.

Nothing did.

This isn’t a pretty story.

It’s bloody. Ugly.

It’s full of broken mirrors and ghost limbs.

I questioned reality every day.

I didn’t feel human.

My body didn’t feel like mine.

It was like I was watching life through a thick glass—

like I was wearing a body instead of living in one.

And nothing was funny anymore.

I literally lost my sense of humor.

I couldn’t dream.

I couldn’t remember.

The future became a fragmented abstraction.

The past played like silent black-and-white films.

Even those memories didn’t feel like they were mine.

I was someone else.

For a decade.

And do you know what happens when you have an overactive brain with nothing to hold onto?

It turns dark.

Really dark.

Intrusive.

I wanted to die.

Sometimes I thought maybe I already had.

My identity had certainly died.

And if we are our experiences…

what happens when you can’t even access your own memories?

Was it early-onset dementia?

CTE?

Had I gone insane?

When I look through the photos I don’t recognize myself.

The eyes are dulled. Blank.

The face is pulled tight.

There’s an invisible weight dragging everything down.

For years, I floated through life in a fog too dense to see beyond the moment,

too confused to stand up for myself,

too disconnected to reach out,

and way too young to feel that old.

2018–2024 marks the time I became a severely stunted, hollow version of who I actually am.

And the craziest part?

This story is still being written.

Second puberty is very real.