𝑺𝑻𝑨𝑹𝑮𝑰𝑹𝑳 | ᵍʳᵉʸˢ ᵃⁿᵃᵗᵒᵐʸ

𝑏𝑢𝑟𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑜𝑢𝑡 | ¹⁹⁹⁷

𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐇𝐀𝐓𝐓𝐀𝐍, 𝟏𝟗𝟗𝟕

I remember the seemingly endless evenings when my parents and I sat at the dining room table, surrounded by school books, notepads, and brightly highlighted paragraphs of text.

My mother, Addison, her hair pulled back in a messy bun. My father, Derek, still in his scrubs, the exhaustion visible in his blue eyes.

They tried. They really tried. But every time they hit the insurmountable wall of my frustration and exhaustion. I could see the confusion in their eyes every time I made a mistake or couldn't answer a simple question.

They were both brilliant doctors, successful at what they did every day.

And there was me, their daughter, having problems with reading and writing, not being able to express my emotions properly, constantly pushed to my limits.

I had always been a difficult child, a complicated equation with too many unknowns. And since my stroke, since the moment when my brain, that immature and fragile ecosystem of neurons and connections, had been damaged, everything had become even more complicated.

Their mission was the same every morning: to somehow get me through the day. The evenings grew longer, the work got harder, and the gap between us seemed to widen each day.

At the age of nine, I was sitting late into the night with my parents at the kitchen table, struggling through math problems and spelling exercises.

"Look, sweetie, it's a simple equation," my father said in a voice that tried to be reassuring but only put more pressure on my tired shoulders.

I slammed the pen down on the table, tears in my eyes, a flood I could no longer hold back.

"Missy, come on, you need to understand this. It's important," my mother had said, holding one of my old chewed-up pencils, her eyes fixed on the open math book in front of me that had been torturing me with multiplication and division problems for hours.

"The letters are jumping all over the paper. I just can't..." My voice trailed off, the words choked with sobs. I felt trapped between my parents' expectations and the limits my brain set for me.

"Of course you can, sweetheart. You just have to hang in there. Try to focus, it's really easy once you figure out how to do it," my father replied, trying to be patient, but there was a hint of desperation in his voice.

But it wasn't just the math problem, it was everything - the blurry words on the paper, the letters that made no sense in my head, the world that was so relentlessly messy and confusing.

Then it happened.

Everything inside me froze. My thoughts, my emotions, my whole body, everything. I couldn't talk, couldn't move, as if I had forgotten how.

At first, my parents thought I was doing it out of spite. Like it was some kind of rebellion against a system I couldn't function in.

"Missy, enough is enough. We're all very tired, it's been a long day," my mother said, her voice impatient and sharp with frustration.

I was no longer tired. I was no longer frustrated, angry, or stressed. I was simply nothing. Just an empty, passively existing shell of what I could have been.

"Missy?" Mom shook my shoulders.

"Missy, for God's sake!"

I could hear the desperation in her words, but I felt nothing, for there was nothing left in me to resist this frightening yet liberating stiffness, even for my parents' sake.

And if I could have felt anything in response to their visible concern for me, I would have felt sorry.

Dad, who had had a long day in the OR, got impatient and clapped his hands in front of my face, the same hands that had been using scalpels and saved lives just a few hours ago.

But I didn't move, didn't even blink.

It was as if I was in another world, a world without sound, without feeling. I heard my parents talking to each other, their voices sounding increasingly desperate.

He tried again, this time so close to me that I should have felt it.

A sudden expression of concern covered his face and he leaned down to check my reflexes, pupils, pulse and breathing. Everything seemed normal, but it was anything but.

"Did she eat and drink enough? Could she have taken something?" I heard my mother ask.

My father ran through the possibilities, but nothing seemed to fit.

And then, in a last desperate attempt, Dad slapped my face.

Not out of anger, but out of sheer desperation, hoping that some form of physical sensation would break my paralysis. Not hard, but hard enough that it should have hurt, enough that I should have reacted. But I did not.

Moments followed that came and went so quickly that I didn't even realize they had happened, forgetting them just as quickly, as if they were sand and my brain a sieve.

It was as if my body had given up on me because it knew that my will was not capable of doing it. As if it was telling me: 'Here, go ahead. You can let it all go. You are free.'

It was a yawning emptiness inside me that was both liberating and crushingly lonely.

But for some reason, I wanted to stay in this state forever.