Pretty sure I broke my brain.

I’m not sure what set off this cluster of partial seizures 13 days ago, but they just won’t let up. I thought it was over until I was brushing my teeth this morning and it hit. I had an overwhelming sense of deja vu followed by anxiety and a dropping feeling as an all-encompassing vision appeared in my mind’s eye. It felt so familiar, yet like with every episode, I can barely remember what I saw. Maybe some people, skewed in a cartoon character kind of a way. I took a step into my living room and noticed my left hand and left leg were going numb. I was salivating so much that I almost choked trying to say aloud what I was experiencing. Within a minute or two, it was done but left me nauseous and tired. Since then, the random memories and visions keep popping into my head and I can’t shake the deja vu.

These persistent visions/memories and the ever-present deja vu and lingering jamais vu are new. In the past, this would all fade until another partial seizure started. But for the past week or so, I can’t shake these feelings. I can’t help but feel I am stuck in a dream. When I was in high school, I worked at a movie theater and we were showing the movie, Waking Life. It followed around a Dude who was either dead or stuck in a dream or having a massive temporal seizure. One of the people he encountered would say, “The ongoing wow! is happening right now!” This feels like that. I feel like I’m stuck in a dream and everything is just a little off. Extra bright and extra crunchy. Extra wow.

But it also feels like I could have another partial seizure at any moment and certainly in the last two weeks I’ve recorded having at least ten. I also keep waking up with splitting headaches hinting at more seizures in the night.

Between these episodes and the constant feeling of deja vu, I do wonder if I’ve broken my brain. I wonder if it’s rewired itself in response to the seizures and something got misconnected in some way. Or if maybe this is some kind of really weird awaking (experienced through the feeling of being in a dream). Or if the pandemic and my job and my other responsibilities have just become too much and I’ve departed reality. Or if I’m really still just 17 and sitting in that movie theater destined to relive the last 20 years (if so, I’m going to buy stock in Amazon immediately).

Really, it’s becoming more and more plausible to me that I’ve actually traveled back in time. Maybe from twenty years in the future. Maybe it feels like I’m reliving everything because I am. But what good is it to relive your life if you can’t remember any of it to change it? But maybe that’s the point. Maybe we just relive our lives over and over and sometimes some of us get a little peek behind the curtain and we call it deja vu.

Maybe I’m just having a bunch of partial seizures and frying my brain a little each time in the process.