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Amato, Joseph A. _On Foot: A History of Walking._ New York: New York University Press, 2004. Bryson, Bill. _A Walk in the Woods_. New York: Broadway Books, 1998. Espy, Gene. _The Trail of My Life_. Macon, GA: Indigo Publishing, 2008. George, Jean Craighead. _The American Walk Book_. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1978. Hare, James. _Hiking the Appalachian Trail, Volume One_. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, Inc., 1975. Hare, James. _Hiking the Appalachian Trail, Volume Two_. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, Inc., 1975. Luxenberg, Larry. _Walking the Appalachian Trail_. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994. Marshall, Ian. _Storyline: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail_. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Matthews, Estivaun, Charles A. Murray, and Pauline Rife. _Gallia County One-Room Schools: The Cradle Years_. Ann Arbor, MI: Braun-Brumfield, Inc., 1993. Morse, Joseph Laffan. _The Unicorn Book of 1953_. New York: Unicorn Books, Inc. 1954. Morse, Joseph Laffan. _The Unicorn Book of 1954_. New York: Unicorn Books, Inc. 1955.
Morse, Joseph Laffan. _The Unicorn Book of 1955_. New York: Unicorn Books, Inc. 1956. Nicholson, Geoff. _The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy and Literature of Pedestrianism._ New York: Riverhead Books, 2008. Seagrave, Kerry. _America on Foot: Walking and Pedestrianism in the 20th Century_. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc. Shaffer, Earl V. _Walking with Spring: The First Solo Thru-Hike of the Legendary Appalachian Trail._ Harpers Ferry, WV: Appalachian Trail Conference, 1996. Solnit, Rebecca. _Wanderlust: A History of Walking_. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Swift, Earl. The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. BEN MONTGOMERY is a staff writer at the _Tampa Bay Times_ and cofounder of the Auburn Chautauqua, a Southern writers' collective. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 and has won many other national writing awards. He lives in Florida.
Jacket design: Debbie Berne Design Cover photo: Gatewood family collection, courtesy of Lucy Gatewood Seeds Author photo: John Pendygraft Printed in the United States of America </s>
Gotham Girl Interrupted - Alisa Kennedy Jones Introduction 1 "The Big One" (2015) 2 Everything in New York Is a Little Bit Broken 3 The Unbearable Brightness of Being 4 Where the Hell Is My White Light? 5 Angry Mothertrucker 6 Oh, the Pie-rony... 7 D-day 8 The Cocktail Hour(s) 9 Why Yes, I Am a Cyborg 10 Dostoyevsky's Addiction 11 When Mom Is a Werewolf 12 Everything in New York Is a Little Bit Broken (Part 2) 13 Unspeakable 14 Get Your Freak On 15 I Feel Bad About My Face 16 Gotham Girl, Interrupted 17 DNR 18 A Love Letter from My Brain 19 The New Rules of You Epilogue: On Being a Narwhal Acknowledgments Introduction HELLO FRIEND! Thank you for picking up this book or for borrowing it from some well-intentioned acquaintance. And thank _you,_ well-intentioned acquaintance, for foisting it upon some unsuspecting reader! In 2010, at the age of forty, I was diagnosed with a severe form of epilepsy. The cause was a mystery. What is epilepsy, you ask? Simply put, it's an overabundance of electricity in the brain. Less simply put, it's a serious chronic neurological disorder characterized by sudden, recurrent episodes of sensory disturbance, loss of consciousness, or convulsions, associated with atypical electrical activity levels in the brain. With more than forty different types of seizures, epilepsy affects sixty-five million people worldwide. Because of the complex nature of the brain, epilepsy can strike at any age and manifest differently depending on a variety of factors.
My seizures are the kind most often portrayed in the media, meaning the afflicted person falls to the ground and thrashes around until some brave-hearted Samaritan comes to the rescue. They're dramatic. I look totally possessed when my eyes roll back into my head. If I'd been born during any other era, I'd likely be institutionalized or burnt at the stake by some angry white guys. Over the years, I've had hundreds of seizures. They tend to involve four phases: the first is the _prodromal_ phase, which means before the fever. This is the emotional or intuitive voice that whispers, "Some shit's about to go down." The second phase is the _aura._ Sometimes an aura can be as subtle as a shimmer of light at the edge of my field of vision. Other times, it's more hallucinogenic and has me asking, "Whoa, what kind of _Donnie Darko_ movie is _this_?" Then, there's the third _ictal_ phase—that's the seizure itself, the electrical storm in my brain where I'm usually on the ground in convulsions. To those around me, it may look agonizing but I'm actually not feeling any pain at this point—just a gorgeous black bliss. Lastly, comes the _post-ictal_ phase where the convulsions have stopped and I'm out cold. In the moments when I'm regaining consciousness, I might be confused or frightened, but mostly I can really _only_ focus on what's directly in front of me—often it's the smallest things.
Seizures tend to put one in a constant state of disaster preparedness. Picture a pilot fixing an airplane engine while it's flying or, in my case, as it's crashing. Some of the preparations I've made over the years might seem ridiculous, but then I've never claimed to be the most logical girl. Still, epilepsy is about having a plan, a "Here's what we're going to do..." and then improvising as things with the condition evolve. People tend to think of epilepsy as something that primarily impacts children, but it can strike at any time, no matter how healthy you are. As with so many stigmatized chronic conditions, I tried to keep mine under the radar for years for fear that people might misjudge, mock, or withdraw. If I wasn't having seizures all the time, I reasoned, not everyone _had_ to know. Then, in 2015, I had "the big one" that nearly destroyed me, laid me flat and left me the most vulnerable I've ever been. It was brutal. It changed almost every aspect of my life, forcing me to start completely over from zero—I couldn't speak, eat, or work. I couldn't go out in public without frightening people. The experience led me to believe that people _do_ need to know more about this condition and that perhaps they also needed a different narrative approach. I know I certainly did.
For years, I've called myself a spaz. Why? Because when you are a nerdy, too-tall, introverted, single girl-mom with chunky glasses, who has epilepsy, anxiety, and depression, at a certain point you want to take the derogative term back from the historically mean asshats of the world—primarily people who say epileptics are spastic freaks who are addicts, junkies, drunks, crazy, dangerous, deranged, possessed, demonic, divine, incontinent, unreliable, unable to hold down a job, unable to care for children, and so on. Whether you have epilepsy or not, chances are you know someone who is affected by it. I happen to think we are _all_ a little neurodiverse—meaning we are all uniquely neurologically wired. Where one person is the quintessential extroverted life-of-the-party, another is an introvert completely overwhelmed by people, chatter, and music. Everyone experiences the world according to her/his/their neurological makeup, and we shouldn't have to go around faking "normal" all the time.
Epilepsy is certainly not _all_ that defines me, but it's also a thing that's not going away anytime soon. To go around hiding the fact is not only exhausting; it's totally missing out on the richness and hilarity that comes when we are all put together, as people, side by side and forced to understand and deal with difference. And I'm with Carrie Fisher on this one; I am constantly perplexed by the stigma attached to mental illness, the various chronic neurological conditions and the differently-abled. If you are walking (or rolling) around New York City or any town with epilepsy, living your life, connecting with people and able to feel compassion for friends, family, and your fellow humans, or to feel even slightly productive in your own right, you deserve a standing ovation—not a kick in the teeth. We need to stop being such uptight weenies and admit that it's high time the world learns to adapt, make room for, and _embrace_ all kinds of people along the spectrum of ability and neurodiversity instead of everyone always tiptoeing around topics of neurology, mental illness, autism, epilepsy, and so many other chronic conditions governed by our brains and genetics.
Over the years, people's questions about my conditions have ranged from "Do seizures hurt?" to "How come you're not completely developmentally delayed and/or traumatized?" More often than not, the questions are more a reflection of the person asking them than anything to do with me. My answers are typically, "No, my seizures don't hurt" and, "Actually, they can be quite beautiful." Indeed, some of the instances when I've felt most intellectually inspired, most human, and often most creative in my life happen when I fall, thrash around, and then get back up. For me, it's like the ultimate system reboot—a vibrant Technicolor awakening each time. I won't pretend that it isn't a doozy or not complicated, but my family (and Oprah) raised me to believe that my ideas, thoughts, and opinions mattered, that they were grounds for more inquiry, and that it's only when we are able to connect the dots between our deepest points of vulnerability and tell our stories that we can change things. So, this is my story about _not_ tiptoeing around the difficult dots. Little did I know (as I was writing this) how much the concept of neurodiversity would come to matter, the idea that whether you have anxiety, depression, addiction, bipolar disorder, autism, or epilepsy, the point is your own individual neural wiring might in fact be your magic rather than a tragedy, that it might allow for finding meaning in places you never expect it to and with people you'd never anticipate having in your life. Yes, you may be different; you may be in a chronic waltz to feel at home in your head or in your body. You may even feel trapped in there for a long stretch (as I was), but it doesn't make you less; it makes you magic.
That's what this book is about. The one superpower epilepsy (or any chronic condition for that matter) _shouldn't_ give you, however, is invisibility, so I wanted to write stories about loveable weirdos with all different types of wiring to ask, Why can't the awkward, spazzy nerd win after all? Why can't she/he/they end up with the good, funny, amazing person who is her/his/their own equal and opposite counterpart? What's to say they can't live out a truly great rom-com? Why can't they have a full tribe of kooky friends and family who have their back? Why can't they have a rich, rewarding career? Why, with technology, science, and modern medicine should there be any hindrance? For my part, I have told these stories as I remember them, which means salted and peppered with truth and exaggeration, with names changed to protect the guilty and the innocent, starting with my parents. At times, it's more of a rescue-and-recovery operation than a memoir because I'm filling in certain blanks with reflections, bad ideas, and inappropriate metaphors. I wrote them in a kind of fever dream, my own series of seizures, a lightning-bolt flipbook of time-lapse photography on a hyperloop. Factor in a few grim flashbacks, select absurd hypotheses, and misunderstandings made funnier with prescription drugs, and there might be a book in it.
Epilepsy can lure you into powering down your whole self—especially your funny side—and I believe this is a mistake. Some things are out of my control. Others, well...let's just say are a self-made mess. Some are absurd. The breezy humor you find in this book may be a defense mechanism, but I believe it's a necessary one at times and an excellent self-care tool when you can tap into it. By taking a comedic approach to these stories, please know that there's never any intention to trivialize or diminish the suffering people experience as a result of epilepsy. It's a devastating condition, but we don't have to _stay_ devastated. Okay, time to get to your safe space, people. This is how it always begins. Here comes the shimmer... 1 "The Big One" (2015) "DON'T SPEAK. It's going to be okay," he whispers. Okay, sure. I don't have to talk at all. I'll do whatever you tell me because I am a really good student and...wait, where am I? I feel...wrung out like a dirty dishrag. And _who_ is _this guy_ standing over me? Well, hello, smoldering antihero! Mothertrucker, he's hot and his voice is so...swarthy?
"I want you to blink if you can understand me." I close my eyes. I open my eyes. "Did you take something, Ms. Jones? Blink once for 'yes,' twice for 'no.' " I try to shake my head "no" but I can't move. In fact, I can't feel anything. I think I'm strapped to one of those neck-spine boards they use to keep you from being paralyzed after an accident. For now, I can only look up at this man, whose hair is just stunning. So lustrous and thick, it's like a 1970s ultrashag carpet. You want to camp out on it and play Monopoly like a horny twelve-year-old at a slumber party. Now, before we go any further, you should know it's practically a law in New York City and rom-coms everywhere, if at any point in your beautiful life you ever pass out (for whatever reason—hold on, I am about to explain), you _will_ invariably be woken up by a handsome, scruffy firefighter or paramedic type, someone authentically brave and badass, with a deep voice and great hair—like this guy over me. Whether you've gotten blackout drunk and inadvertently slept with him, or say your brain decided to spontaneously combust in the grocery store, it _will_ happen at least once. In my case, it's the latter scenario.
Still, the calculus of this exact moment, of waking up to an amazingly handsome man telling me to blink, isn't quite computing. For God's sake, I was just going for coffee. Wasn't I? Not fancy coffee made for me by some well-intentioned barista with piercings and a soul patch. No, for once, I was actually buying coffee _in a can_ to make at home because I was doing like Suze Orman told me and putting my latte money where it might count someday: drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. As I made my way down Eighty-Sixth Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I reveled in what felt like the first real day of spring. The air held a clean crispness. Think iceberg lettuce in a wedge salad. The kind they still serve at old-school steakhouses named Kevin's or Ken's. Where only a week ago the winter of 2015 had been as frigid and grim as in _The Shining,_ now the glass and gunmetal buildings glowed sunstruck. Everyone was smile-squinting. Yes, even the most curmudgeonly of New Yorkers do this. That old guy on the stoop next door who always smokes a cigar in his purple bowtie, even _he_ was smile-squinting. It's like when the clouds part in Portland and everyone rushes outside for a fix of glorious vitamin D.
I slowed to bask in a warm, luxurious squint. I felt the muscles around my eyes scrunching up in the grin-worthy brightness. Shimmering fractals unfurled before me. To the west, a double note of thunder over New Jersey. Or had I imagined it? I've always been oddly sensitive to storms, but I felt good. Maybe a slight itch of fatigue? I had been pulling long hours at work lately. I felt a subterranean murmur, like the thrumming of bees in the back corner of my mind. My epilepsy—or more specifically, my _seizures_ —often begin this way. Well, most of the time. There's the shimmer at the edge of my vision, the thrum and the thrash. Should I turn back? No. I wasn't going to have one today, I told myself, pressing on. Not today. I feel fine. _Just breathe, girly._ Mostly, I was feeling righteous. After a productive morning working on a new creative campaign for a live televised superhero takeover of the city, I'd survived hot yoga without being singled out by the teacher, Yogi Wallace, who somehow always managed to stupefy the class with his radiant smugness.
And yes, in that moment on the street, it might as well have been the opening credits to _Mary Tyler Moore_ where she tosses her hat high up in the air just as you hear the theme song go, "You're gonna make it after all," because I _was_ making it. After all. I had gotten the best job in advertising a writer could get, making the most money of my entire adult life. Instead of navigating nomadically, job to job, from writing one bad TV crime pilot after another, I could finally afford to be alive without constant single-mother anxiety. The kind where you're always holding your breath at the checkout to see if the debit card clears. Finally, after years of scrambling, nose-to-stinky-grindstone, scraping to get by, sucking up to entertainment and tech-preneuer douchebags, who spoke almost exclusively in corporate synergism jargon interspersed with words like "hella" and "bro," I finally felt respected at my job. I'd made the big move back to the East Coast for work, and so both my daughters could be nearer to their dad. The girls seemed happy. For the first time in years, they were finally going to have everything they needed. They weren't going to be the poor, broken-home kids that other parents pitied. They'd already been through too much in their short lives. Suffice it to say, I had made it through a feral divorce—a veritable blood sport of blame, self-recrimination, and dueling indictments. If you've ever been divorced, you'll immediately get this: it's the equivalent of waking up and being in a head-on car accident every day for about two years, complete with neck braces, scary forms, and even scarier attorneys. While I hadn't escaped completely unscathed, my hair still looked good, and my little blog, _Gotham Girl,_ an ongoing love letter to New York City weirdos, was starting to find real traction. Plus, I hadn't had a seizure in almost a year. This was a big deal for me because as I mentioned earlier, my brain likes to blow a fuse (or all the fuses) now and then.
I'd spent five years trying to crack the code of epilepsy with different treatments, medications, diets, gurus, and whatnot. With each grand mal seizure, where I'd lose consciousness, drop to the ground, and convulse uncontrollably, my world became a near-constant obstacle course filled with sharp corners and hard edges. I'd awaken to crazy bumps, bruises, cuts, and concussions. Looming over me was an ever-changing cast of freaked-out strangers, prickly doctors, and loads of ambulances, bills, and consequences. But I'd solved it. The meds were finally working. _I_ was working. I was also in love. More love than I'd been in for what seemed like nine hundred thousand years, and I didn't want to jinx it. At this point, I'd probably qualified to have my virginity reinstated. His name was Loïc, short for Louis, and he was my exact kind of crazy: a good-quirky-smart-silly Frenchy. We laughed nonstop—at my very broken French, at his even more broken English, with ridiculous conversations where he would implore me, "Mon amour, why not just to use zee sugar cubes if you always get zee wrong amount of sugar in zee café every morning? It's plus exacte, non?"
Okay, yes, I was in love with Pepé Le Pew, but he was right; I _did_ always grumble about putting the wrong amount of sugar in my coffee every morning, and these were _exactly_ the kind of silly tête-à-têtes that I wanted to be having after all the years of struggle. Mostly, I could see us getting married one day in some handmade backyard ceremony in France—complete with Polaroids, ukulele music, and crafts that made the guests all feel mildly superior. I could feel a future weaving itself together like some richly patterned fabric. I felt such long-legged joy as I walked into the grim little grocery store on the corner, only slightly bigger than a bodega. I was rocking my favorite jacket and my ever-present big bag, a Louis Vuitton Empreinte Citadine tote—a gift from an old squeeze—a terrible boyfriend but one with great taste in purses. To be clear, my big bag doesn't look terribly fancy at first glance, but it is. For all you nerd ladies out there, it's like Mary Poppins's carpetbag when she meets the kiddies for the first time. It holds everything: computers, baby wipes, extra shoes, subway reading, a built-in pharmacy, too much lipstick, and even its own wallet on a leather string so you never lose it. How smart is that? I swear, if this bag had running water and electricity, I'd probably live in it.
Still, as I made my way down the coffee aisle, I was overcome with a sense of satisfaction that had nothing whatsoever to do with accessories. I felt I'd finally become the person I'd always wanted to be: a solid person who wasn't totally failing at becoming a better person, who thought of others first, who paid all of her bills and all of her dues, who didn't let circumstance rule outcome _entirely,_ who donated to public radio, who read _real_ books, who showed up on time (more often than not), and one who'd let go of past gripes, grudges, and regrets. Yes, I was finally figuring things out, and feeling pretty badass. Again, I shook off the hiss in my head, or was it the damn fluorescent tube lighting of the store? I couldn't tell, but just as I bent down for the can of Martinson Breakfast Blend coffee (smooth mild roast), the world fell away. (My editor wants me to say here that _I_ melted into the floor, but that's not actually how seizures work for me. There is no time and no feeling other than a buzzing in my head and sometimes maybe a tightening around my temples. But _I_ don't melt into anything. Instead, it's the world that starts to shimmer, and _it_ melts away in a swift vertical wash of slivering, slicing black cuts, like eyelashes blinking closed. Or eye _slashes,_ as I call them. It's accompanied by a momentary feeling of exultation that, maybe, only I truly know, but still it's magnificent because it's a moment of pure, ecstatic joy.)
"Ms. Jones, _did_ you take anything?" Oh...you again. I tune back into the swarthy stranger above me now. If they were doling out middle school nicknames, his would simply be "The Hair." He reminds me of a pirate: a tidy, well-groomed pirate with perfect teeth, which now that I think about it, has to be spectacularly rare because everybody knows pirates never brush or floss. They're too busy looting. It's practically science. I wish he would kiss me. For a second, he leans in closer and I think he might. Wait, no, I love someone. I love someone, don't I? Where am I? Things shift, and he looks so sorry and sad, as if someone has just spanked a puppy. I feel instantly terrible for him. In my head, I can hear myself: "What's wrong, _Mr. Hair_?" Still, there is a heaviness now bearing down on him, and on me, a kind of reverse gravity. He seems physically pained, like his chest is about to cave in. I take in his shirt: there was a medical snake-cross-thingy on the pocket, and he is covered in blood and bits of something pinkish-gray. Oh man, is that my brain?
Wait...did I just get brain on hot-hair-guy? And wow, that's _a whole lot_ of blood. That's pretty much a _Walking Dead_ amount of blood. And then I realize; it's happened again. I've had another one—another seizure. That was the shimmer I felt. The thrum. The hiss. As I lay there wishing my brain bits were back inside my head where they belong, I think, _holy crapdazzle_...isn't this just the absolute, foundational analogy for life? The moment you think you're the person you've always wanted to be, suddenly you're _not_. The world rushes in to compel you to become something _more_ , something different, something _else_ , because nature abhors a vacuum. Where there's a void, nature always seeks to fill it with some kind of form. And that really _is_ science. You may be wondering, is this how this person really thinks all the time? Even after a seizure? Or is it creative reimagining? The short answer is, this is pretty much how I process the world. Even in the middle of a crisis, I live in a state of constant reimagining, creative commentary, and improvisation. Plus, again, I've had loads of these. I've never been a huge fan of the survivor narrative. Inspiration porn isn't really my jam as not all suffering is redemptive or transformative. Some of it is just _hard_ and majorly sucky. To generalize wildly for a moment, I think you take certain risks; you make yourself vulnerable to go after the thing you want. In the process, you fall, you thrash and flail around; maybe you get banged up, maybe even a little bloody, but then you get back up and press on. Just like a seizure. Fall, thrash around, get back up, and press on.
I can't really blink my answer to The Hair about having taken anything (mostly because I take _everything_ ), so I croak a whisper up to him as best I can, "I-nuh-staz..." "A what?" he says, leaning down now as though I am whispering a code word for entry into a secret society. I try again, "uh sppzzazzz..." He cocks his head, looking quizzical. "A spaz?" I close my eyes. I open my eyes. He suppresses a smile and says, "You've had a seizure." To his partner, a guy I can't quite see, he rattles off, "Status epilepticus...blah-blah-dee-blah-blah..." Everything sounds like molasses now. "...Dislocated jaw, compound facial, cranial, dental fractures and lacerations..." Processing his words, all I can do is blink in a Morse code of my own making: _Good God, why couldn't I have fallen on my big bag instead of my face? What's the point of having a big bag if it doesn't at least function as a pillow or a helmet?_ Then he is back talking to me, trying to channel his most upbeat but sorry self: "There are things they can do...implants, prosthetics..."
Prosthetics? _Dear me_ , prosthetic _what_? His words trail off again, and I can see him realizing that just before this moment, maybe only twenty minutes ago, I was probably a very different girl than I am now. And I just want to tell him, "Don't be sad, _hot-hair-ambulance guy._ This isn't my first brush with the electric." 2 Everything in New York Is a Little Bit Broken WHEN WE ARRIVED at the hospital, I was too afraid to look at myself. I avoided any and all reflective surfaces. I had no idea bones and teeth were technically poking through my face. Seriously, whatever you are imagining right now, I'm pretty sure it was worse. I just knew that everything about me was a little bit broken. It's the same as when I try to explain New York City apartments to the rest of the developed world. People usually don't believe me. Don't get me wrong—I love my apartment. I love living on one not-so-level floor where marbles would roll back and forth by themselves and all my stuff is just right _there._ I confess to being a little absent-minded—especially on all the new drugs. But even before that, I once lost our hamster in our apartment for a week. She was fine, but only because I also lost a pizza.
The first thing I typically tell people is, "Look, you need to understand that everything in New York is a little bit broken." Every building has its quirks. Certain fireplaces only work on the third Thursday of every other month. There are windows that need a hard nudge in a particular direction in order to open depending on the weather. You practically have to be a master locksmith (and recite magic words) to get into the city's older apartments—it's all a little broken. In most prewar rentals, everything is retrofitted with clumsy renovations. Don't even get me started on the railroad apartment and how no one part of the house can be gotten to without going through the whole rest of the apartment, and privacy is for sissies, so get over it. And best of all, there is almost _always_ a refrigerator problem. Every single apartment that's even worth having in New York City—the one that has those built-in bookcases you've always wanted or perhaps it's in the perfect location right next to the dog run, _it almost always has a fridge problem._ The fridge is either too big or too small, or it juts out oddly into the space so that you stub your toe every time you walk by it. Worse still, some idiot renovator decides the main storage unit for all things edible in your life should go right next to the bathroom—or why stop there? Just put it _in_ the bathroom right across from the toilet, or in the tub, if you are so lucky as to have one of those.
Now I too was broken—my face, jaw, and teeth to be exact—but no one in the ER seemed to know where to put me. I was still fading in and out of consciousness when The Hair solemnly took his leave. Breaking your face is a lot like falling through pond ice. There's the initial shock of razor-slicing coldness cutting into every part of you and then, within what feels like seconds, there is a gradual slowing of all systems—circulatory, respiratory, digestive, and nervous—that takes hold. It's a prevailing stillness. I felt my body temperature dropping, as I lay trapped beneath the frozen surface of my mug. I knew from my obsessive Googling that there are more than four hundred miles of blood vessels in my brain alone—that didn't even include the face with all its tiny capillaries laid end to end. The bones in my face and jaw seemed to have cut sharp paths through them. My lower jaw had effectively been ripped off from the upper part and then broken through the bottom of my chin and through the left side of my face.
There had been no brilliant fireworks with this particular seizure, only obsidian darkness flooding in from all directions. In the cold depths where I was immobile and starved for oxygen and for an inner monolog, I tried for a millimeter of outward movement. I tried to wrap my lips and tongue around any sound I could try to make, but the word _help_ with its "p" sound at the end and lips momentarily touching together was too difficult. The only sound that would come out was "hell..." It seemed appropriate for the moment. Overhead and all around me, there was an orchestra of humanity that is the New York City ER department. I could hear the overly intimate moaning of other patients behind neighboring curtains while nonsensical wailing came from behind a closed door in the near distance. Meanwhile a psychiatric patient was yelling into a trash can. Nothing was okay that day. And it had to be okay that it was not okay, I told myself, hoping I'd fade back into my usual, velvety, postseizure blackness, but instead I was relentlessly awake. In my head, I could hear myself whispering, "I see live people."
One of the live people I saw was Rakesh. He was not ER staff or an EMT on a break. From the narrative fragments I picked up through the curtain separating our two ER bed bays, he was there for his son who had fallen off some dangerous play structure in the park and broken an arm or some other such bone. They had taken away the kid for X-rays. Now this kind-looking, beautiful, brown-skinned man had spied me through a slit in the curtains. His face was one of horror upon making sense of me. He also made out that my whisper of "hell" was actually a call for "help" and came closer. "Do you need me to get someone?" he whispered from a few cautious feet away. I tried to nod yes, but wasn't sure if my movement could be discerned by the outside world. "Yes!" I yelled from inside my head. The pain was dull and distributed but still overpowering like a tidal wave bearing down on every bone in my body. He seemed to understand me and scurried off to find a doctor. A few minutes later he returned. "They are coming," he whispered again, his expression still grave. Approaching closer now, he introduced himself in broken English. "My name is Rakesh. I am driving Uber. Would you like me to pray for you, my child?"
"Oh God, no!" I screamed inside my head. "Don't pray for _me,_ Rakesh! Pray for morphine! Pray for _any_ opioid pain relief!" He put his hands out toward me now, both palms facing me as though he might lay them on me in some evangelical, holy roller prayer ritual, except I was probably still too bloody and gross to actually touch. _Oh no, where were the nurses,_ I wondered. Through the curtains I could see scrubs flitting past us now. There must be a shooting happening or a code blue. Jesus Christ, why wasn't _I_ a code something? Glancing up at what were surely moldy ceiling tiles, Rakesh closed his eyes and began to pray in hushed, melodious, Hindu-sounding tones. "Lord Jesus, we pray to you now for mercy. Please come into this poor, wretched..." _Wait, wretched? Who's wretched? Have you seen my purse?_ "...suffering soul," he continued, voice rising in intensity. "And drive the devil out of her, most merciful God..." _Oh, for fuck sake._ "Cast out the demon of pain from your poor, wretched daughter, Lord..."
_Demon of pain? Holy cats! No, just cast out the pain. Maybe cast in some Advil? I'll keep my demons, thank you very much, if only to do my bidding later._ Then, raising his hands, Rakesh started speaking in tongues, which I want to say went something like this, "Nnngyoooooo–tammmmmmmm–yaaaaaaaaa–zahhhhhhhh." Don't get me wrong. I was grateful for the intercession on my behalf since I couldn't speak, but inside my head and outside my head, I'd already been through enough. I didn't get any coffee that morning; I'd seen bits of my brain on a hot guy's shirt and then lost him for good. And somehow, there I was, still pleading, "Someone, just please, anyone...hit me in the throat with the back of a hammer, right now! Let me go back to my usual postseizure coma! I'm too tired for all this fanfare." Just then, a nurse entered and Rakesh-the-exorcist stepped aside to let her get to my IV. "Are you saved, my child?" he asked before disappearing behind the curtain. I am now, I thought, not entirely facetiously. Then, the black curtain of morphine came down on the scene, or was it another seizure? I couldn't tell. I didn't care. I was back to _not_ being, which was fine considering the alternative.
I AWOKE SOME TIME LATER to a very tall white ghost at the end of my bed. It was my best friend, Ed. Ed is probably not quite tall enough to qualify for giants-only sleep-away camp, but because he is a commanding salt-and-pepper executive type, I think most people often mistake him for one. There's a waspy, I-rule-the-world, deep-voiced quality to Ed. And he is a total dead ringer for New York City's current mayor, which can be really funny when we're out walking together. He'll pretend to be the mayor and tell some poor tourist very sternly not to litter, or a speeding cabbie to slow the heck down when taking a left through a crosswalk. It's totally the best and slightly evil because people's eyes go all wide with false recognition and they immediately freak out and obey him on the spot. Then later, you might see a blurb in the daily Gotham news blotter, "Mayor D. tells littering hipster tourist to tidy up!" I think the hospital was under a similar impression about Ed being the mayor because, while I'd been off in the great, glorious outback that is my unconscious brain, it had been a literal game of musical rooms, I later learned. I'd been in the ER, the OR, the X-ray, and what passed for a broom closet as well as a room with another patient named Alissa Jones who was having some random organ removed. And so Ed, my giant service beast—my service unicorn, as I call him—had been required to have a full-on, grown-up man tantrum and use his "mayor" voice to get me decent digs with a reduced chance of life-altering medical mistakes.
There'd been a stroke of luck, he also reported. The head of the maxillofacial surgery program had been in the hospital right as I had been brought in and had seemed very excited by how smashed up I was. It takes five hundred pounds of force to break the human skull with the thinnest part being near the temples. That's mass multiplied by acceleration. I am only a hundred and twenty pounds and had fallen but a short distance (two feet), so apparently I had done a real number on myself. They were coming soon to talk to me about next steps. In the meantime, Ed was trying to distract me with the PBS series _Wolf Hall_ playing on his laptop, which I thought was hilarious because I realized in my morphine-induced stupor that Ed is _also_ Sir Thomas Cromwell. If you're not familiar with the history of the sixteenth-century British monarchy, fear not. Cromwell was King Henry VIII's right-hand man—a cunning idealist from the back streets of London—who masterminded Henry's divorce so Henry could not only get down with the hot strumpet Anne Boleyn but also undertake a heap of other nefarious things involving executions, torture, and the creation of the Church of England. In the fog of drugs and blinding pain, it was clear to me Ed was a total Cromwell and I was _so_ the ne'er-do-well Henry VIII—but without the turkey leg. The point is, Ed always loves running back and forth amid all the different key players (neurologists, surgeons, nurses, and lunch ladies) trying to get everyone to agree and take action. It is his favorite thing in the world. He's like a more effective United Nations, only in giant human form.
Still, in the lead-up to my surgery, no one was agreeing. Apparently, the neurology team had decided to try me on a newer, stronger epilepsy drug, but I needed to stabilize on it before the maxillofacial team could begin the lengthy reconstruction of my face, because if I seized on the table during the operation, I could die. It turns out a sliver of a millimeter in the wrong direction while shaving a bit of bone near the brain might very well disfigure and/or paralyze you. A micron slip of the scalpel around the wrong blood vessel and you could easily wipe out a decade of memories. On the other face-bone side, it was complicated because we were in the "golden time," which I understood to be a short window of opportunity for operating on faces before super-intense swelling typically sets in. Call me naïve, but I never knew this was a thing. If they didn't operate soon, it might be another week before they had another opportunity. To each set of doctors, I was like a Jenga tower piled precariously high and set to an egg timer quickly running out of sand.
My face, nervous system, and basic bodily functions were all competing against each other for dominance on the chore chart. Again, I was caught in the middle of two decidedly not great options: (1) wait to stabilize and stay safely alive while risking being terribly disfigured and in the hospital for another two to three weeks, or (2) go for the gold during this "golden time" and risk seizing on the operating table while they put my face back together so that I might be the least deformed version of me in the long term. If you're anything like me, you are a girl, and underneath all of your emotional depth, you're still vain as fuck and so you go for option two. Do you really want to live out a super-long life as a poorly constructed Jenga tower? The only thing you really wish for in a moment like this is to be able to time travel back to the instant right before the seizure. The moment on the street where you sensed _things_ might go sideways and then you _actively choose to listen to your gut._ You turn back to the safety of home, your apartment with its overabundance of pillows and soft things, the place where you lose everyday items and yet you never lose that inner gut voice. More than anything, you wish you'd listened to it in that specific moment.
According to my girlfriend Holly (who showed up soon after I was brought in to support Ed and who is another, albeit much shorter, Cromwell-ian navigator), there was a great deal of arguing around my bed. You might think it was a clusterfuck of ineptitude, but I'd like to think it was mostly just people acting in good faith. I couldn't make out all the details, but it resembled one of those scenes from _Charlie Brown_ where the teacher is speaking unintelligibly over the loudspeaker in a sort of _mwaw–mwaw–mwaw–mwaw–mwaaaaaaw_ sound. Apparently, there was also a stretch of time where I would insist on sitting up absolutely straight in the hospital bed because I was in too much pain to recline even slightly. For once, I had ballet-perfect posture, which I never have because I spend most of my days hunched over a computer like an old crone or a mollusk. But there I was, oh-so-properly with my pen and paper, writing out my answers to the various doctor questions. What I remember most tangibly was meeting Walter. At six foot six, now there was another giant in my life, except this one was the living, breathing incarnation of the late actor Walter Matthau. As the head of the hospital's maxillofacial surgery program, there was an almost wizard-like quality to him. He was like Gandalf or Albus Dumbledore. He seemed to give off his own curmudgeonly glow. Walter is not a man of many words, but when he does speak, it's the plain truth without any sugar-coating. There's a gravitas to everything he says, even when he's joking. Practicing for more than thirty years now, Walter is a specialist who handles New York City's worst cases: "the jumpers who lived."
There was something strangely comforting about Walter, the way he would study me and then the way I would study him back since I couldn't speak. We were like two orangutans checking each other for nits. I could tell he was a tinkerer, the kind of friend who came over to your house and took your whole car apart piece by piece for hours to identify the mystery problem, fix it, and then put it all back together late that night with infinite patience and specificity. He was the surgical equivalent of the guys from _Car Talk._ As he examined my jaw with its bones poking out through my face and my right eye rotated back into my head, he looked down at the giant binder of incident notes and said jauntily, "Oh, you're right in the neighborhood." I was loopy on pain meds, which was how I was able to even communicate, but by this time I could nod a small "yes." And then he said, "Ah kid, why couldn't you at least fall in Zabar's? Don't you know? Someone wouldda caught ya in that store?" And I laughed out loud, which hurt like a mother, not just physically but also because I usually _go_ to Zabar's. Christ almighty, I would _live_ in Zabar's if I could—right next to the cheese section. Still, I'd been trying to do like Suze Orman told me—get the cheap coffee. She owes me a serious latte.
The other doctor who figured into the goings-on was the consulting neurologist, Dr. Delia. I remember less of Delia as my brain was starting to do a funny thing at that point—whether it was the drugs or just straight-up trauma, I may never know—but it was collapsing all the faces of the people around me into only two faces that my brain could process and recognize. Everyone started to look like either my giant BFF Ed or my girlfriend Holly. Delia—who was completely new on the scene—would be talking to me about my epilepsy, asking questions to which I was writing all the answers out on paper, but in place of Delia's face I could only see Holly's. My brain was face swapping live people's faces like a social media filter. I was effectively the character from Oliver Sacks's story _The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat._ This was a trip, since it's a bit like dissociative misidentification, which you see in mental illness, except that I very rationally understood this person in front of me to be who she was, Delia-the-neurologist. But my eyes didn't see things that way. They disagreed—to my eyes she was Holly. At one point, Delia leaned in close to me and said, "Tell me about your first seizure."
And even though I couldn't speak, because she had Holly's warm, kind face, I felt so comfortable. I wrote out on my piece of paper, "Now, that's a story..." 3 The Unbearable Brightness of Being FADE IN: La-La Land... No, not the celebrated movie musical. I'm referring more mundanely to the ruthlessly backbiting, cock-measuring place of Los Angeles itself. Anyone, even Carl Sagan's chipper ghost speaking directly from the bardo, will tell you that La-La Land is full of _star stuff_ : star walks, star sightings, star _lets,_ star makers, star fuckers, star comebacks, star charts, star doctors, star diets, star cleanses, and star dog walkers. You name it. Everywhere you look it's stars rising, flickering, shooting, falling, flailing, or fizzling. My first seizure there in 2010 only adds to this list of stars. As I glanced in the rearview mirror, it was clear I was having a Gene Wilder morning. My hair was set to super-crazy static. Brushing it would be a no-go. I searched my dumpster of a mom-car for dry shampoo as the line at the drive-through Starbucks on the Santa Monica–Venice border came to a dead stop. Better, I resolved, to pat down the frizz with product and pretend the mess was 100 percent intended. Lazy French mom-look. _That_ was the only way we were going to make it to the movie premiere on time. The other mothers of Santa Monica may have been all about three-hundred-dollar Brazilian blowouts, but I'd already tried that and ended up looking like that poor, terrifying girl from _The Ring._ Besides, my world was _bigger_ than my hair, I reasoned. I was a writer, not a performer. People were lucky if I showed up wearing any pants at all.
All brains light up in order to send messages from one cell to the next, but some days, it felt like my brain could power the whole city's electrical grid. Not literally. It was more like a crackling, energetic feeling in my head. My machine was "on." I'd have so many thoughts going at once, you could simply plug a USB charger into my ear and light up the town or download a few dozen new plot twists. You could power all the tuna-can Priuses and shiny Teslas on the 405 freeway. I don't mean to sound like a jerkwad—as if my brain were somehow the answer to the city's first-world problems. I only mean to say that long before I ever had a grand mal seizure, I was already a pint-sized, livewire lunatic. I was an odd, skinny, little twerp of a child. Think Don Knotts with features all out of proportion. I had yet to grow into my enormous ears. My eyes and lips were too big for my elfin nose. I also operated at two distinct speeds: child-reading and child-wriggling. When I wasn't in a corner with my nose buried deep in a picture book, I was dancing. I would spin like a top, kicking, zinging, and gyrating in my pleated plaid skirt and dark blue knee socks.
I was especially demonstrative about my one true preschool love, American folk singer Jim Croce. Indeed, by age four, I was deeply smitten with the much older, much-mustachioed musician. Yes, even as a child I loved the swarthy lads, especially the ones who didn't eat paste. To this end, you could often find me boogying fitfully in front of the hi-fi in my grandparents' living room. I was especially down with Croce's rousing classic "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown." In my mind, Jim was the ultimate stud. A poet but not a pretentious sissy, he was emotionally available to my four-year-old heart, yet still a badass. My fidgeting wren of a mother, who was probably trying hard to behave under the stifling glare of her stoic Norse in-laws, would inhale sharply at my every move and wriggle as if to whisper-yell, "Stop the whirling for God's sake! You're going to break something!" By "something," she meant the collectible plates my grandmother had carefully, prudently mounted on the wall next to her vast collection of commemorative spoons. Though I did not yet have the verbal skills, in my head I thumbed my nose at the whole lot of them and shouted, "Impossible, you boring dummies! I'm bad, bad Leroy Brown! I'm going to break everything!"
That moment wasn't just the birth of a defiance that would become (ahem) a recurring theme in my life—it was also the first time I became conscious of what I call _the electric._ The second time, well, I blame free-range parenting. I better tell you what happened. Once upon a time, there was a perfectly well-meaning hippie couple from San Francisco who suffered from chronic back-to-the-land fantasies of sustainable living. These were brought about by a steady diet of _Mother Earth–Nature_ magazines and TV shows like _Little House on the Prairie._ Prairie, my ass. That show was shot in an LA suburb and everybody, including my wistfully crunchy parents, knew it. Alas, there we were, in the hinterlands of Northern California, looking at land just outside of Old Shasta, population 432. A once-thriving, now-creepy village, Old Shasta featured a post office, a greasy-spoon diner called Jay-Bird's that cooked almost exclusively with lard, and the one-and-only Jay's Market and Gas. All of this was owned by a beakish guy named Jay, who looked like a crook-necked cartoon buzzard. There were loads of trees and cows and horses—along with one extremely accessible, low-to-the-ground, unmarked, highly touchable electric fence. Made all the more inviting by the horse that was behind it.
What most likely saved my life: a pair of fantastically hideous shoes called Buster Browns. These were super thick, rubber-soled children's shoes that were very fashionable in the mid-1970s. You might as well have been wearing gigantic meatballs on your feet. I was about ten yards from my parents when it happened. They had ventured eagerly ahead with their redheaded realtor, Janice, who was a churchgoing lady with springy, permed hair who resembled a bright orange toilet brush. As my father gazed out at the pastoral rolling hills that smelled like wet dirt and rotting flowers left sitting too long in the vase, he waxed poetic about things like beekeeping and organic root vegetables while my mother puffed skeptically on a True cigarette, her preferred brand, no doubt pretending she was California's "healthy" answer to the French. Meanwhile, I was busy dawdling by the horse. Now, when you're a squat little runt of a kid, it's easy to feel like everything in the world is bigger than you, and there's a tendency to adopt the attitude where you're either afraid of all of it or afraid of none of it. I was the latter type of kid, and I was fascinated with horses. It's not just that they are completely beautiful, powerful, instinctive beasts capable of terrifying brute force, sudden strength, and lightning speed; it's more their faces I fixated on. Their great pooling, anime-style eyes always made them appear to me scared and confused. When I leaned forward, it was actually to convey in well-intentioned kid-speak, "Hey there, mister or missus horse, don't worry. My parents are completely chill, clueless agricultural poseurs who probably don't know a stitch about large animal husbandry and I'm pretty certain they won't make you do anything you're not super keen on..." and my index finger came to rest on the wire fence.
All of a sudden, SHAZAM! The bolt flew up my finger through my right arm. It was like being unzipped from the inside out...with fire! The current coursed through my kid-body, zigging past my tiny bird ribs, zagging down toward my little hoozie (causing me to pee just a teeny bit) and then it flew down my legs and shot my fully laced up Buster Browns clean off my feet. The next thing I knew, I'd been blown back and was lying flat in the dirt. My parents turned to look back, their bucolic reverie harshly disrupted. I'm not sure if they were high, or if it was just the 1970s, but this was long before helicopter parenting where they always rush every child to the ER. I sat halfway up on my elbows, probably looking like a drunken midget passed out in the street. "Holy shit!" I would have said if I'd any inkling of the existence of such words. "What on mother earth are you doing?" My father asked, puzzled. "Why'd you take off your shoes, kiddo?" "But...err...I–I didn't take them off," I stammered in drunk midget-ese as my equally perplexed and exasperated mother struggled to put the dreaded meatballs back on and then brushed the sodden leaves from my hair. As I explained how I was merely _talking_ to the horse when I touched the fence, I saw the jaws of my parents and their churchy realtor drop, aghast. Their eyes widened just like the horse, and the toilet brush declared under her breath, "Lord Jesus!" as they realized I'd electrocuted myself.
"Didn't you _see_ the sign for that said ELECTRIC FENCE?" they queried, shocked expressions all around, as if I was the one who'd lost my damn mind. This is when I reminded them that I was still only four and couldn't totally read big words yet. "What's _eclectric_ mean again?" I asked my mother who stood frozen in place, her cigarette burnt down to the filter between her lips. Again, since it was the seventies, no one called 911. I never want to speak ill of people who were probably in their own unique way trying to give me an idyllic childhood, but I think my parents may have actually been the original, self-involved hipsters. From there on out, though, they were careful to relate very pronounced warnings right out of the blue. "If you happen upon an old refrigerator in a junk yard, never climb inside and shut the door." Or, "If you see a bowl of razors, don't stick your hand in it." (Hoo boy. This explains a lot.) That night I couldn't sleep. My preschooler mind was whirring like a hummingbird, zipping from bloom to bloom and thought to thought. My head felt like root beer, its insides all fizzy and carbonated. I was coloring well beyond my bedtime with great fury as if the current were still alive on my fingertips. To make up for the midafternoon jolt, my parents bought me an elaborate farm diorama kit at Woolworth's, the kind where you had to color in all the grass and paper doll farm animals and outbuildings. It was some serious agrarian role-play complete with dangerously pointy farm implements. There was even white split-rail fencing to go around all the animals, which seemed to me ever so much better than the other kind I'd dealt with earlier that day. No wonder that poor horse was terrified, I reasoned.
As I colored, I thought about the day, the horse, and the fence. I studied my zapped index finger and recalled the unzipping feeling inside of me. I'd been zapped, and I wondered now if I could make a zap now myself, or if maybe I was electric? I looked down at the chaotic pattern of my coloring, which seemed confused, as though the blades of grass were eddying in slow, swirling, perpetual motion. I couldn't stop coloring. I pressed the crayon harder to the paper, and I loved the feeling of it, an excitement welling up in me, my own charged particles swarming like fireflies in a jar. Meanwhile, my father glowered in the doorway. "What are you still doing awake?" Not looking up, I told him I was working, that farm life was a rough business and hadn't he seen _Little House on the Prairie_? BACK IN LA-LA LAND 2010, at the Starbucks drive-up window, I'd given up on finding the dry shampoo. I clung to my venti drip with 2 percent and inhaled so hard that were it not for the plastic sippy-cup lid, coffee would have spouted straight up my nose and scalded my brain. It was a sole moment of relief, of respite from life as a truly single mother—no boyfriend, no sex, zero personal life.
I was worried about how we were going to make ends meet on my writing. I have very few backup skills, other than writing pithy ad slogans and fart jokes. With zero alimony and very limited child support, our new financial reality was about to be grimly Dickensian. And as anyone will tell you, Hollywood is still a place where the primary interview question remains, "So, how can you contribute to my greatness...or at least get me off right now, today?" I wasn't out of ideas. I was just well aware of the institutionalized gender nonsense that comes about when a too-nice nerd-girl tries to deliver them. I'd known that well before I'd schlepped the kids out from the East Coast after my poor husband told me he could no longer take being responsible for my happiness. I'd spent most of my time since arriving in LA feeling exhausted and like I was failing. I never fit in with all the orange spray-tanned people. Yet, I'd managed to carve out a little life for us, with scraps of work, a handful of nonjudgmental friends, and family not too far away but also not too close. I went to yoga. I meditated. I waxed all the things I was supposed to—eyebrows, upper lip, chin, arms, legs, and hoozie. I ate and drank all the leafy greens the healthy people told me to. I told myself, no matter what, I _meant_ well, even if Hollywood was making me seem _mean,_ which is sometimes how you _have to seem_ when you are outnumbered, undergroomed, and overwhelmed in LA.
My last script-doctoring job had ended more than a month ago, and with nothing significant on the horizon, I knew I was on borrowed time. I'd even begun to look at various corporate gigs back in advertising and marketing. I was in such a frenzy to nail down a gig, I'd been running everywhere, attending every coffee meet-up, every dinner party, and every lame networking boondoggle. I made the Kardashians look like shut-ins. I tucked a wayward lock behind my ear, pulled out of Starbucks, and turned south on Lincoln toward Venice. The fog was just burning off. It would be warm out today, probably near eighty, I thought, as I made my way toward our modest bungalow in Venice. Driving along, I noticed the vision in my left eye begin to shift. All at once, the left side of the road ahead began to reel backward. The palm trees, shops, and parked cars shot away from me, as if I were driving in reverse. At the same time, in my right eye, the film of life began to speed forward at a pace faster than I thought I was driving. Everything in my right field of vision seemed to rush toward me and past me, accelerating. I felt a panicked hammering in my heart. What was happening? Did my bitter barista just roofie me? Everyone knows they're frustrated screenwriters. Which way was home again? Which way was I going? Was it north toward Santa Monica, or south toward Venice? I was just around the corner from home and had traveled this route thousands of times on the way to school, sports, and friends. Had I gotten turned around? I tried to catch my breath and pumped the brakes on our 1985 Mercedes surf wagon. Our tank of a family car had been restored and converted to run on veggie oil so you could fill it up with Wesson at Costco. I know what you're thinking: yes, I _was_ my parents' child, but we loved this car. The only drawback was that anytime you went anywhere in it, you ended up smelling like a taco. I slowed the Wesson wagon to a crawl.
My eyes strained to reconcile the two films side by side, but it felt like a sudden shard—the exact _opposite_ of a thought. Where, a second ago, there was nothing but road and trees and houses, now there was a small, certain darkness—a pinprick of a black hole growing in my consciousness. One I didn't want to see, know, or even think about right then. I tried to blink it away. I just needed the films to match up, but for a moment it was like a splinter of pure absence between them. The angry blare of a car horn startled me back to life, the films merged before me in the driver's seat, and I was mostly back to normal. Yes, I was headed in the right direction. I just needed to get home, I told myself. I heaved a deep breath. Breathing, breathing would get me back home. "Namaste, motherfuckers!" was my mantra. I just needed to drink more water and take an aspirin. "Stop being such a freakin' sissy," I scolded myself, using my inner mom voice and focusing on the road. I'd promised to take my youngest daughter and her friend Kasey to the premiere of _Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang_ at the Television Academy. We'd planned to meet my friend Jacqueline and all go together. And I wasn't going to let work or money stress get in the way of a treat. Between the divorce and move, both of my daughters had been through enough in the last few years. This was one small thing I could _still_ make happen.
At home, we were traipsing about. In. Out. Around. As usual, glitter was everywhere. For a ten-year-old going on thirty, Sophie was chirping away like a little cricket. Beyond excited, she was getting ready for approximately 109 minutes of Emma Thompson transforming from a warty old crone to a warm, magical, motherly being. I headed toward the car. As I called back to her from the kitchen, I felt a vague buzzing, like tiny electric needles in my temples, and an invisible metal band tightening around my head. My gaze stretched out across the kitchen to the driveway. And then as I stepped forward, the kitchen counter tilted sharply to the right. A black wash of paint flooded my vision from the top down, a dark watery curtain, a tidal wave of blackness falling on the stage of my life. There was no time to react, to even put my hands out, or reach for anything to catch myself. Darkness is different from nothing. It's not that I see darkness in my head; I just don't see at all. The messages no longer flowed between body and brain. Not even a split second to notice or care that something was happening or had happened because there was no time anymore. No being; just a voluptuous, impenetrable blackness. There was no distance, no distinction between it and me. I was as much part _of_ the blackness as it was part of me. And that was okay. There was no pain. In fact, there was less than no pain. There wasn't even a concept of it because there was no "body" that I occupied at that point. No gravity. No corporeal heaviness—only nothingness but less than even that. Only light.
I'll have to check with the people who do science (like astrophysicists and such), but I feel like there is probably a very pragmatic reason for the speed of light. Complicated theories aside, we need light to take its time to get places, and fortunately, the universe is happy to oblige. Why? Because if you could see all the light in the universe, all at once, it would blind you in an instant. What I saw was all the light in the universe, even the little bits you cannot see, a hundred thousand sparklers from a galaxy far, far away. Not entirely blinding but close. In it, I could feel the universe eddying like a fast-flowing river of stars. La-La Land and everything was illuminated—thank you, Jonathan Safran Foer. Like being trapped in the Van Gogh painting _Starry Night_ in swift oceanic motion, but it was more than light. It was a feeling of transcendence, of unstoppable ecstasy, accompanied by divine chromatic effects: a rapturous, paradisiacal stillness and glow. Amid the rushing of countless points of white light, I felt myself wrestling blindly to separate myself from this luminous new inner geography, to get back from it and put words around it, to observe it. All I could get out or hear myself say was, "It's a lightning storm in my head." No deep, Jack Handy thoughts. Nothing profound. Just star stuff. It was unbearably bright and impossibly close, but still, I didn't want it to stop because it was beautiful. Ecstatic even. It was _the electric._
Layers of voices slipped through the blackest blackness like sylphs enshrouding, swirling all around me, touching but not touching. I couldn't tell where they began and I ended. Was that my skin or hers, or whose? I had only the most fluid and flimsy of borders. I had the vague sense of dark blue authority, a uniform and possibly a badge. I have always had a problem with authority, and had I access to language just then, I might have said something impolitic like, "Don't tase me, bro'...I'm not one for self-diagnosis, but I think my brain might already be its own stun gun right now." Later, shadows and hushed voices faded in and out, sounding like they were coming from a conversation down the hall in a vague middle distance of nowhere. Still only blackness, but one voice flitted past me. "She hasn't had a stroke," it said, and I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman. Then, another shadow leaned in close, one that I could see only in a silhouette of black on white. I felt her velvety voice brush over me.
I knew this woman. She had been a mothering presence for my children and me for years now, a bonus mom. A costume designer for the movies and TV, Jacqueline had arrived in our lives by happenstance when I was working on a new pilot for a TV thriller. She always came complete with bags full of fabric, sparkles, glamor, and infinite patience for my children's cantankerous ways. She was the prize you found in the bottom of the cereal box—the kind of cereal your hippie mother wouldn't actually let you ever have because it had artificial everything in it. Jacqueline was her own Lucky Charm. And mine. "Darling," she whispered now. "Nanny McPhee?" I may have said back to her. "Darling, you've had a seizure." Now, I felt the gravity of my body being pulled down and out of the CT machine thing. I could sense the perfunctory comings and goings of medical people in blue and green scrubs. I recognized this feeling in me now. It was electric, like the fence. "Good God, my brain is charcoal." I whispered.
Still, no nice doctor came to explain what had happened, or what a seizure was for that matter. It was a jam-packed Los Angeles ER. I was not diagnosed with anything. This wasn't an episode of _House_ where a cranky middle-aged neurologist and his team of plucky residents work tirelessly to solve the medical mystery of why I'd had a seizure. I was released in Jacqueline's care with discharge instructions to follow up with a neurologist and take a bunch of pills that looked like horse tranquilizers. It had all been unbearably bright and extremely close, but I was convinced it was a one-off. 4 Where the Hell Is My White Light? THE DAY AFTER that first seizure in 2010, I surveyed my prizefighter face. I sported an angry purple shiner, a cut lip, and a massive bump near my right temple where I'd cracked my head on the edge of the kitchen counter. I held a bag of frozen organic peas to my eye to ward off the swelling. I figured I could cover the shiner with sunglasses like the plastic surgery moms at school always did after their various procedures. Thankfully, I hadn't needed stitches in my lip. The scab was already healing and would fall off in a day or two. In the meantime, I would just look a tad diseased. "Just a touch of scurvy!" I could tell people. Nothing a little vitamin C and some water couldn't cure. Every muscle on or associated with my person ached to the point that simply taking a shower was excruciating. I wanted to take a bath but was told not to do so until I'd followed up with a neurologist.
More than anything, life felt strange and seismically unsettled. Out of nowhere, I recalled a conversation about God that I'd had with my father when I was a child. It went something like this: "So, you're saying he's _everywhere_?" I asked. "Pretty much," said my father from behind his newspaper at breakfast. "And _no one_ can see him?" "Yep." I didn't like it. Not one bit. What happened to mother earth? I must have been about five when I had this first conversation about religion with my dad. Other than their back-to-the-land nature fantasies and a love of Dean Martin Christmas carols, my parents weren't terribly religious people. Nonetheless, I was a spiritually inquisitive child. Heaven, I had already worked out on my own, was a cloudy white space in the sky where angels and good dead people hung out, while hell was a low-lying hot place for the baddies, but the idea of "God" was still a fairly abstract concept in my little kid brain. The world just seemed too big for only one guy to be in charge. This is why Santa had also seemed unrealistic to deliver all the presents. You'd need tens of thousands of minions—not just one guy and a couple elves, which is how he always showed up in cartoons.
"And God can see everything and everyone?" I persisted. "Hmm-mmm," my dad confirmed, sipping his coffee all fatherly. "Even when they're getting dressed?" "Hmm-mmm." "Well, I think he's a real perv." There was something annoyingly conniving about an all-seeing, omniscient being. My father lowered his paper. "Where did you learn that word?" "What word?" "Perv," he persisted. " _Columbo_?" I couldn't really remember, but I loved _Columbo_ at the time because Peter Falk has always reminded me of a Muppet. It was an early spiritual crisis, but I still think it's true; there is something perverse about God and the exercise we call consciousness. As I regained mine in the days following the seizure, I noticed I slept like the dead. Now, home alone with the kids at school or at their dad's, what had happened with the seizure began to sink in and the stakes of it all felt unnervingly high. By the time I really woke up and my postseizure stupor had lifted, I felt a strange expansiveness in my head. An odd kind of floating. I started to wonder how close I'd really come to death. I had so many questions.
Thanks to pop-culture shows like fantastic 1970s paranormal classics such as _In Search of..._ , narrated by none other than Leonard Nimoy, I was already all too familiar with the common trope of the near-death experience. "Don't go into the light!" you've no doubt jokingly shouted at a beloved television character or at your mate when he or she is on a raging emotional bender. These NDEs (as the pros referred to them) always seemed to feature a single bright white light, perhaps at the end of a tunnel with gauzy angelic loved ones, all gently beckoning for you to cross over. And in most narratives, somehow if you don't cross over, it's because you have yet to fulfill your destiny or learn some lesson that aligns with your belief system. Maybe you even saw yourself from above during your NDE, on the operating table, or lying flat on your back in your kitchen. In the quiet of the house, I naïvely Googled "grand mal seizure" and tearfully watched the videos of people writhing, their bodies juddering away in a hospital bed or on a soft couch only then to fall into a deep slumber afterward. The afflicted were usually attended to by a loved one or a couple of methodically calm but comforting nurses who had clearly seen this kind of thing all before.
I was unusually silent for me. Ordinarily, I am a gregarious Chatty Cathy and given to much cackling laughter and semi-melodramatic tirades, but not after this. This seizure had stopped my mouth in its tracks. I was mired in a deep swamp of ambient melancholy. I must have scared the hell out of my poor daughter. It had to be an isolated incident, I assured myself. I kept having vivid flashbacks of the lightning storm that had struck in my head. The words don't really do justice to the electrifying dynamism I experienced during my seizure. It felt like my brain was actively reaching around inside my head, searching to fill in the blanks to reconstruct the memory of that day. I realized there had been no single white light, no tunnel, and no overhead POV shots of me "seizing" on the kitchen floor. There had been no sign of my nanna or our old dog welcoming me to the afterlife. Where were all the beckoning loved ones? I knew I had experienced a kind of "lights out," but what bothered me the most was that I didn't even know I was gone. What is so uncanny is that when something like this happens, you really don't miss yourself _at all._ And you think how can that be? But there _is_ no you to do the thinking. You're just gone. I couldn't even miss my kids. There was simply no capacity for missing anyone while off in Seizure City, which meant I'd better get busy with missing them right away if that's how death was.
First there had been a gorgeous Van Gogh-esque lightning storm in my head that had felt so sublime, and then suddenly, there was absolutely nothing. Probably less than nothing because it was like blacking out, except with no brain activity whatsoever. Was this what it was like to be brain dead? Could it really be as ordinary and _bland_ as all that? Was the end of life really just lights out? If so, I was going to be magnificently pissed off. I noticed an odd openness. It felt as if I were standing in the middle of a great field with my brain having taken a deep, deep breath. Now there was all this new space. Buddhists sometimes refer to this sensation as having a _beginner's mind_ —where everything seems new—as though you are seeing it for the first time. I'm not sure why it works that way. I'm sure there's some complicated neurochemical explanation, but I found myself often studying very small things such as the grains of coffee swirling in the French press coffeepot or the microfine pattern of dust on a window. My linguistic skills were also lagging, but the thoughts in my head were crackling like bacon in a hot pan.
If I had experienced a glimpse of the afterlife—apart from the pre-spaz glitter bomb—it seemed a bit mundane. No God? No heaven? Where were all the people? Where were my nanna and Jim Croce? Shouldn't he be there? And what of Princess Di? What about reincarnation? Where was the multiverse as semi-promised by the string theory nerds? And what about ghosts? I'd been _so_ totally looking forward to at least haunting a few of the jerkier people in my life—moving a picture, stacking some chairs, and saying "boo!" Forget the angelic beings you might have heard about. This afterlife was more like when you actively try to remember back to the time _before_ you were born and you can't because you're just _not._ It was very unsatisfying. I don't know about you, but I'd expected just a little more creativity from the universe. As I brooded over the narratives about God—at least in the western hemisphere—it seemed the story went that God is always all powerful, all knowing, and all good. But if you took a look around at all the evidence—things like global famine, childhood cancer, evil dictators, tsunamis, and seizures—it seemed clear that God was either not all powerful or _not_ all good. What was the use of that? But what had I expected, really? Santa? Fairies? Even a higher plane of consciousness would have been nice. I was taken aback by my own naïvety. Had I been such a closeted faithaholic this whole time, silently indulging in Anne Lamott's three essential prayers of _Help, Thanks,_ and _Wow_? Those words we all whisper during life's inexplicable events?
To grow up in California is to grow up with a patchwork system of beliefs. The afterlife and God might very well be a big nothing, so you hedge your bets with _spirituality_ and hope it's all worth it. Now I found myself challenged to even defend the "s" word. It was an existential conundrum, the banality of it all. I was disappointed. Of faith and religion, Christopher Hitchens once wrote, "Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, and it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something. That is the sinister thing to me. Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated." In the wake of my divorce, I had needed a placebo: literally anything to believe in and make myself feel better. Neuroscience hypothesizes that when it comes to brain activity, emotional pain looks a lot like physical pain. Bad breakup? Have a sugar pill and feel amazing. It turns out whatever you firmly believe in will actually make you feel better.
Naturally, I chose something super complicated to believe in, something that would elevate my sense of purpose. After all, didn't someone somewhere on TV once say that the moral high ground has quite a lovely view? I chose Catholicism. It fit all my requirements: 1. I wanted to feel righteous and rightness. I was devastated by the end of my marriage, and I was not going to do what Nora Ephron tells us all to do when she says, "You are not your divorce." I was going to persist in being an idiot and own the fuck out of it and out of martyrdom. Catholics are great at that, I reckoned. I fit the bill. 2. I also wanted a boyfriend, one with a moral compass stronger than all the other boys I'd known in life, one who had the same sense of soul-crushing guilt I'd learned from the Irish phalanx of my family. Plus, I was terrified of being outnumbered by the kids. Chances were a Catholic lad would exercise a degree of compassion toward my children, as he would have grown up with heaps of siblings and so wouldn't be terrified of my sassy, heathen daughters as other childless rubes might be.
3. I wanted a religion that partied. Go communion wine! I wanted dinner parties with amazing food, an earthy Cabernet Franc, and marathon conversations like the kind I'd had when I was married. The kind of dinners that ended with all candles melted down to the nub and geraniums wilting somewhere on a porch. 4. I also wanted a Thomas Merton approach to belief. Merton was this very cool Catholic monk who managed to harmonize aspects of Buddhism and meditation with all the glorious guilt and neurosis of the Catholic Church. I wanted a little God but without all the dogma, if that makes sense. I certainly didn't believe in any of that _Secret_ nonsense, which was all the rage in LA at the time, especially with their scary sweating rituals. Pass. I already had hip-hop yoga for that part of my day. In the end, Saint Monica's was only a few blocks away and seemed a perfect fit for my little spiritual walkabout. It worked for a time. Up until my first seizure in 2010, I was the healthiest person I knew. No surgeries. No chronic anything except sadness after the divorce. Nary even a head cold! To be honest, I'd been spending so much time trying to live my best life in earnest with kale juice, mindfulness, and yoga, I hadn't given much thought to mortality—except that maybe after single motherhood, death might feel like a well-deserved nap? What was I supposed to do with this grim Hitchens confirmation? The idea that it was just lights out gnawed at me. Faith wasn't just overrated, it was a completely sinister ruse. I couldn't make sense of what I'd seen and felt during that first seizure. Was the big white light all just some neurochemical hallucination—an acid trip of the brain's own making? If so, did it serve any kind of adaptive evolutionary purpose? Maybe it provided much-needed distraction in the middle of dying. Maybe it was our brains' own way of coping with the transition from being alive to being dead?
I started reading different accounts of seizures and NDEs. I came upon this passage by Dostoyevsky who had recorded more than one hundred of his own seizures over the course of two decades: "The air was filled with a big noise and I tried to move. I felt the heaven was going down upon the earth, and that it had engulfed me. I have really touched God. He came into me myself; yes, God exists, I cried. You all, healthy people, have no idea what joy that joy is which we epileptics experience the second before a seizure." I recognized this! This same split-second joy, these words, and this ecstatic feeling right before my first seizure, had it been a glimpse of God? Still, there was all the inky blackness and the void to reconcile. It bothered me. They say a bee's brain contains roughly a million neurons. By comparison, human brains contain about one hundred billion. The idea of neurodiversity holds that there is profound value in how each and every individual's brain is wired. Was I wired for a flash of the divine now and then? One so bright, it knocked me flat? I tended to think I was no more special than a bee. Still, I was irritated because I expected the universe to be slightly more creative than just lights out. _Thwack,_ you're dead, you poor, dumb but very environmentally necessary bee.
The betrayal I'd felt during my first seizure was one of utter disconnection—a disconnection from a hope of more or a story of _more._ Hope takes a crapload of work and narrative invention to maintain. Hope can often be easier to hang onto in stories than in everyday life. Stories of origin, reckoning, salvation, and redemption reside much more easily with hope than the practical daily requirements of food, clothing, and shelter. These things take so much energy on their own I wondered if hope was even worth the trouble. The flip side to hope, faith, and God suddenly feeling like _a big nothing_ was that all at once, life started to feel like _a big everything._ If this was all you got, this one, single life, then there's _a big everything_ out there to experience, so best to love, fail, take risks, make crazy-ass mistakes, and do what gives you joy because all you have is now. I know it sounds self-help-ish and obviously "YOLO," but coupled with my scary seizure, it was oddly freeing. Suddenly, I had permission to do whatever the fuck I wanted.
I'd grown up to become a fairly obedient but neurotic white girl. I'd wanted to believe in everything: Gods—new and old, the Buddha, witches, the tooth fairy, ghosts, cosmic justice, specialty causes like Hobos for snow leopards, and nice, non-probing aliens like E.T. I liked the idea of the unseen world and all its secret powers and invisible mechanics. I'd always loved that there's a "possible" out there, but the inscrutability and uncertainty of "God's plan" was so damn annoying. Interpretation is how we batten down the hatches and secure the storm of our experiences. We tend to reach for any fixed point that might anchor us. I badly needed a mooring after the first seizure. _I wanted my goddamn white light._ Writing had always been a mooring for me. When my big life failures left me with a bleak but unflinching skepticism that there is no God, no cosmic point to human beings, I could frame that disappointment with a story, or at the very least a joke. Everybody suffered, and once you figured that out, and only when you dropped the whiney questions like, why is this happening to me? could the more interesting questions such as, what makes joy? be asked and partly answered.
Still, all those hours and years wasted after the divorce. All those Monday-night adult classes I took to become a good Catholic, learning the books of the Bible and the Lord's Prayer, never mind dealing with communion, not swearing, and being less morally jerky. If nothing really mattered, not even what people think about you or how you made them feel when you're just _gone_ , why be good? Why hold back? Go ahead, read Ayn Rand and _be_ a complete shithead. Eat, drink, and smoke what you want; tell those asshole kids to get off your lawn. Live every day like a Russian oligarch. The universe _doesn't_ really have your back, so screw that hipster nonsense. The universe has a very low balance in its fuck account. And if anything, it's saving those dwindling fucks for Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama. I never knew that Thoreau was an asshole until that _New Yorker_ article 150 years after his death. All this time I just thought he was an admirable hermit. Didn't Nietzsche say morality is just part of the herd instinct anyway? Who wants to be a damn goat? I suppose you could be a lamb or sheep. They're more adorable, but damn if they don't get slaughtered a lot.
But it's not as simple as all that. Thinking about Ayn and Nietzsche, it's hard to have your gratitude toward God or the universe for the good things you have in your life _not_ curdle into resentment. My personal theology was turning out to have more inconsistencies and plot holes than a sci-fi movie made by twelve-year-olds running around the yard with their iPhone 8s. Was it Max Planck, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist, who said, "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change"? I can't remember, but I believe there were three big tectonic shifts that needed to happen in my person: 1. I probably needed to rewrite my point of view and unlearn a number of small certitudes that signified I was an adult and actually in charge of anything. I hadn't been in charge that morning of my first seizure. I had no control over my brain that day, so I shouldn't feel too terribly bad about it. 2. I also needed to go back to being a student. When you're a student, you actively seek to have your paradigms challenged, dismantled, and even smashed now and then. You want to be wrong. You want criticism more than ever because you worry more about learning than about what other people think of you. My whole paradigm for parenting and the perfectibility of our children had gone out the window with the divorce. But if dying in my kitchen in plain view of my kid wasn't a good enough excuse for living, I didn't know what was. I needed to be okay with not being okay and learning things as though I never knew them to begin with—which was (conveniently) how I felt after this first seizure—like a beginner. Like a student.
3. I would need to stay funny, and in my postseizure crisis of faith, I realized something about the whole white light phenomenon that Leonard Nimoy was always harping on. It wasn't _a_ white light. It was white lights _plural._ That's what I was seeing: a pointillist conspiracy of a million white lights, that tornado of stars I'd been caught in, that was my white light. And the strange religiosity I felt in the wake of my seizure had also been experienced by Joan of Arc and St. Teresa of Avila—thanks Google. But those ladies hadn't fared too well, so a sense of humor seemed both highly appropriate and necessary. I also wasn't afraid of death (as much) anymore—whether or not it was a mere neurochemical process or a passage to a divine realm. Don't get me wrong, I was still very much afraid of pain and suffering, but more than anything, my seizure left me curious about the brain. And I confess, I _did_ feel a kind of yearning to flirt with the moment that we perish. I didn't want to go there again or have another episode anytime _too_ soon, but what was it that St. Augustine said? "Lord, make me good...but not yet."
5 Angry Mothertrucker FUCK. I was lost...and things were a mess. What do mothers do when there's a mess? They clean up. They straighten. They vacuum. (I _love_ my Dyson!) Mothers know the life-changing value of "the reset." On film and TV sets, it's the same deal. You're always telling the cast and crew after a botched take, "Okay, everybody safely back to one!" which means everybody grab your props and get back into position, and let's try it all again. Similarly, my whole world had been reset. With every new seizure, the scene was suddenly filled with deadly sharp corners and even harder edges. All our modern furniture was a concussion risk that needed to be foam padded. I wasn't allowed to drive—which is probably for the best. With little to no sense of direction and a periodically tenuous grasp of reality, I wouldn't want me on the road either. I couldn't swim and there would also be no more hot yoga. I couldn't even cook a normal dinner on the stove as I might seize and set myself or the house on fire. Sigh. By age forty-two, I was supposed to baby-proof our home all over again, but this time I was the baby.
I know it probably sounds inconsistent, but I had such a palpable distrust of my brain, my memory, my sanity, and my body to even just stay standing upright. And for a writer, I became a wildly unreliable narrator. I was always on edge that I would seize again. Worst of all, I had scared the crap out of my brave, little, resourceful, smarty-pants kid, and I had no idea how to make up for it. My ten-year-old regarded me now with fear. Her face, not yet even spotted with adolescence, conveyed worry and a premature maternal wounded-ness that left me insisting, "Hello, I am _still_ the mother here!" I agonized that her heart had been broken too soon in life—by the divorce and now by epilepsy. If I dropped anything in the kitchen or the bathroom, a dish, or a hairbrush, she'd immediately call out from the next room in this stricken voice that, as a parent, just hollows out your ribcage. It's this telepathic/telekinetic sense of your child's heart and your own heart both darkening and caving in on themselves in unison.
The shrinks all say that children are constantly changing, disappearing overnight and then resurfacing as entirely different people each day. New moods, new cells, and even changeling character traits appear in the span of twenty-four hours that served their resilience. Still, a child should never have to worry about whether her parent is all right. I needed to protect both girls from whatever this was or wasn't. So, I decided right then and there, _I would lie about the whole seizure thing._ I was going to be a big, fat, skinny liar. I would lie to my colleagues, to the other mothers, to my family, to my ex-husband, and to the FedEx guy. No one would be served by the minutiae of maybes and fears that this little neurological event of mine might stir up. Like many before me, denial would continue to be my core strategy until I had a lock on what was really going on with my brain. This would give the girls and me not only time to process but also some much-needed privacy. The divorce had never afforded us this luxury. It felt entirely too public with the cast of rotating attorneys and disclosures and "ding dong, the bitch is dead." There's always a bad guy in every split—even in no-fault states. (Raises hand. Yes, it's me. I'm the snarky, vitriolic, wicked bitch of the west. What can I say? We'd built a whole life together. I didn't want to get divorced.) So, the privacy and safety we'd known before things all fell apart had been a warm bath. I needed that more than ever postseizure.
Denial of my diagnosis would also give me a chance to figure out an "upside" to all of the guilt I was feeling. It had found its way deep down into my Cracker Jack subconscious. There had to be a prize at the bottom of all that sugary goodness and I wasn't leaving without it. If there is one great equalizer across all mothers of all 'hoods, of all socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures, religions, and ambitions, it's guilt. There are whole industries built around it. You could make a veritable wheel of it like the chore charts your mom used to hang on the fridge that said things like "Empty the dishwasher," but this chart would top them all. Guilt, over both the sacred and the profane aspects of motherhood, is a universal force—like gravity or dark matter. Let's start with the profane things I might have said as my little sea monkeys sallied forth from my uterus and out into the cold, cruel dystopian world. They say you forget the pain, but really you don't. It might have gone a little like this: "Oh my fucking God, you fucking [insert cruel descriptor for husband], _you_ did this to me, you fucking fuckwad!"
Or, since it was a teaching hospital, there was a group of young, terrified residents in attendance, there might also have been a little of this: "Why the fuck are _all of you_ standing at the end of the bed cheering for my va-jay-jay? And I don't care if you're learning—you, on the end there, stop looking so horrified! You too, [insert expletive for husband's name]. And _no_ rearview mirrors! Who the fuck _ever_ thought _that_ was a good idea?" Or, if things weren't going exactly according to plan with the epidural I'd requested, there might also be some: "Oh, fuck...please, please, just push her back in and then please, please, give me a fucking C-Section!" (Repeats string of nonsensical expletives, knowing all the while the guilt is just a rain check arriving later, COD.) Then, there were the wishes, prayers, and pleadings that happened in those last moments before she was out that might have gone something like this: "Oh fuck, I wasn't made for this! And _how_ is our daughter not going to end up with a corncob head? Lord, please don't let her have a corncob head, or worse, a corncob brain, and even if she is corncobby in any way, shape, or form, don't let me be so shallow that I still don't find her completely exquisite. Oh, fuck!"
Then, "Good grief, her head is the circumference of hipster artisanal bologna! What if my poor hoozie stays like this forever? What if I lack the appropriate prostaglandins to make things normal again? Oh fuck, please God, or Gaia, or whoever the hell's in charge anywhere, just _get her out_ of me! And pretty please, can I please, please just _not_ poo on the table in front of all of these nice people?" But from the moment you gaze down at their goopy little heads, that's when the sacred takes over and you realize what you've known all along: you are going to be apologizing to your child in advance for the rest of your life for all the things that will invariably go wrong. For all the little awkward and terrifying moments to come, you _know_ you need an overarching damage waiver to protect all parties involved. Even in your arms right then, you know that the extra-crispy hospital blanket is not _nearly_ soft enough for their perfect, little Winston Churchill cheeks. And then, you realize that, way before this moment, there are all these instances coming in the future that you are going to need to account for as well—like when you make the wrong call at the class campout when her wrist is really fractured but instead you _believe_ that one doctor-dad who says it's just a sprain and so no reason to cut the trip short. We're all just renting this life, so it just feels like you need to inspect it for dings, dents, and scratches before getting too far down the road.
In my case, with my elder daughter, Olivia, I'd been dilated to five centimeters for a good four weeks before going into labor. I'd hoped this hadn't been hard on her. Honestly, it was like walking around New York with my purse just wide open! Who knows what could have gotten up in there? Or she could have just rolled right out down Broadway. As I beheld her perfect little noncorncob head in those first moments after delivery, it also occurred to me that I needed to completely _apologize_ for eating all those off-limits unpasteurized cheeses and sushi that I'd had before I'd even known I was pregnant. Or the immense volume of salt I'd ingested because I had constant terror-based dyspepsia for all nine months that only things like salt and vinegar potato chips and greasy bacon could remedy. I definitely needed to apologize for that. I said a sheepish "I'm sorry" and thanked my then-husband for not letting me name the baby after the anesthesiologist who had slipped me some eleventh-hour good stuff. For once, my husband had stuck to a plan. I also apologized for throwing a handful of tampons at the same poor man after labor number two. They'd bounced off his forehead. Nevertheless, he didn't deserve that. He'd been trying to find me sour apple Jolly Ranchers and other lady items anywhere near the hospital.
Another pie slice in the sacred wheel of maternal guilt, besides pie itself, was breastfeeding. I know people always describe breastfeeding as this beautiful, private moment between mother and child, but for me, there was nothing private about it. It was deeply and unbendingly public. From the very first moment in the hospital when the nurse remarked that I didn't have very _latchable_ nipples (What are those anyway?), breastfeeding was an all-access, live-streaming titty fest. I could have streamed it live on Twitter and it would have been more exclusive. My daughters were both gigantic babies. They might well have been born lumberjacks complete with flannel—in case you couldn't tell from the number of f-bombs I dropped earlier in this chapter. At eight and a half pounds each, they had voracious appetites. And as much as I wanted to be an overachiever in this realm of motherhood with all the other smug, self-satisfied moms in their fucking Eileen Fisher blouses and their Boppy pillows, my body just couldn't keep up with the little ladies. I tried everything, but it was neither natural nor easy. Yes, there are whole industries designed to make you feel shitty about this one particular slice of motherhood. I'm not whining for a participation ribbon, but I don't think any mom should ever be made to feel guilty for supplementing with a little formula—be it SimilInfalackiform for your little one or Prozinaxipro for you because your hormones are on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. Breastfeeding's not a foot race. And even if it were, there'd be no one right way to run it. It's more like a dance marathon, and sometimes you will have to change up your moves.
Nevertheless, you say to yourself and to your wee one while they're still gloppy in your arms, "Okay little person, we're not going to know if I'm a good parent for another oh...thirty-odd years, and even then people with solid parents and totally happy childhoods have their issues. You might really get irritated with me during the teen years. Or you could turn out to be a complete wastrel, but I am going to love you regardless and we're just going to try to keep things interesting so that life always holds some curiosity and joy. I hereby commit all future earnings to the swear jar. I promise out loud not to be one of those annoying moms who give out boxes of raisins for Halloween. It's going to be all chocolate, all the time. And no cheap candy-corn filler. I promise to give you the Heimlich maneuver should you ever accidentally choke on a Tiddly Wink when you are twelve and long past the ages of doing such silly things. And if your little heart is ever broken by anyone, any boy, any girl, or any circumstance, I promise to stand up for you like a lioness and help put things back together and comfort you. If you are ever lost, I promise to come find you—even if you are lost in Antarctica and I don't like the cold. And even if I'm bad at boundaries, I'll do my best to stay back so you can forge your own path. I promise if I ever get to the end of my tether, to give myself a time-out (possibly with some Xanax). I will try not to embarrass you at too many school functions, except I _will_ probably make big signs for sporting events that say things like "Go Dragons!" and cheer louder than all the other parents to the point where, from the basketball court, you tell me to sit back down and shut up. I promise to support whatever dreams you end up having even if they seem like long shots and as long as they don't involve too many tattoos because needles are sucky and you might change your mind about your various life narratives over time. Because this is the sacred long game, I whisper to my cheeky monkeys. It's where you come to grips with the fact that any truly worthy, long game is made up of many, many shorter games, scrimmages, and adventures. It's like an epic Broadway show with multiple musical interludes, different story arcs, unsavory characters, mean girls, meaner moms, unexpected heroes, rap battles, and a twist or two that none of us saw coming. There will, of course, be some poignant, happy-resolution montages coupled with farcical missteps, some offscreen quibbles, downright _Fight Club_ scenes, and intermissions, so we just need to pace ourselves; am I right?
To give a little more context I wasn't just a mindful parent; I was a manic one. I was so worried about my daughters' lives not turning out totally great. I'm the crazy mother who drove 1,800 miles from New York to Disney World in a blizzard so that her daughters could ride in teacups. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else or do it again—although, we _did_ have the Magic Kingdom almost entirely to ourselves, which was great. There were no lines to the rides because of the flurry of cancellations, we had free run of the hotel, and we got to meet all the princesses. I was a feisty mother and I wasn't going to let the fucking universe with its shitty winter weather ruin my kids' jolly holiday. Sometimes the universe screwing with you feels personal and so you have to defy it. Did I need to do that again now? After both births, I'd said I was sorry to the girls, in advance, for all the confusion that was about to ensue, but I never anticipated having to apologize for seizures or the anxiety, depression, and consequences they would bring.
Even with becoming a mother, I'd hoped to retain a sliver of myself. It felt selfish but necessary. Sleep deprived with scarcely a minute to feel the hot droplets of a shower on my face, I was desperate to save any small piece of "the-me-before-them," to remember my most favorite words and expressions like _perspicacity_ or _journey proud,_ to be able to complete at least one single thought from start to finish, or to come up with a moderately creative idea. With every pressure that parenthood brings, it would be easy to become a shrieking dishrag of a woman if I didn't try to preserve some fragments of the chick I'd grown up with. Still, the sense of guilt that gripped me on a molecular level after that first seizure was a doozy. The single thing to which my unconscious mind resolved was, "I'm sorry." I still have no memory of it, but when Jacqueline arrived at our house with the ambulance in tow, Sophie, my younger daughter, had helped me to bed. Apparently, all I kept repeating as I clung to her was how sorry I was. I couldn't stop apologizing—even in the middle of a grand mal seizure, with a concussion, a black eye, and a bloody lip, I was just so sorry. If I could have uttered it softly into a tin can and sealed it, preserved for all of her lifetime, I would have.
I'd always imagined better for her, for all of us. When you have children there is an unspoken agreement that you won't die on them, at least for a stretch of meaningful time; even if you _secretly_ wish for it in a fleeting moment, this is mostly just a desperate wish for sleep. In the days after my first seizure, I'd decided that this little "event" was an isolated incident. I had been simply doing too much hip-hop yoga, not drinking enough water, and stressing out about having no ideas for any wretched new reality shows that would surely write themselves if we just cast them with horrible enough people. It was one of those moments where I'd decided that I was not going to let this seizure thing _become_ a thing. Still, I was in this awkward place of not knowing what I didn't know. I had always been a healthy person—a tad high strung and neurotic but healthy. My friend Helene and I would do wheatgrass shots after booty class until we were completely high on wellness. I drank overpriced Kombucha teas. I meditated. I was doing all the right things—on paper and in practice. I'd even worked on a raw-food cookbook project—a mistake of incredibly farty proportions. But the seizure shook me. Healthy people always suspect the sick: she wasn't looking after herself, or she wasn't eating right, or she must have been drinking. All of the above had been true at different times of my adult life—but not lately.
And I didn't know what I really wanted to know _yet._ Before my diagnosis, I'd come home from the hospital and simply Googled the word "seizure," which came up as _an electrical discharge in the brain presenting in a variety of forms._ As I read on, it felt like there was a whole laundry list of new rules and trauma-prevention factors to consider now. If you've never witnessed someone having a grand mal seizure, it definitely breaks all the _mom contracts._ Like crying at your desk at work. If you really want to terrify people around you, a grand mal seizure has the same effect. There are two parts to the grand mal or tonic-clonic seizures that I tend to have. The first part is the _tonic_ moment where all your muscles stiffen and air being forced past your vocal cords causes a sharp cry or scream. At that point, you typically lose consciousness and fall to the floor. You might bite your tongue or the inside of your cheek. After the tonic phase, the _clonic_ part kicks in. With this bit, your arms and legs begin to jerk and spasm rapidly, sometimes bending and relaxing at the elbows, hips, and knees. If you are having trouble breathing from vomiting or if the seizure lasts too long, your face might turn blue. As the body again relaxes, you might lose control of your bladder or bowel. It's frightening even for the initiated.
For my part, I've been told I shake in spasms, all the while opening my mouth like an anaconda unhinging its jaw and making the frightening noises of a Japanese horror masterpiece. Yes, it sounds terrible, but just to paint a picture of how I roll, there it is. Oh motherhood, it's a protracted state of conflict. You're never enough at work. You're never enough for your mate. You're never enough for your kids. I've never done big, scary drugs other than the ones that are mass-produced by pharmaceutical companies, but I'm told meth makes you feel like such a confident, laser-focused badass. Like you can manage everything with a satisfying, effortless brilliance. Suddenly your life is a spectacular performance art piece. You can lift refrigerators with your pinky finger. Above all, you are finally _enough._ I can understand wanting this feeling. My seizure had made me feel so much worse than being not _enough._ And I was still in denial about the whole thing. I was stuck at the corner of guilt and shame.
They say that if you experience guilt, it's a sign that you hold yourself to a higher set of expectations or standards and that with shame it's the opposite. I can't speak for other mothers and their modes of self-care, but I'm going to throw off the philosophical straitjacket here and say that I feel guilt because I _do_ want things to be better. I want tuned-in but not helicopter parenting for my kids; I always wanted a stable home in one place and an interesting life for them. One where they could have it all, whatever "all" turned out to be for them. Guilt doesn't paralyze me; it propels me. My guilt doesn't stem from any deep-seated kernel of unworthiness. I have always believed in myself the way I believe in my daughters. I was raised in the age of Enjoli. For the uninitiated, Enjoli was the iconic drugstore perfume of the late seventies and early eighties. Ten-year-old little girls everywhere grew up singing the jingle into a hairbrush like an anthem in their bedrooms with the male voiceover coming on at the end to say "the eight-hour perfume for the twenty-four-hour woman." It stood for second-wave feminism that said a woman could and _should_ have it all—from the boardroom to the bedroom. But damn if it wasn't overwhelming.
I also came of age with books like _Women Who Run with the Wolves._ They had been part of the feminist canon under which I'd grown up, so I had embraced a certain amount of my own mischief and acting out to get by. Nothing too extreme—mostly just general mouthiness. The more I thought about how our world might explode with uncertainty because of my seizure, the more it sank in: I'll take the wheel of guilt and wanting things to be better over the wheel of shame any day. I reject the latter wheel and chore chart—wholeheartedly and unreservedly. Motherhood is so fraught with ambition, desire, and socially unacceptable appetites, it creates these currents that women so often struggle to quell or channel just to stay functional and survive. Maybe the upside of guilt is guilt. Owning it, taking care of oneself in the face of it, and then letting it go: maybe with meds, maybe with mischief, and maybe with other mothers. If anything, what my seizure made me realize is that forgiveness was key in the face of the cultural, social, educational, pharmacological, industrial maternal guilt complex. The myth that you're somehow not enough because you might be a sick mother was horseshit.
Maybe I was not so lost after all. 6 Oh, the Pie-rony... I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but when a crisis hits, I am often knocked back by the unexpected vastness of _the ordinary._ Like finding a perfectly formed paper clip in the twisted metal wreckage of a plane crash, it can be something as insignificant as an everyday household word. In this case, the word was _garage._ In those initial days home after my first seizure, yes, I was felled by a _noun,_ not even a verb. I'd attempt to say the word _garage_ and instead the word _yard_ would burst forth. In my head, I knew I meant to make the sounds that make up the word _ga-rage,_ but they just weren't there. A second later, the word _garbage_ would trip off my tongue and only after that would I get to _garage._ It was as though I could physically feel a set of invisible hands inside my brain kneading through different words and actions like a big ball of dough. Not only was my word retrieval way off, my brain still felt like I'd tried to vape the sun. Everything was too bright—the daylight, darkness, my shoes. The motion of life felt like driving in a very fast car or like being pummeled in the face by an action movie that unfurls so quickly your eyes can barely keep pace with all the cuts.
"Why is the world shouting, again?" I'd ask the kids. The sound of life in all its forms was just too loud. Even the little beings, like snails and crickets, proved deafening. I'd also morphed into what would later be described as an unpresidential word salad. I was a panhandler for words for common things like coffee cup, Scotch tape, and socks. My inner monolog was set on pause or the tape had gotten snagged in the reels. There were moments where I'd be completely fine but then falter. "Just put the plates in the... _thing_ where you put the dishes before putting them in the thing that washes them," I'd tell my daughter. "You mean _the sink_?" she'd say, giving me the side eye. " _Sink_? Are you pranking me? Is that really a word?" "Yes." Cue look of ten-year-old alarm. " _Sink_ is a word, Mom." "Huh, well, I'm going to look that up, missy." It was exhausting work that had me saying all the wrong things and doing all the wrong things out of order and backward, and only realizing it after with a kind of uneasy chagrin. I'd put my clothes on inside out. Pants were impossible. I'd brush my teeth and then squeeze out the toothpaste after rinsing the brush. Can we roll that tape again? I'd search my head for the right words. I _knew_ they were there, I could sense them like hidden books on the shelves of my mind, but I had no retrieval power. With each mental grab, my hand would pass right over the correct phantom volume only to miss it. I'd read that temporary cognitive delays after a seizure were fairly common, but it was unsettling.
I'd been given a supply of antiseizure drugs with vague instructions not to stop taking them, which given my hippie upbringing, clearly meant don't even _start_ taking them. I didn't want to feel any foggier than I already did. Plus, pharmacological continuity marketing was not my bailiwick. I told myself, there was nothing really wrong with me. My seizure had been a one-off after all. An aberration. I'd probably been overtired or dehydrated. It wasn't hubris so much as a low-lying fog of fear creeping in close to the ground. I don't think I had a full understanding of my brain injury at the time. Not only was my language off, so too was my execution and sequencing. I was continually getting things wrong like thinking of the object that is a spoon and going over to get one in the totally wrong part of the kitchen—all while knowing full well that spoons were in the silverware drawer on the opposite end of the room. I couldn't tell anyone about this as it might impact the girls—especially Sophie because she'd already seen enough action during the seizure itself. How could she ever _not_ be scarred by it? I had to at least pretend I knew what I was doing or laugh it off—if actually caught in the act of being wrong or seeming ridiculous.
I'd combed through other similar cases online during my more coherent moments. There would be these sessions between a speech therapist and a stroke patient dealing with expressive aphasia. The therapist might ask the patient to say the word _chair_ and the patient would respond with _table._ The therapist might then say, "Great, let's try it once more. Can you say the word _chair_?" The patient might falter and repeat the word, "Table. Table. Table!" and then start to sob out of sheer frustration, because he knows what he needs to say, but he simply can't say it. He can remember the days of the week, sing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," and count to a hundred, but he still can't say a simple word like _chair._ I recognized this. I had never dealt with postseizure cognitive impairments before, but while Sophie was at school and Olivia was at her dad's, I opted to close all the blinds and settled on the Food Network for my convalescence. Ina Garten had the lovely, warm, soft-spoken voice I needed right then. Just the way she pronounced _bruschetta_ felt like a comfy cashmere sweater. And there were no huge surprises in her world. Her husband, Jeffrey, was nearly always away, and someone safe yet pleasantly new would come over for lunch or an early dinner that involved mashed savory bread puddings and pork chops. I also found another comfort cook in Giada De Laurentiis, who tended to glow like her whole person had been routinely dipped in extra virgin olive oil, which seemed like a good idea postseizure. Giada also pronounced all her words as though she was chewing al dente pasta, which I thought might also help my still slightly slurred enunciation.
Anyone who knows me at all will tell you that my worldview is based almost entirely on food. What's a worldview, you ask? It's what you do when you're alone in a room and you think no one is looking. That's a worldview. I believe with my whole being that the world doesn't need a wall to keep people out as much as it needs a sandwich to a build bridge between them. If everyone in the world were made to try each other's sandwiches—even if they just took small, polite "thank you" portions of each one, there might be a tiny bit of peace on earth. In the country of _me,_ my sandwich is a BLT—on sourdough with the bacon almost cremated and crunched-up potato chips and Russian dressing on it. Every culture has its preferred specialty—whether it is a hero or a gyro—and there would be a lot more understanding and empathy among people if they only partook. The same goes for pie. Every culture has its own rendition of pie. A pie, like a sandwich, has a story. Invented by the Egyptians, pie has a whole narrative arc, a sequence that involves death, comfort, and healing. Did you know the piecrust used to be called the coffin because it was, in fact, shaped much like one? At this stage of my recovery, I wanted only to crawl inside the comfort of a crust and fruit and fat. I had been doing flashcards and singing sentences that's sometimes recommended for stroke patients, but in the end, I decided (alongside Ina) that if I had a problem with my brain, speech, and my literal pie hole (aka my mouth), I was going to cure it with pie. There are two pies I led with—one because it's easy, the other because it's fabulous. There was something about having to read (which was also a tad tricky at the time) and follow each step in the instructions, having to use my hands, and walking to different locations in the kitchen that would trip me up but then also _wake_ me up. The more I did with my hands, rolling out the dough, peeling fruit, the more my words came rushing back. Words like _temperamental, lawnmower, parsimonious,_ and _grappling hook._ (Grappling hook?)
This was how I would get my brain back. I'd cooked a ton when my husband left me and it had been a palliative. I decided I was not afraid to get baking wrong until I got things right. Oh, the sins I committed in the name of pie and words would put many a baker to shame—especially those darlings in the UK. I am of the mind, like numerous others before me, that when you grow up without much in the way of organized religion, you tend to make up religion everywhere you go. Given my worldview, I'm of the mind that pie _saves._ And now with the seizure, I'd planned to make a cult out of it. Its warm, buttery flakiness coupled with its filling in all the delicate sweet and savory forms is a living manifestation of comfort and generosity. Marcel Proust's _In Search of Lost Time,_ which I confess to never having finished due to my own lost time, goes on for forty-some pages about the nostalgic power of a cake-like cookie. Well, here's where I go on for mercifully fewer pages about the restorative power of pie to rekindle words, executive function, memories, scents, and people.
The easy pie I started with was a pear pie with Gruyère baked into the crust. I'd originally happened upon it while watching the short-lived but much-loved TV series _Pushing Daisies._ I'd fallen in love with the idea of this pie mostly because it seemed so unexpected, which was how I felt overall at the time. Plus, in the show, the hero brings his one true love back to life with an electric touch of his finger, which was also pretty much how I'd felt after the seizure. I had been zapped back to life but now was profoundly worried underneath all my shameless pretending and fibbing that things were fine. I needed an easy pie win. I ended up rechristening my pear pie the "Cheater's Pie" because our dishwasher was broken at the time. Can I just tell you how sick I am of intelligent design? Our dishwasher is not smart; it is fucking confused and neurotic, all of which meant I had to cheat whenever I could with ready-made ingredients like peeled pears in jars and frozen crusts. Still, the extra chore of doing anything sequence-based with my hands, including the dishes, was what I felt I _needed_ to do to get speaking properly again.
The best thing about the pear pie is that while it keeps for about three days, it tends to be gone in two: once for dessert and once for breakfast the next morning. It's a great breakfast pie because the Gruyere in the crust keeps it from being too sweet. But back to being a spaz...One of the most marvelous contributions of modern neuroscience is the concept of neuroplasticity. The idea that we can edit, revise, and interpret the stories our brains tell about our lives—even when we are bound or constrained by objective facts. I saw my job during these first days home from the hospital as one of working with my own head and nervous system to rewrite this recent story in a more interesting and productive way. If anything, after my first grand mal seizure, my neurological wires were crossed. The messages my brain was sending to my mouth and the rest of my body were confused, frequently lost, or going down the wrong neural pathway with the wrong set of instructions. But because of the notion of brain plasticity I could, by trying different things—making pies, singing opera, or learning a new skill like tap dancing—rebuild and even reconfigure the neural pathways in my brain to not only regain function but also forge new ways of thinking altogether. Out of chaos, I wondered if maybe I could make a new order and slightly different narrative for what had happened. I wasn't sure what exactly; it definitely had to involve Ina.
As I worked, I began to relearn where the different kitchen utensils were located. I regained my sense of sequence. There was A, B, C, D, but I began to be able to change things up with intent—rather than by accident. The pear pie gave me back old words like _sink, preposterous, cantaloupe, sentient,_ and _juxtapose._ The second pie I practiced rewriting my neural pathways with was a crumb-top bourbon cherry pie. (It's a tiny bit of bourbon, but I find it makes all the difference, though as a word of caution, most doctors recommend limiting alcohol when it comes to seizures. Except at this point in the story I didn't know any of this.) While I'd be squishing the chilled butter into the oat and brown sugar mixture with my fingertips to make the crumb topping, I'd practice naming simple objects around the kitchen and singing songs I'd sung to the girls when they were little. "Many moons ago, in a far-off place lived a handsome prince with a gloomy face...for he did not have a bride..." The neighbors must have thought I was bonkers, but with the cherries coated in bourbon-sugar-orangey goodness and the juices bubbling up through the deep golden crumb top, it was magic.
What I love about this pie is the immense feeling of potentiality that comes with it. The scent alone is a wildly generous neurochemical "Yes!" to life. The first forkful is a massive "Fuck, yeah!" in your mouth. No wonder Queen Elizabeth I loved it so much. It is a moment of _total-beautiful-possible_ that helped bring back words like _pusillanimous_ , _vigorous_ , and _Christmas_. I made it a number of times before I got it right, but each time the story of the seizure and what had happened to me shifted a little in my mind. Sequencing came back: underwear, _then_ pants. Gradually over the weeks there were beginnings, middles, and ends to different activities. Certain actions regained a familiar arc. I knew where the spoons were once more. I could say the word _dishwasher_. So what exactly does _baking_ have to do with word retrieval and sequencing, you ask? Absolutely nothing. I could have done any new or unfamiliar activity like sewing or painting and it would have helped my cognitive function. Why? Because my brain was building new neural pathways. Again, this idea of neuroplasticity—that the brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life means that our brains can compensate for disease or injury and adjust their activities in response to new situations and changes in environment.
IN MY TEDX TALK about creativity, electricity, and the brain, I spoke about pie and about how _our brain's ultimate evolutionary function and most important job is to tell stories_ and send messages—no matter whether it's to your big toe, to other humans, or to inanimate dessert ingredients. I've been trying to work this point in, but in a way that didn't go full meta on your ass or sound too heady. (Sorry, I just couldn't resist the puns.) See, my words are working again already! 7 D-day THE NEUROLOGY WING of the hospital was on a high floor—some twenty stories up. I'd postponed the recommended follow-up appointment with the neurologist for three months. From everything I'd read online, seizures nearly always signaled something bad, something _serial_ as our nanny Teodora used to say when she actually meant the word "serious." A seizure could indicate any number of serial things: a tumor, a stroke, cancer, a brain injury, or something worse—something lengthy and degenerative. I tend to think the real medical examination starts in the waiting room—with the nurse evaluating your penmanship on the forms. There are always far too many of them to fill out. Then, it's about magazine selection. No _Neurology Todays_ in this waiting room. Everything on the coffee table seemed specifically curated to take one's mind off of the brain.
Apart from the man reading _Marie Claire_ in the corner with his head wrapped up like a mummy, I could have easily been at the manicurist. And all these people with brain troubles were trying so hard not to look at each other. I picked up a copy of _Knitting Monthly._ I have always been a terrible knitter. Lots of dropped stitches, zero attention to detail. That's so me, I chuckled nervously to myself. The seizure I'd had in my kitchen had been an aberration, I continued to tell myself as I perused scarf patterns for idiots. If someone could just loosen the bolt in my temple, I'd be fine. That said, what if my brainwaves indicated that I was absolutely bonkers? The worst thing would be for my ex-husband to finally acquire the hard evidence he needed to prove I was nuts. What if they made me pee in a cup and all that came out was chardonnay, cigarette smoke, and extract of bacon? (I'd gone on a date the night before and we'd had all those things at dinner.) As I covertly watched the other patients hobble in as their names were called, I realized it was yet another subtle waiting-room test of neuro-typicality and reminded myself to check my gait and balance when they called my name. No weird arm swinging. Stand up straight. Wings together. No sleepy pins-and-needles legs. Thank God I'd worn flats.
The child in me wanted a prize for even showing up at all. By subjecting my brain to a series of lie-detector tests, I was "adulting" for a change. I usually saved all of my responsible juice for the kids, so this was a magnanimous act of self-care I'd decided to perform on the day before my forty-first birthday. "IS THIS GOING TO screw with my blowout?" I teased the pimply, moon-faced technician. I don't know why, but I couldn't take the moment seriously. Probably because it felt all too serious. We were two nerdy strangers crammed into this gray little closet of a room. It was the kind of forced intimacy that recalled the sweat-inducing middle school party game Seven Minutes of Heaven. I was having an elect-roenc-ephalo-gram (an EEG), which is a test that measures the electrical activity of your brain. Special sensors called electrodes are attached to your head. The electrodes are connected by loads of wires to a computer that captures your brain's internal electrical weather system live, on-screen, and as a scrolling printout. The tech was sifting through my tangled mane attaching wires to my scalp with dabs of cold, gelatinous glop.
I felt oddly giddy. I'd never had an EEG before (as far as I could remember), and I could only imagine that my mapped-out brainwaves would resemble a piece of Cy Twombly modern art: well-intentioned, faux-juvenile chaos. "Ummm..." The tech seemed to turn my blowout question over in his head, but also out loud, "Not sure. It's a conductive paste that helps the electrodes adhere, so a little, maybe? It's washable, though." "Fine." I sighed, rolling my eyes, blowout be damned. "I'm not a blowout kind of girl anyway. I always wake up looking like Eraserhead the day after the salon. Honestly, how _did_ women in the 1950s survive without product and handheld hairdryers?" I babble when nervous, and I was a little nervous. Still, I was practicing being a quasi-fearless, responsible grown-up by actively participating. I'd even taken the bus, which alone would make any sensible person tense, all the pressure of possibly having a brain problem before, during, or after ultra-snail-paced public transportation.
I had a big presentation back at the office in an hour and couldn't be late. My boss already didn't like me. I annoyed her with my general weepy incompetence and total lack of decorum. I should have taken a personal day, but that never worked with Clarissa. She had big abandonment issues. The good thing is that her hair was always terrible too, so maybe all this EEG glop would work in my favor today, I reasoned silently on the table. I could easily miss a whole year of work just doing my hair. It takes forever, it's so unruly. "We also need to tape you up." The tech held up a roll of thick white medical tape. "Sounds kinky." I quipped. He feigned a laugh, taking pity on me for a moment. My guess was that he'd heard lots of bad, nervous jokes in his time and probably been instructed not to react too pointedly to anything. What was supposed to be a benign exercise in adulting was starting to feel like a surreal game of medical BDSM. The tech continued his careful ministrations to my head. I could feel him holding his breath now, brow crumpled as he attached each electrode one by one. He seemed so serious. Why did people have to always role-play so stridently?
If I were a little kid having this done, I think I'd be terrified. I felt we needed a safety word but then realized that if anything I would be the one zapping _his_ machine and not the other way around. "Okay, if you can hold still." As the tech wrapped wide strips of bright white tape around my head, it was clear I was going to be late for my presentation—even if I cabbed it back to the office. This was more important, I told myself as he finished up, my ears pressed flat against my head. The tape was so tight but not as tight as the imaginary metal band I'd felt tightening around my head at the end of every day for the past few months. Work had been a shit storm of constant changes and stress. The script for our latest young-adult project had originally been written in French, and the translation read so clumsily, it was laughable. The more I delicately explained to the producer that no credible American teenager would say, "I'm going to make the social media with you," the more she challenged my own grasp of native English. I laughed it off. The market testing would show how ridiculously off-kilter the dialogue sounded and we'd have to rewrite. It would cost more, but at least I'd raised the flag. After every one of these talks, I'd down a couple (or three) ibuprofen at my desk and tell myself it was just a tension headache, the kind that creeps from your shoulders up through the back of your neck and wraps itself over the top of your head like a malicious octopus. Everyone I worked with got them, didn't they?
"Now, if you can just lie back slowly and we'll get a baseline," the tech said as I caught a glimpse of myself in a video monitor. A hundred wires flowered forth from my head and I felt strangely glamorous for a moment in all my electro-brain-garb. "Oh my God, how Bride-of-Frankenstein am _I_? Quick, we have to take a picture!" I reached for my phone in my purse, suddenly excited to be part of the whole grand experiment, and shoved it toward the tech. "I look like a total badass cyborg! My kids will love this!" I smiled cheerily as he snapped a photo, aghast. "Ooh, I should be singing like Madeline Kahn or that other chick from the original film! Elsa-something!" I started to belt out "The hills are alive..." in a twittering vibrato. The bewildered tech took another photo and then quickly handed me back the phone. "Oh, come on." I winked at him. "I bet you never usually have this much fun doing these." He sighed impatiently and I lay back on the table. I knew I was a handful, but if I was going to be diagnosed with something serious I was at least going to be playing Maria.
You may wonder _how_ it was or _why_ it was that I didn't seem scared, but I _was_ scared—that's exactly why I _was_ singing. I was filling the air of that tiny room, which didn't seem big enough to house any truly bad news—never mind my bad singing. As we went through a series of exercises involving flashing lights and some curious takes on Lamaze breathing, hyperventilating, and holding my breath, my brainwave Cy Twombly unfurled from the scratching machine. The neurologist slipped into the cramped room. He was young, early thirties, and cocky with expertly mussed hair. It was clear he was a bright bulb, even if he was the _opposite_ of a thoughtful, debonair Oliver Sacks-type I'd expected. I imagined him later in some hipster pickle bar, saying dumb, douchebaggy things like, "Hey bro, I know the three exact pressure points on your skull that will make you instantaneously crap your pants," in an attempt to impress other doctor-types. He was quiet for a minute as he studied my Twombly, and I told him how the tech and I had just taken the best Bride of Frankenstein photo. He promptly ignored me and said, "Does anyone in your family have epilepsy?"

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