I fell off a moving bicycle last week. I hurt myself quite badly. I use “quite badly” here only as a figure of speech and not as an assessment of my injuries. In truth, I haven’t thought it necessary to develop a concrete opinion about the severity of my injuries. In the seconds after I fell down, I worried that I had hurt my head but when it became clear that it wasn’t deeper than some scratches and a bump—the “real” injuries were elsewhere in/on my body—I dropped the matter all together. Since my last head surgery, I have developed a fear of “acquiring” head trauma. I see this image: my head, splattered across the tarmac. It’s unclear whether I die in the narrative of this image (I don’t see how I don’t) but my fear isn’t the inherent concomitance of death in such a circumstance—it is that I would have hurt my head quite badly. Again, “quite badly” here isn’t an accurate assessment of said injury. I suppose it’s just something I say.

There was a moment after: sitting on the bathroom floor, cleaning myself, when I thought, I’m proud of myself. If this had happened to me last year, I would have taken it as a sign that I was shit at being alive and I would have compulsively followed that thought until it landed me on suicidality’s doorstep. Sometime last year, I wanted to make something that required me to pre-heat the oven. Unbeknown to me, there was an oil spill in the oven. As the minutes passed, I could tell that something was burning but not once did it occur to me to switch off the oven and see what’s up. Eventually, it was my cousin who ran in and switched off the oven as the smoke alarm was going of and the entire house was filled with smoke. My grandmother could have died of smoke inhalation while I stood in a smoke-filled kitchen, patiently waiting for the oven to heat up. When it finally occurred to me what I’d done, I sat on the floor and cried. How bad I must be at being a functioning person that I can stand in a smoke filled kitchen and not think to turn off the oven. My cousin was kind and graceful about it: no harm no foul; I’d know to do better next time and really, it was just chemo brain. I still had brain fog four years later. For most people, it gets better a few weeks after chemo but apparently I’m one of those people whose brains never quite recover from having poison pumped into their blood stream. Later, while I tried to fall asleep, I thought, maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to cook and while we’re at it, maybe someone should kill me before I kill my grandmother. A few weeks later, I recognised that was a massive overreaction but still, I don’t really cook anymore. And on my bad days, I take that as evidence that I am less equipped for life than most people. Which I suppose I literally am, but the healthier thought would be, maybe I should try picking up cooking again. Instead I go, maybe I should starve myself to death.

So yes, I worry, incessantly, about head traumas. In the beginning I just thought I didn’t want to lose some of my intelligence (if intelligence is quantifiable) but really, I’m terrified that I’m one injury away from losing my brain’s ability to shepherd me though life. I think I’ve only made it this far because my brain directs my body to keep me alive, often against my will.

There’s this Tumblr post about how life just boils down to practice. Practice at being a good friend, a good sister, practice at knowing which emotions to take seriously, etc. Which I guess, okay. A few days before the bike accident I was feeling run-down about being chronically ill so I watching YouTube videos of this woman who’s been chronically ill her whole life. She was talking about how it doesn’t really get better, you just learn to build a good enough life around the edges of your chronic illness. Like with chronic fatigue, you learn what level of exertion will make you crash so you either choose to exert yourself less or you schedule recovery time because some things are worth the crash. Functionally, the Tumblr post and YouTube video are making the same argument. You do something long and often enough, you learn to do it well (enough). So what does it say about me, that I’ve been alive for this long and I still feel so technically incapable of keeping myself alive? I know I’m not stupid—I am capable of harnessing my experiences into fundamental life skills. I know that I have even though it often doesn’t feel like it. I know that nearly dying often; that having a body that malfunctions often strips down your faith in your life’s sturdiness. Rationally, I know these things and you would think I would remember but every few months, I go through a hard patch and without fail, as illogical as it is, I think maybe it’s my fault, maybe I’m meant to be dead and this pain is the price I pay for being arrogant enough to survive. Why do some people get to go through life believing for the most part, that they deserve to be alive while my life often feels like penance, for daring not to die?

I worry that I’m not the kind of person that eventually learns to manage their chronic illness. I worry that I’m the kind of person that eventually chooses death. I worry that I’m going to spend my life collecting evidence that I have never really been good at life anyway so if you really think about it, what other choice did I have but to die?

Anyway, on Friday afternoon, I was talking to my friend on the phone and he kept asking if I was okay because I sounded off and I found it quite annoying because I thought I was fine. But he kept asking and I reluctantly admitted that I was in pain because of the bike thing and I was especially exhausted because I’m anaemic and I’d had neuropathic pain all day in the spot where I’d had my surgery but I was trying not to think about what that could mean. So he asked if I had taken any pain medication and I realised that I hadn’t because earlier, I had been at my friends house and they didn’t have any painkillers so I guess my brain decided to close that chapter because even though I was home now and and my painkillers were literally in front of me, it hadn’t occurred to me to take them. Isn’t that funny? I worry that one day I might kill my grandmother because of my brain fog. I worry that I’m so over being chronically ill that I might wake up on a random Tuesday and kill myself. I worry that I do not have what it takes to be alive. But sometimes in the thick of it, I just keep going. Sometimes I don’t even realise I am not okay until someone points it out. I don’t know, in a morbid way, that gives me hope. But also, do you see why I cannot afford any more head trauma?

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Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash