A year ago today, I had a seizure. Slowly coming to as a couple of police officers with bad attitudes restrained me, it wasn’t until my friend’s boyfriend, who I like to think is also my pal, yelled at me about what had happened that I snapped back into reality. I still remember her terrified and hurt blue eyes the size of the moon as I switched from thinking that she had betrayed me and called the police for some unknown reason to coming to enough to realize what had actually happened. I have never had something affect my body or reality as much as that incident and was just as baffled as the doctors who couldn’t figure out what happened over the next few days.
Seeing the reminder on my Facebook news feed this morning didn’t upset me. Oh the contrary. It feels like a million years ago. To me, it was surreal. Not painful or scary. I was floating in a different reality and having a new experience. That’s life.
What it did do this morning was to instantly make me start to reflect. So much has happened. I have solidified my dream of having a lifestyle of freedom outside of normal societal restraints. I am set up to travel the world as a lifestyle and have multiple different ways to financially support that in regard to work. Most of the people I am now closest to are others with creative, adventurous and bohemian personalities who live all over the world. People who add to the life I want to live instead of inadvertently being a threat to it.
Funny how different things take on symbols of transition in life. I just so happen to put on the dress I was wearing when I held my Layla’s body through the night after she had been killed. Burning Man had unexpectedly been about processing that loss in 2015 and is where I finally found closure and said goodbye in 2016. To wear the dress today symbolizes to me that I may finally be able to move on. Before the seizure, I had been stuck in between a life and person the world had always told me to be and what I actually wanted. Looking back, it feels like the moment I finally started to violently fight back and refused to be that person so untrue to myself any longer. Whether a truth or not, what that experience has come to represent means the world to me.