I am Lost

And I can’t write about what I need to.

I keep staring at this photo. I took it recently, only a few months ago. It’s one of my favourite places in the world, and that visit was the first time I’d gone there in years.

I didn’t enjoy the visit as much as I should have. It was during the time my neuropsychiatric illness was at its worse. Antibodies were attacking my brain and I was hallucinating and scared, overcome by severe OCD, barely able to function.

My parents took me to that place because they thought it would help. They didn’t know then that a few months later, I’d start to get better. That doctors would find out why my brain was inflamed and be able to treat it.

And now – now that I am getting better (or I was – I don’t know now) I keep looking at that photo of my favourite place in the world.

And I wish I was there.

Something bad happened yesterday. Something that had me crying buckets. And I hate that cliche, but I’m using it now because I am numb.

I cried to my parents and they held me and told me it would be okay.

They tried to offer comforting words, but then their words made me angry.

I wanted to be alone, and so I made myself alone. But I needed to talk all the same.

But there was no one. The one person I’d have tried to talk to? The person I needed?

Gone.

All I had left were the trail of footsteps that showed the directions of our very different paths.

It is morning now, and my head is fuzzy. My eyes are sore and swollen. I am lying in bed and my body aches with all my chronic illnesses and I can’t get up. I feel sick and I need to sit up to take the medication that will control the inflammation of my brain – but I can’t.

Can’t.

Can’t.

Can’t.

I feel lost. And so I’m looking at the photo of my favourite place, hoping it can anchor me.

I turned to writing – right here on my phone – because I felt the urge just to let the words out. To do something. To make my feelings concrete, and when words are written, they become powerful.

But I can’t write about the thing I want to, so instead I’m writing around it, spinning a complicated web that only I will understand.

And maybe no one will want to read this, but that’s okay. These words are for me, but I’m making them public because then they are more powerful in healing me.

I have to heal.

I don’t want this to stop me getting better.

But it might.

Right now, I don’t know.

Madeline Dyer is a young adult novelist. She also writes personal essays on topics such as mental health, disability, and neuropsychiatry. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @MadelineDyerUK and visit her website www.MadelineDyer.co.uk. If you’d like to keep up to date with her writing, you can follow her on Facebook for both her novels and her personal essays.