Power Restored.

it feels fucking good to live in here again.

not in the mind/body i have been calling 'mine' for the last six years.

this one.

the one that sleeps each night from ordinary exhaustion, not because consciousness itself has simply become too insufferable, or because four sleepless days finally made staying awake impossible.

the one that wakes up with the sun.

the one that runs, not toward anything or away from it, but around the neighborhood.

the one that does things at roughly the same time every day until the internal permission to begin each task no longer needs to make it through a congressional hearing first.

i had almost forgotten how invigorating it can be to operate.

somewhere along the way, i had mistaken adaptation for permanence. "the new normal"

Once upon a time, before the fall, the old normal was an existence i wanted more of.

there was a man. i thought i would spend the rest of my life with him, not just five measly years of it.

i was not secretly unhappy - far from it. there were no obvious cracks i had been politely stepping over.

it was good. better than good.

then suddenly it was over, and worse than over.

the person sleeping beside me had been a stranger that entire time.

addiction. pathological lying. whole sections of reality quietly fabricated while i was standing in them.

i did not just lose him.

i lost confidence in my own ability to know when something was real.

then my father moved in.

alcoholism. dementia. another person's disorder taking up physical space in my home and logistical space in my head.

then my body started breaking down.

invasive medical testing that came back abnormal and still somehow inconclusive. 24/7 (365) pain. surgeries.

working out became difficult. sleep became difficult.

then both became nearly impossible.

my mother's suicide. the final nail in the coffin.

not hers; her ashes are in the sea.

mine.

the impossibility of functioning stopped being figurative.

every time i tried to exercise, my own mind screamed:

HOW DARE YOU TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF WHEN YOU DID NOT EVEN TAKE CARE OF YOUR OWN MOTHER?!

and my legs listened.

sleep was not much safer.

there was nothing dangerous about the bed. just what my head did once i was in it.

if i stayed awake, i would replay her final few hours.

if i slept, she came back...

alive again. in trouble again. mine to save again.

then i would wake up and she would be dead again. the dream had given her back just long enough for me to fail her, again.

all the while, demands from wage-earning work kept getting bigger.

more people relying on me. more decisions. more consequences arriving with my name attached.

every new responsibility, whether at home or in the office, tightened the same private rule:

i could not be the point of failure again.

the pace kept picking up. it did not wait for me as i fell further behind.

the less of myself i could access, it seemed, the more of me every aspect of my life required.

eventually the lesson got very simple:

getting up is just the first part of getting knocked back down.

save yourself the trip.

so i did. made myself a new life lying flat, with my cheek against the floor.

and then, somehow, you put me face to face with a question i had stopped asking after six utterly demoralizing years of the same decisive answer:

(no!)

can i stand back up on my own two feet... manage my audhd naturally, manually, without crutches, the way i used to?

not through brute force. not through white-knuckling it. i already tried that.

unsuccessfully, in the first handful of awkward years when things still worked just enough to convince me harder might work too.

before that one October took the rest, and harder stopped producing anything at all.

but now...

could i bring back online the boring machinery that used to make my brain work:

daily exercise. early to bed. early to rise. predictable days. routine propagating more routine.

so i tried it.

and the answer was

oh.

yes.

apparently all of this was still in here.

the funniest part is that i was already moving toward it.

i was planning to start jogging to get my cardio back up so i could actually finish those bedroom marathons instead of treating every decent 5K between the sheets like a new PR.

i was committed to fixing my sleep schedule, to shutting my eyes at a reasonable hour so i could open them when you did each morning and send you something to start your day.

romance, but make it cardiovascular conditioning and circadian rhythm management.

of my own accord, on paper, all else being equal, i was almost there.

then you pushed me off the ledge unceremoniously.

and i dove right in.

this is the part i did not expect.

i thought about that bridge.

how we stood over the water and talked about the strange physics of falling...

how, from high enough, water stops being something a person cuts through

and becomes something that cuts through a person.

i think some part of me expected impact.

instead,

the water opened.

i went through.

and started swimming.

for several straight days now- my legs remember what they do. my brain is getting quieter. my hours have edges again-

i can feel myself catching my stride inside my own body.

not becoming someone better.

not reinventing myself.

just discovering that what i thought was gone was merely inaccessible for a while.

there is a difference.

six years ago, life taught me not to bother getting up.

apparently, that lesson had an expiration date.

the water is great.

not too cold. not too hot.

the temperature is just right,

and i would invite you to come on in,

but this was never really your swim...

maybe you were only ever what pushed me over the ledge.