How to feign normality: patience, logic, and pills 

It’ s strange that it’s not until you’re lying in the road bleeding to death that you start to rethink your life choices, start to consider that you might need some new perspectives. Maybe it’s morbid, but I believe getting hit by that car was the best thing that ever happened in my entire life. It was God’s way of slapping me in the face and telling me to get my shit together.

More gray than blue, the overcast November sky blocked out the sun’s light and warmth entirely. The playground by my house was no longer a place of childhood innocence and laughter, a place to have fun and be carefree, where kids run around, screaming, climbing up plastic rock walls, running across creaking wooden bridges, and sliding down blue slides only to run back to the red jungle gym to see who can dangle upside down the longest: those were the days. Instead, it had become a routine for me to walk to the playground, sit on my designated swing, sometimes completely still and sometimes swinging slightly trying not to hear the creaking of old, rusty, metal chains that needed to be greased. I’d sulk, sob, and rant to my friend whom no one else seemed to see, and then I’d walk home again, and promptly go to bed. 

Everyone gets sad sometimes, so they cry, shut themselves out for a while, and cope by themselves. Eventually, typically, they get over it; I had a pretty good life, a loving family, and stable existence overall. Perhaps I would have had a smoother recovery from my depression had I not been hit by a car on top of everything else.

Everything was so still, so eerily quiet that evening as I tried unsuccessfully to purge myself of my negative emotions. I just sat there in my usual swing, listening to my earbuds, dressed in blue jeans and a black and white plaid coat, crying. The tension in my face and hands, and throughout my body kept building. I gripped at the chains, and looked down at the ground, wondering why everything had taken such a downward spiral. As I sat there sobbing, I realized that I hadn’t accomplished anything. I felt like I had wasted my time, and I just wanted to go home. I walked over to the broken sidewalk in the front of the elementary school. The parking lot was vacant. The street lamps had come on, shedding dim light onto the asphalt, just as blood would be shed on that same asphalt.

It had been such a long and mentally strenuous day that all I wanted to do was go home. my eyes were downcast as I walked along the side of the road. The streetlights were dim and the fog-lines on the shoulder of the road were non-existent. I’m legally blind, and was further disabled by the the fading evening light. I didn’t realize I’d walked into the road until I saw the headlights of the oncoming car, until it was too late to react. After being hit by a car going down the highway at 35 MPH, flipping over the hood into the other lane, and then almost simultaneously being run over by a truck, I woke up in the trauma center at Vanderbilt University Hospital. 

[Section break]

Whether it was my family, teachers or classmates, everyone in my life could always tell that there was definitely something wrong with me; maybe I just give off a vibe that I’m not all there.  I was what one might call a “problem child,”   always misbehaving, throwing crazy and violent tantrums, and in general just causing strife for everyone around me. I started having hallucinations at the age of seven when I moved to El Paso with my mother. Whenever I was sent to my room for punishment, I’d sit in the corner, talking to someone, ranting and badmouthing whoever was punishing me. People around me always thought I was talking to myself, and assumed I had an imaginary friend, but I heard voices and saw things that aren’t “imaginary friends” so much as invisible and intangible people whom only I could interact with but who were very real. Through the years,I have