Maybe I’m Not Losing It. Maybe My Body Is Just Rude.

I am not, by nature, someone who goes from zero to full mental collapse in twelve minutes.

That’s important to establish right away.

I’m not the type to stub my toe and immediately assume I need a psychiatric evaluation and a padded room. If anything, I usually do the opposite. I doubt myself, wonder briefly if I’m overreacting, get distracted by something else, move on, circle back later, and repeat. My attention span is not built for a long, elegant spiral. I don’t escalate beautifully. I scatter.

So when I started wondering if something was seriously wrong with me, that did not come from one dramatic bad day where I cried into a candle and declared myself unstable.

It came after two and a half years.

Two and a half years of neurology.
Two and a half years of specialists.
Two and a half years of symptoms that sound fake when you say them out loud too quickly.

I have migraines. Not cute little “I need a dark room and some water” migraines. I mean chronic, atypical, vestibular, silent, sideways nonsense. The kind that can mess with balance, thinking, language, recovery, fine motor skills, and your basic confidence in your own body. The kind that makes a simple night out at a bar cost me three full days like I got into a street fight instead of having two drinks and bad judgment.

That is not me being delicate.

That is my body apparently running every experience through an internal committee and deciding, no, absolutely not, we will now be ruined until Thursday.

And after long enough living like that, yes, I started asking the question.

Not because I’m hysterical.
Not because I escalate.
Because how much can migraine really take from a person before you start wondering whether something else is happening too?

That’s the part I wish people understood better.

Sometimes questioning yourself is not drama. Sometimes it is the most reasonable response in the world.

Because I am not talking about vague feelings here. I am talking about documented slowness. Fine motor loss. Word-finding struggles. Real symptoms. Real appointments. Real effort trying to figure out whether this is “just migraine,” something autoimmune, something neurological, or whether my body has simply decided to become the world’s least helpful mystery novel.

And yes, when you live in a body that keeps doing things that scare you, your mind starts asking bigger questions.

Not because you’re unstable.
Because you’re paying attention.

I think that has been the strangest part of all this. Not just the symptoms themselves, but what they do to your sense of trust.

It is one thing to have pain.
It is another thing entirely to feel slower.
Less steady.
Less sharp.
Less fluent.
Less like yourself.

That starts getting existential in a hurry.

Because pain is miserable, yes. But there’s something especially unnerving about feeling your own body mess with your confidence. When you can’t find the word. When your hands don’t cooperate. When one normal evening out requires a three-day recovery plan that makes you sound like a Victorian widow. When you start wondering whether your body is sick, your brain is sick, or you’ve just become a person who now needs forty-seven business days to recover from noise.

That can make anybody question themselves.

And maybe that’s the more honest version of this whole thing.

Not: maybe I’m losing it.

More like: maybe it is hard to feel like yourself when your body keeps changing the rules.

That feels truer.

Because here’s the other truth I don’t want to lose in the middle of all this: my life is still good.

Messy, yes. Loud, yes. Physically annoying beyond belief, yes. But good.

I have a wonderful family.

I have a granddaughter who is adorable, hilarious, spunky, naughty, and fully committed to keeping all adults on a rotational schedule of delight and exhaustion. She is joy with bad ideas. She is a glitter bomb in human form. She is probably plotting something right now.

And that matters.

Because I don’t want to write like my whole life is darkness just because my body has made itself the least fun cast member. That would be false.

I still laugh.
I still love.
I still get annoyed at stupid things.
I still care about beauty and writing and making bread and making sense of my life.
I still have moments where I feel deeply grateful and moments where I feel like my nervous system should be allowed to file taxes separately from me.

Both are true.

That’s what I think I’m learning, actually. That a hard body and a good life can exist at the same time.

You can be grateful and frustrated.
Loved and tired.
Happy and scared.
Fine-ish and still asking a lot of medical questions.
You can be deeply thankful for your family while also being furious that your body can’t seem to act right after a simple social outing.

That doesn’t make you negative. It makes you honest.

And I think honesty is better than the fake inspirational version where I pretend every challenge is secretly a blessing and every symptom has turned me into some glowing, spiritual, more evolved woman.

It hasn’t.

Some of this has just made me tired.

Some of it has made me funnier, though, which I would like noted for the record.

There is a certain comedy in realizing your body can now treat one evening out like a federal offense. There is a certain absurdity in being tested for things like lupus while also trying to keep up with everyday life like a normal person who definitely isn’t Googling things she shouldn’t and then immediately forgetting why she opened the tab.

And there is something darkly funny about the fact that I don’t even spiral correctly. I don’t have the focus for a proper breakdown. I just sort of question everything, get overwhelmed, wander off mentally, and then come back later like, wait, was I having an existential crisis or just a migraine?

Who can say.

But that’s part of why I wanted one more pass at this.

Because I don’t want this story to sound like I’m defeated.

I’m not.

I’m confused sometimes. Frustrated, yes. Worn down, definitely. But not defeated.

I am surviving.

I am adapting, again, which apparently is both my gift and my curse.

I am learning that my body can scare me without me needing to turn that fear into some grand story about weakness or collapse.

I am learning that it is okay to ask hard questions when hard things are happening.

And I am learning that maybe the most truthful thing is not “I’m falling apart,” but “this is hard, and I’m still here.”

Still here making bread.
Still here loving my people.
Still here trying to write honestly about what it feels like to live inside a body that sometimes behaves like it got its medical degree from a haunted cornfield.

That is not nothing.

In fact, maybe that’s the part I want to hold onto most.

Not that I doubted.
Not that I asked whether something bigger was wrong.
Not even that I got scared.

But that in the middle of all of it, life kept being life.

My family kept being wonderful.
My granddaughter kept being chaos in a tiny outfit.
I kept laughing.
I kept loving.
I kept going.

And maybe that’s the real story.

Not that my body has been difficult.
It has.

Not that I questioned myself.
I did.

But that even while all of that was happening, my life was still full of people and moments worth being here for.

That feels less dramatic.
Less tragic.
More true.

And honestly, after everything, I’ll take true.