I Wasn't Truly Lost Until...

CONTENT WARNING: This story touches on some mental health (anxiety) issues including the "mental doom-spiral" and suicidal tendency. There's nothing overly graphic in here, but if you are easily triggered please consider yourself warned. The main theme involves a character who pushes themself too hard to reach a goal, and a major setback affects them more than it should, resulting in a tragedy.

For those who know me personally, yes bits and pieces of this were inspired by events in my real life - that's just how the writing process works. But please remember this is still 100% FICTIONAL. So read it, take it as you will, but if you call me trying to console me you're just going to look like a fool LOL.

I wasn’t the best student in high school; I was always getting distracted by everything at once. My school counselors saw some evidence there that I may have ADD. For all those years, I felt like I was adrift, like I had no purpose in life and didn't even want one. You know how every year the teachers ask you "what do you want to be when you grow up?" Well, my answer was always "Done with school FOREVER!" It wasn’t until my senior year, when my brother was diagnosed with a terminal heart problem, that I really made the effort to focus and apply myself. Even then, my grades weren’t perfect. But I got into college. My choice to go pre-med was a surprise to everyone: my counselors, my teachers, my parents, my friends. But in my head it was the only choice that made any real sense. Nothing else mattered to me. So the summer before college I spent all of my time with a tutor, going over the fundamentals – things I SHOULD have learned in junior high and high school except my brain had too often refused to stay on task. My grades in college were good though, I worked hard to get this far and I was proud of my progress. I had never been drunk, I didn’t smoke weed or do drugs. I had never stayed out all night partying or gaming. Why? Because I had a goal, no, not a goal, more like a mission from God. I really wanted to go to a good medical school so I could learn to be a great doctor and help a lot of people someday. Hopefully I would be able to do that before my brother's heart condition took his life. He didn't deserve to suffer like that; no one does, it wasn’t fair. So maybe I could help him, too.

Most people have no idea how many possible ways there are for a person to die. No inkling of how fragile we really are. But once you get right down to it, we’re all just bony sacks of chemical soup. And the slightest disruption in that chemical balance can make things go very wrong, very fast. Or even the slightest wrong movement or impact might break our bones. Or some passing microbe will decide we look delicious and then dissolve our flesh for sustenance. I did a lot of independent study in college to get a head start on med school topics, and it really opened my eyes in a lot of ways. Lives end every single day. People get sick or hurt so badly that they can’t walk, or can’t work, or can’t remember their loved ones’ faces – every day. And this new knowledge only increased my drive to become a great doctor. I narrowed my focus, decided I wanted to go into medical research rather than treating patients directly. I wanted to move medical knowledge forward, find new ways to help people.

I was also able to learn a lot of math, a lot of chemistry, and a lot of biology. Even physics… though I struggled with the electromagnetic side of physics in the beginning, eventually found a home in my brain. I also crushed my required electives. It turns out that if I set my mind to it, I can learn anything. Science, math, history, even English class – I got mostly A’s with only a couple of B’s in the courses where I sort of tripped over my own feet in the beginning, until I found a decent study group for it. If I’m being honest, I didn’t love the amount of work I had to put into this program, but I was still set on my destination. I wasn’t going to let a little thing like “it’s hard work” stop me.

Maybe part of my reason for being so stubborn and trying so hard for this was selfish, wanting to spend a little more time with my brother. But I promise you I had lofty ambitions and most of my reason for it was altruistic. Maybe I was being naïve or arrogant, but I had a goal and I pushed myself down that path as hard as I could. Maybe harder than I should have. I basically sacrificed all chances of having “a normal life” for this because I had to put so much time and energy into my studies.

But I wasn't truly lost until...

The MCAT exam results were in, and I saw my own score. I was so nervous leading up to the exam that I had suffered two full-blown panic attacks earlier in the week, and the night before the exam I got zero sleep and couldn't remember any of the material that I was trying to study. During the exam, my mind went completely blank for the first thirty minutes. So before I even opened the letter with my score packet, I was pretty sure that I did not do well on this test.

I guess the weight of it all, the responsibility I would need to shoulder, facing the reality that someday people’s lives would be in my hands – me, the kid who couldn’t even multiply fractions until sophomore year of COLLEGE… the knowledge that this test would in a very real sense determine the course of the rest of my life... it broke me. Plain and simple. I put too much pressure on myself, and I snapped. By the time the exam ended, I had only answered two of the questions, and one of them I know I got wrong because I remember trying to write some basic bullshit while praying for partial credit on that one. Honestly I'm not even sure if I managed to spell my name right on the answer sheet. So it was no surprise when I looked at the test results and saw that my score was in the bottom percentile. One of my professors was on the board responsible for making and administering the test, and he said that mine was the second lowest score in the test's history. I could hear the shame and disappointment in his voice; I had been one of the top students in my program so I know he expected better from me.

Well, my mission was a failure. Now it seemed I would never be able to help my brother. Or anyone else, for that matter. My future was doomed, and I had done it to myself. What rotten luck!

This was a sign, I was sure. A sign that the world didn't need me, and it didn't even want me. A sign that I was nothing, that I would always be nothing. I had attempted to climb to a height that was beyond my reach. And now I could feel myself slipping, my mind coming apart at the seams. The whole world was coming apart around me. And then I felt myself falling...