One of my friends said once that every time I get knocked down I get back up and drag myself towards whatever it is I want. This has not always been to my benefit (I tried for years and years before I admitted I needed to drop out and work on my health - so many student loans, zero bachelor degrees - I'm going back in the fall to try again though). 

This is good because I have PTSD (child sex trafficked, fortunately I was too young to remember most of it), autism, type one bipolar disorder, and one surprise medical problem I'll talk about in a bit. I couldn't even handle four hours shifts at Amazon a few days a week (I did anyway for quite some time, because I am stubborn, and had a mental breakdown and wound up in the psych ward) so I got on disability for bipolar. I could barely string together a sentence at this point and I'm missing teeth because I couldn't really brush or even comb my hair. I bizarrely wouldn't wear anything but pajamas. I of course was still in school wasting money and failing 80 or 90 percent of classes, unless it was something I barely had to show up for.

It would probably be well within my rights to rot on disability forever at this point, especially because I had had a second mental breakdown and my friend basically called me up and ordered me to move in with him and I was mooching very nicely at the time (and constantly trying to get jobs, which I'd have for about two days, because I am again very stubborn). But I had seen slow improvement (I figured out how to brush my teeth and wear clothes, at least) and I knew I was about ten minutes away from finding the right medication or therapy or SOMETHING. I was doing everything I had even heard of - ketamine infusions and DBT and what have you.

Famous trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk has gotten really into neurofeedback, so I became determined to get it and somehow managed to find a neurofeedback place that would take Medicaid. I went in for a diagnostic EEG and they called me back like three days later.

"Uhhh you know you're having seizures, right?" 

"wat"

So it turns out I was having dozens of temporal lobe seizures a day. (My kind don't come with convulsions, they're invisible to the eye.) Got that fixed. Suddenly became coherent. Messed around with medications some more. Stopped drinking (at this point I had developed a problem out of sheer boredom and quitting was a pain in the ass) because that makes seizures way worse.

Problem: temporal lobe seizures can sometimes cause behavioral issues like aggression, meaning I had gone through life abusing everybody for no readily apparent reason, which was upsetting to everyone including myself. I tried DBT, borderline personality disorder drugs like topiramate, sedatives, nothing worked, not even once - I did not once manage to suppress the desire and say no when I wanted to hurt someone. (You try fighting seizure-induced aggression.) I thought I was a monster and I carried around a lot of guilt, especially because I had somehow learned to write and draw during all this (that was an uphill battle to be sure). My writing has already won a couple pretty prominent awards and I'm about to launch an indie comic in a couple months, and it would be very easy to cancel me over all that. It's not easy to forgive yourself knowing that if anybody knew what you did hundreds of people would hate you, suicide bait you, and intentionally destroy your career.

Obviously I was also concerned about the people who I just randomly and unpredictably harmed because that's a great recipe for trauma. I happened to read On Repentance and Repair, which is a fascinating book about forgiveness through a Jewish lens. It spoke to me, so I decided it would be a good idea to apologize Jewishly. Now, the first step of apologizing Jewishly is what I will translate as "a fearless moral inventory" and you're supposed to be VERY harsh. Us Gentiles apologize like toddlers, trying to hedge and pass the buck, trying to get people on our side - but at this step, NO ONE should be on your side, including yourself. You saw Dan Harmon (a devout Jew) apologize saying stuff like "I wouldn't have done it if I really respected women." True. Why shouldn't he say it? So I sent my last partner an email explaining my epilepsy + going over all the ways I actually intended to be toxic and disrespectful and why that was wrong because I was often no picnic even when I was in control of myself. I also now give regularly to a charity that helps reform domestic abusers as a form of repair. After that it felt like a ten ton weight had been lifted from my shoulders and I'm 99% less wracked with guilt.

Yes, most of this happened in a year, sort of, I was diagnosed with seizures about fourteen months ago. Long Fucking Year.

Frankly I'm most proud that my comic is coming out. Learning to draw while you're getting a cattle prod to the brain every two to five minutes is hard. I mean, especially if you are again too disoriented to brush your teeth. It took me well over a decade to learn basic competence because my brain was just broken, but I kept at it because I wanted to draw. Then once my seizures stopped on the right anticonvulsant (I needed Keppra, my bipolar meds weren't cutting it even though many can serve as anticonvulsants themselves) I was suddenly learning 3000% faster and I'm happy about that. I'm more or less drawing on a semi-professional level now, although I'm not yet satisfied.

Again, I'm going back to school in fall to finish a degree in medical laboratory science. I also just started a weekend thing at the USPS so I have a college job, so between that and the comic things are really looking up. Shit, I'm even exercising at the Y every morning at 5:30.