How A Deer Tick Caused Me To Start Writing

 

Note: This passage contains events that are very personal to me. You may stop reading at any time if you feel uncomfortable, as I’m bearing my soul here.

Once upon a time, I was in high school. Golf was a passion of mine, and it still is to some degree. Back then, I practiced every day for at least two hours and played in First Tee tournaments along with the occasional JGANC tournament.

During the summer of 2014, my mom, who was basically my golf tournament secretary for me at the time, found an opportunity for me to attempt to qualify for an American Junior Golf Association (AJGA) tournament located in Santa Rosa. I happily agreed to take the two and a half hour road trip. I knew it was going to be tough to qualify, since the AJGA regularly comprised the best of the best junior golfers.

The qualifier wasn’t actually held on the same course the tournament was going to take place. I played well enough that day to shoot a 76 and come in a seven-way tie for the last seven available qualifying spots. I had qualified for my first AJGA tournament, and I was ecstatic.

Mayacama Country Club was the venue. It’s tough for me to find the words to describe the beauty of the place, so you’re going to have to google it. One key detail, though, is that the rough was deep and the hazards had very long grass.

I didn’t play well during the tournament, mostly because of my driver. I can’t remember how many balls I lost over the duration of the tournament, but I must have accumulated over an hour and a half of searching for my ball in the various hazards and such. This is relevant. I promise.

Fast forward to a week after the tournament. I was in the kitchen having a casual conversation with my mom and brother. I got up from the dinner table to grab a peach, and suddenly it felt like my head was being forced forward toward the ground. My head buzzed with the intensity of a thousand bees. I stumbled my way around the island in the kitchen and collapsed into my chair at the dinner table. My mom rushed to my side, wondering what was happening. I couldn’t get myself to talk. I was convinced something happened to my neck, and that I was going to die within the next few seconds.

The dizziness decreased in intensity over the next couple minutes, but my head still felt heavy as a boulder. I took off my shirt because I had broken out in a sweat. My mom led me to the living room couch, and I lay there for thirty minutes until my dizziness went away. I was able to stand and walk again, but I was cautious for the rest of the day.

My mom, being a physical therapist, tried to determine what had caused the dizzy spell, but she had no idea and neither did I. The same thing happened to me the very next day while I was sitting at my computer. I had to lay on the floor for over ten minutes for most of the dizziness to dissipate.

Over the next few weeks, I had numerous dizzy spells that felt exactly the same as the one I described. On top of that, my uncle and aunt visited for two weeks and my parents forced me to sleep on a mattress in their room while my uncle and aunt slept in my queen-size bed (I’m 6’5”, so I need one of those). The mattress I was given was too small, so I got horrible sleep for two weeks straight. The curious thing, though, was that the constant fatigue from the sleep deprivation didn’t go away after I got my room back. By this time, a constant dizziness had set in as well, so I felt like a bobble head each waking moment.

I started my senior year of high school with these symptoms, and they kept getting worse. I had to be taken home two days out of the first week, because I couldn’t keep my head up. I don’t remember the exact timing, but we saw several different doctors over the next couple months. I was diagnosed with mono, to explain the constant fatigue, and vertigo, for the constant dizziness. The medication they prescribed, though, didn’t help at all. I vaguely remember my mom asking about Lyme disease, and the doctor’s casual denial that I had it, citing the fact that I didn’t have the rash that came with it (In actual fact, only 30% of Lyme patients get a rash). This is significant as well.

So in less than a month, I went from walking several rounds of golf multiple days in a row, to not being able to hit a wedge on the driving range for more than thirty minutes before feeling like I had to lay down. I essentially had to quit golf for the time being, and any physical activity for that matter. Even walking up the stairs with a full laundry basket once made me sweat.

Contrary to what you might think, my anxiety problem didn’t start as a result of this, not directly anyway. I got to do what most teenagers loved doing: surf YouTube and play videogames all day (after the homework was done, of course). Though the brain fog was frustrating, I remember not feeling too concerned about my condition, partly because I knew it was curable, but mainly because I could still do something I was interested in. I was even correctly diagnosed with Lyme disease early the next year, once we finally found a doctor willing to test for it. My mom’s head almost exploded at that news.

For the record, I despised writing at this time, mostly because it was boring and it took me forever to write essays.

For the rest of 2015, I accomplished nothing besides keeping my grades up and graduating from high school. I enrolled at my local community college where I started pursuing my computer science degree, and the slow process of recovering from Lyme disease began. This included a complex regimen of herbs and antibiotics (because Lyme disease is caused by a specific kind of bacteria that originates from, guess what, a deer tick! It was at this point we realized I probably got that bitten by the tick while I was playing at Mayacama. Santa Rosa is notorious for having Lyme problems during the summers, apparently). I also had to go gluten and dairy free, which was a nightmare, especially when my family went out to dinner. I never thought I’d be restricted to having exactly one option on Cheesecake Factory’s menu.

Then the year turned to 2016, which would turn out to be my personal Year of Hell. Sometime during January, my focus gradually shifted from videogames to YouTube. As I’m sure you’re aware, YouTube’s algorithm can be very addictive, and I became another one of it’s victims. I spent hours and hours watching videos that intrigued me. At some point videos concerning religion started to pop up in my recommended videos. I wasn’t associated with any religion at the time, and still not and probably never will be. Regardless, I found the various debates between atheists and Christians to be extremely thought-provoking. Soon, those videos were all YouTube recommended me.

After about a month of bathing in the controversy that is religious debates, the fateful day came. I had decided to try to play nine holes that day, just to see if I could make it all the way through the front nine without collapsing. I played horribly, but that wasn’t the issue that day. I was constantly thinking about all the things I’d heard in the religious debates, and my mind was constantly simulating imaginary debates between me and a fictitious opponent. Near the end of the round, it struck me that those thoughts were absolutely useless, so I did what turned out to be the worst option possible. I tried to outright stop thinking about anything religion.

Now, I’ve never been run over by a speeding freight train, but I think what I experienced was pretty darn close to that. The momentum my mind had was unstoppable, fueled by the past month of absorbing those videos. Within seconds, every thought that occurred to me became an enemy. That’s the best way I can describe it, anyway. They grew in strength and seized my attention, only strengthening my resistance to them. My belief was that if I continued to think about those thoughts, then I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything at all and my life would fall apart as a result.

In a way, I was correct. The thoughts about religion actually did recede, but only because they were overshadowed by the thoughts about, well, thoughts. It became a self-fueling cycle: the fear of being consumed by a single thought became the thought by which I was obsessed, thus causing more instances of that thought and intensifying the fear. I know that doesn’t make much sense, but trust me, it SUCKS to be caught in that loop. By the time I got in my car that day, I could tell something was wrong, but I had no clue how to fix the problem.

Of course, that stream of thoughts did not cease for the rest of the day, and it started again instantly when I woke up the next day. I hadn’t told anyone about it yet, because I thought they’d think I’d seem weird. I went to my study hall session as normal that day, but when I tried to focus on doing my math homework (something which I’m good at, by the way), the thoughts-about-thoughts only got more in the way. They sped up so much they triggered a panic attack. For a solid thirty seconds, I felt like I was going to die right then and there, though anyone else in the room wouldn’t have been able to tell. I had put on a good mask.

The thoughts slowed a bit when I desperately tried to think about golf. Subconsciously, I knew thinking about something I loved would help. I slowly eased out of the fight-or-flight response, but was still left with a feeling of absolute dread. Somehow, I managed to finish up my math homework by the end of study hall.

Coincidentally, an appointment call was scheduled with my mom and the doctor who was monitoring the treatment of my Lyme disease. After the call ended, I told my mom everything that had happened. Later that day, we went to a medicine shop to pick up some anxiety herbs, but those didn’t help much. At that time, it seemed impossible that anything would help.

Over the next week, my neurosis migrated to thoughts that seemed even more troublesome at the time. I don’t remember how, but I became extremely concerned about the fact that, billions of years in the future, the sun will become a red giant and burn Earth to a crisp. I know, that’s a depressing thought anyway, but it became almost physically crippling to me. Every morning, I’d wake up feeling like life had no meaning and that everything I did was a waste of time. Then my mind would change direction and obsess over my own inevitable death, and that was lovely, of course. It even got the point where I lost my appetite for breakfast one morning, and I loved breakfast.

Okay, this is getting pretty dark, so I’m going to pause and tell a joke! I’m stealing this one from a quote I found in one of my teacher’s textbooks:

Bessie Braddock: “Sir, you are drunk.”

Churchill: “Madam, you are ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.”

Now back to the doom-and-gloom. I promise, this has a happy ending. Obviously.

The descent of my mental state seemed to level out after two weeks, but I was so low it barely mattered to me. Curiously, I noticed there were no suicidal tendencies, so that was a clue that this depression was irrational, but that didn’t do anything to lessen the suffering.

The spring semester of college ended and flung me into the most hellish summer imaginable. It wasn’t that it was stressful, but exactly the opposite. Since I was still recovering from Lyme disease, I still couldn’t be physically active. The depression sucked all emotional energy out of me. I lost interest in anything that would’ve given me joy. Even when I played videogames, I rarely had fun, and it felt like I was forcing myself. That kind of escapism never really worked. You might be recognizing some similarities between this memoir and the last quarter of Shattered Stars. 😉

The fall semester started up for me, and it was at this time things started to turn around for me, though I definitely didn’t feel like they were. Ever since I’d seen the first How To Train Your Dragon movie when I was in 7^th grade, I’d been interested in dragons. I read the entire Eragon series, but then the interest waned over time. Now, it was somehow reemerging. I think it was the few times a reddit advertisement for the “Adorable Dragons” subreddit that kept pulling me in.

Sometime around September or October, I found my way onto a popular art website called DeviantArt, since that’s where a lot of the posts in the Adorable Dragons’ subreddit led. Then, I happened upon a few short stories that had dragons, and in the recommendations of those I found stories of humans transforming into dragons and dealing with the consequences. It was clear to me these were written by teenagers who were simply living out pipe dreams, but I read on anyway, hoping to lose myself in those worlds as often as I could. It also took me a while to admit to myself I kind of identified with those stories as well.

Over time, my thoughts began to relate more to what I was reading than the doom-and-gloom thoughts, but anxiety’s a bitch. And bitches don’t cooperate sometimes. My mind was constantly finding new things to worry about, and I only made it worse when I tried to not worry, because then I’d start worrying about not worrying.

In a renewed effort to combat my thoughts, I started imagining myself as a dragon battling my thoughts that were evil demons. It was infinitely strong and fast. It was an anthropomorphic dragon like in the stories I’d read, and it was white. And it had a mane from head-to-tail. Ah, yes, the connection is finally made within your mind. Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

This little technique seemed to help in the short term, but it wasn’t too effective. As it turns out, your mind knows you better than you sometimes, and it always knows your weaknesses. I ended up getting on Zoloft, and antidepressant medication, and it actually works wonders! The troublesome thoughts became… slippery. That’s the only word I have to describe it. This allowed my mind to start wandering onto less frightening topics every once in a while. And one night, my mind gave me a gem.

I was brushing my teeth right before bedtime. The feeling of dread hadn’t been too bad that day, so my mind was more cooperative than normal. A peculiar thought struck me, one that changed my life from then on: How would this dragon version of me come to exist in this reality, on this planet, right now, in the beginning of November 2016. I have always been a science enthusiast (you might have been able to tell from my author bio) and a creative, so this thought immediately sent my imagination wild.

Well, surely humanity didn’t have the tech to create anything close to that right now, to it’d have to be aliens. But why would the aliens do that, and how? Oh, I know! What if it’s like this, and they need to do that. And then, they’d have to release me back to Earth somehow!

And thus, a very primitive, very flawed plot for Chapter 1 started forming in my head. That process kept me awake in bed until 1 in the morning. It was simply too compelling for me.

My mind kept building the scenario over the next day, and by that night, I finally forced myself to write down bullet points on my phone just before I went to sleep. The thought of turning this into some kind of story had occurred to me several times that day, but I still wasn’t convinced. In the moments between dreading the end of the world and my own death, my mind kept adding something interesting to this little alternate universe that had sprung into my head. The ideas piled up, so much that they basically forced me to admit to myself that I wanted to write a story. But I didn’t want to write it, I needed to. It wasn’t an urge that caused me suffering, but I wanted to fulfill it anyway.

That process of deciding to write took a couple of days. The first thing my mind objected to was that I’d have to actually write, and I hated writing! This kept me on the fence. The thought that eventually pushed me over the edge, though, was this: If you don’t do this, if you don’t create this unique… thing, what will you miss out on?

I just couldn’t afford to not know, and I haven’t regretted that decision since.