Stuck in Neutral Read Online Free PDF Page A

Why should we care whether what makes us happy is just an electrical impulse in our brain or something funny that we see some fool do on TV? Does it matter what makes you smile? Wouldn’t you rather be happy for no reason than unhappy for good reasons? All I know, though, is that my electric happiness doesn’t help my family much—imagine a world where every time you laughed, everybody else looked sad.
    After the smile/laughter part of my seizure has passed, the room begins to swirl around me, not fast or dizzying, but slowly, allowing me to remember it, see it as it was in the moment before the seizure arrived. Of course, it’s not the room out there that is spinning, it is the room in my head; I get a 360-degree view of every detail. What happens next is hard to put into words without sounding like a moronic advertisement for the Granola New Age Spirit World Gazette .
    The simplest way to describe it is to say that as the room swirls and I finish checking off everything around me … well … my spirit leaves my body. I hate to say this! I mean, what is a spirit anyway? By saying this, I guess I mean that I accept that we have spirits, and that they can come and go from us. I don’t even know that I really believe any of that stuff. But I do know what happens when a seizure comes: As the room finishes its swirling, the blue haze lifts and colors become as sharp and clear as crystals. Then, as my laughter winds down to a slow, steady breathing, a part of me rises from my body. I watch; I guess what I mean is that my spirit watches my bent, unconscious body from somewhere outside myself. If it didn’t happen to me, I wouldn’t believe it.
    The first few times my spirit left my body, I was ten years old. It was about the same time that the doctors got my seizure medication just right. When it first happened, it scared the hell out of me; I thought maybe I was dead, and that I’d never go back into my body again. Back then I felt afraid to wander too far away from myself. After a while, though, I realized that as soon as my body awakens from a seizure, I’m forced back inside myself. My little trips have time limits.
    I can’t make a seizure happen or stop one really, although sometimes, if I concentrate hard enough, I seem to be able to hold it off for a little while. For the most part, though, my seizures are not interested in what I’m doing at the moment they hit; they just kick down the door to my brain, charge in, and make themselves at home.
    Of course, except for seizures, my life is one of total dependence. Once I started being able to sneak away from my body, seizures became very important to me. I love the feeling of movement, the pure joy of being able to fly. I love the feeling of escaping from my screwed-up, worthless body. I love my seizures because they give me the kind of life I imagine normal people enjoy, and then some. They give me freedom.
    When my spirit is out of my body, although I have no physical body, I have complete control of my motions. I do all the things I see and imagine other people do: I soar, sail, walk, run, skip, sit, lie down, roll over, wiggle like a snake, swim like a fish, leap tall buildings in a single bound, slither through cracks in sidewalks and walls, zip over the clouds, whirl like a dervish, dance like John Travolta, sing like Kurt Cobain, and look the world in the eye.
    When I’m in a seizure, I go to a different reality. It’s like I can do anything I ever wanted to do. I remember touching Cindy’s hands as she slept and thanking her for teaching me to read; I remember sitting at the edge of the ocean, digging my toes in the sand, watching whales blow spray and then dive down into the black water. I remember yelling in my dad’s ear telling him I was okay. I remember kissing my mom’s cheek and cuddling her. All these memories are hazy, as if coated in that filmy stuff that photographers use to make homely