Here’s what I learned after the most miserable month of my life

It was bad beyond bad. Not regular bad. Not I’ll get better bad. It was “What the hell is wrong with me?” bad. Weird things. Rooms spinning, hands shaking. Couldn’t stand up straight. Couldn’t focus. I saw two of everything. My brain felt like it was going to explode whenever I tried to think. Not math think. Anything think. As in what type of soup should I have for dinner type think. All coupled with a constant, unending exhaustion. It was the worst month of my life.

I’ve always described myself as a person with a thermostat set one notch below satisfied. Normal was never good enough. There had to be something more. And, yet, I spent most of my life filled with insecurity. Unsure I could get it done. Eager to please, but forgetting myself in the process. Sidelined by a deep, dark, crushing doubt.

Worse yet, the more I knew, the more my doubt grew. At least when I knew nothing, I could enjoy the simplicity of it all. I could take all the risk I wanted, because I didn’t know what risk was. I didn’t know what good was. I didn’t know what bad was. Those things didn’t matter.

As a child, you’re preoccupied with the whys and the why nots of the world. You are filled with a basic thirst and an unending curiosity. As children, we have a fundamental belief in dreams, and we possess hope of a scale where most adults dare not tread.

Then come the rules. And there are so many of them. The right way, the wrong way, the smart way, the dumb way. Suddenly, life became a competitive sport, and unless I got the trophy, it didn’t matter. The joy was gone. The curiosity was gone. There was victory. And there was loss. But there was no simple. There was only doubt.

It was a bad month. A bad reaction to some antibiotics, as it turns out. I’ll never feel the same about side effects. But I survived, and here I am on the other end of it.

And as my antibiotic-induced haze wore off, and I could walk again, talk again, think again, and just stand up without a throbbing in my brain, what struck me was that being a whole person – to be fully functional –  to wake up in the most average way on the most normal day is to be able to see and hope and dream. It is not plain and dull and uninteresting. We choose to make our lives plain or dull or uninteresting. It is not success or failure. It is not this or that. It is the choice between doubt and rekindling that innate thirst for knowledge and for living.

You can’t duck and cover from your own life.

The curiosity is never gone. The discovery is always waiting. There are no rules. There are no measurements. Forget about looking back. Don’t even worry about looking forward. The state of normal is to live in the face of potential. It is to have the chance to know the spectacular. It’s up to you to seize it. But it’s there. It’s yours. So let every frame matter. Let every word count. Because to live simply and to live honestly is to live boldy. Normal is to be possessed of the ability to dwell in a world of infinite hope and unending dreams. And that ain’t such a bad thing.