College: Concussions with Doc McStuffins

... a continuation of 'The Brothers Parramazov'

College turned things around. I have no reason to be giving a pitch for the benefits of a college education or anything. I promise Boston College did not endorse this plug. The place just happened to be the backdrop for a lot of personal transformation. Like I mentioned, it is where people started to realize that I wasn’t perfect, or maybe where I started to allow myself to accept that.

The good stuff did not come right away, though. Freshman year actually inhaled a large one for me. There, I finally said it. I had a girlfriend from high school who was in a different state, and that completely deprived me of a healthy college experience. And what’s worse is I can’t even blame her. It was entirely self-imposed. It’s not like I was miserable all year. It was actually nothing like this. I met two of my best friends freshman year (yes, sadly you are one of them, Bosh), and many of my other dearest homies. I spent some good times playing Fifa and eating an impressive number of buffalo chicken wraps—or ‘Shuffle Off to Buffalo’ wraps, to be precise. Only in retrospect did I realize how poorly I spent my time that year. I really just did nothing of value. I didn’t do much at all.

I once read that the devil does his work through wasted time. He does not necessarily make us do evil; he his most content when we do nothing—when we waste our own time, and when we waste God’s time. I didn’t understand this when I read it, but I think I might now. My favorite wrongly-convicted prisoner seemed to have it figured out, too, putting it this way: “get busy living, or get busy dying.” When I am not busy being who I am—who I am called to be—I am serving Satan. That sounds a little extreme, but it’s a good way to keep myself motivated. God knows I need the motivation. I have a strong propensity for sloth without the proper motivation.

A lot of this reminds me of how I was living my freshman year of college. I seemed to be a victim of the devil. I wasn’t doing much at all. I needed to wake up. I needed a good smack on the back of the head.

Sophomore year, I suffered a concussion in a flag football game. I was climbing the proverbial ladder to snag a one-hander in the back of the end zone when I smashed my head on the crossbar of the goalposts. I’m just kidding. I think I was just trying to break up a pass and I hit my head on the turf. I stumbled to the sideline, blacked out, regained consciousness, and spent about 15 minutes trying to figure out how to exit Alumni Stadium so I could find proper treatment. What a deathtrap that place is when concussed. I ultimately escaped its clutches, and somehow ended up back at my dorm, where my roommates were probably alarmed by my incoherence. They encouraged me to go to the infirmary, and I agreed this was a sound idea, but then I spent about another 20 minutes deciding whether I should take my cleats off before I left. It seemed like a huge decision at the time. I kept my cleats on and found my way to the infirmary where I was met by a concerned nurse. She was sweet. I didn’t know who Doc McStuffins was at the time, but now I realize how much she resembled Doc McStuffins.

This occurred at the very end of first semester. It ended up not being a terribly serious concussion, but it had pretty heavy repercussions. I didn’t do that well on my organic chemistry test the next morning, but that was trivial. Things got more serious. I spent that entire winter break feeling really out of touch with the world I was living in. Something was wrong. I read a couple of the Harry Potter books, in an attempt to make myself feel more at peace. It provided only very brief respite from the distress. Something was really bothering me, and I think it was the concussion that sort of set it off.

So much changed for me after that concussion. Maybe it was just coincidence that it did, but being a fan of the brain and all, I attribute it to the concussion. I got back to school that next semester and found myself in the throes of like this little depressive episode that lasted about two weeks. I really can’t make sense of why it happened, as I assume is the nature of depressive episodes, but it was pretty awful. I slept maybe a couple hours a night for those two weeks, spending most of those dark hours feeling sick and with my mind racing away from reality to terrible places.

I could not sit through classes. I remember having to get up and walk out of a lecture or two. I was just so overwhelmed by nothing in particular. I thought I was doing everything wrong: wrong major, wrong school, wrong friends. I wanted to check myself into an asylum, or go back home to Mom and Dad and watch Space Jam. No one had any idea I was going through this except my sister. Thank God she was still at BC that year. I met up with her and told her I was going crazy, and she told me going crazy is normal, so that helped. I had too much pride to get real help, but I had enough sense to know I needed to change something—to do something.

I made myself participate in a service trip over Spring break. It was pretty much the first thing I got involved with while I was at school. I had wanted to do a bunch of things like this, because I knew it would be really good for me and that I would enjoy it and that it might be the first stick gathered in my grand quest to set the world aflame or whatever, but I was too scared about the prospect of having to really open up to people.

I finally just went for it, because my approach to life at the time clearly was not working. Again, it’s a banal bit of cliché: a college service trip and people vomiting their emotions being the stuff that changed my life—all that application essay goo, but it is really what happened. Every person on that trip changed my life. They changed my life just by sharing their lives with me, and showing me that there were so many things in their life that were not right, and that that was cool. I don’t think I spilled my guts on that service trip or anything; I was still easing my way into that process, but it was huge for me to watch others do it. It demonstrated that aliens are people too, and neither is all too perfect. Once I embraced my imperfections, and realized that others would not mind my having them, I could finally begin to love myself and love others. In theory, at least.

Everything else during college pretty much went uphill from there. Or downhill. Whichever one means things got better. It really did. I probably have shared most of that stuff with you, because I am proud of it, and therefore it is easy to share. I won’t make you listen to all that again. You can ask me about my friends later too; because many have changed the direction I am walking quite a bit, for great reasons and strange ones. But I feel like I’m stretching my time constraints here. This was just some of the hard stuff.

#personalnarrative