I often get very bad headaches.* Sometimes I get very lightheaded. Sometimes I see stars around the edges of my vision for no apparent reason. Sometimes find myself losing focus on where I am, who I am, and what I am doing. It’s not quite like blacking out, but I will find myself somewhere and doing something with only the vaguest recollection of how I got there.

I sometimes wonder if I have a brain tumor. In some ways, I actually hope for it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really want to have a brain tumor, but it would provide some fairly simple answers to many of the questions that I have about life. Sometimes I’d much rather have truth without a future than to have a future without truth.

Another thought that I’ve had recently is how my recently deceased grandmother was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and how it tends to be hereditary. I don’t actually think that I’m suffering from symptoms of Alzheimer’s, but thoughts of it do tend to lurk around in the back of my mind. Losing one’s self, one’s identity, before losring one’s body is hard for me to come to terms with. It’s like watching a person drown within themselves and leaving behind little more than a hollow shell, and not being able to do anything about it.

*I generally attribute the headaches to my restrictive sinus passages and the perpetual congestion and sinus pressure that results from it, although I’m beginning to think that I also get some sort of migraines as well.