I got spinal meningitis as an infant. I beat the odds, but permanent scarring in my nervous system causes scrambled signals to and from my brain.

Our perception of reality is made entirely of signals to our brain. As such, my world is a mixed-up place and it could easily be confusing if I hadn't grown up learning to filter out the signal from the noise enough to know that much of what I perceive is not reflective of reality.

Sometimes sounds feel like they are exploding inside my skull. Normal sensations sometimes feel like pain, and autonomic functions like digestion and heart rate get screwed up. My brain takes small signals and turns them into big signals; a stuffy nose may feel like my head is going to burst, or that I'm falling (vertigo); I can't even tell sometimes whether I have to urgently use the bathroom or just sit down and take a rest.

The nerve damage has also caused a host of secondary problems, such as Bell's Palsey (facial paralysis), trigeminal neuralgia (known as "suicide disease" because the pain often drives people to kill themselves) and a lifetime of IBS as well as anxiety and panic disorder. The first panic attack I can remember was when I was three years old when I suddenly just knew that I was going to die, along with a sense of impending doom which can not even be described.

I minimize these problems to my friends and loved ones because I just want to have as close as possible to a "normal life", and I don't want them to pity me. I've been doing this as long as I can remember. My face doesn't show pain and I no longer even have control over it; my "pain face" is almost indistinguishable from my "pleased to meet you" face.

I feel detached from others because I can't share the most basic struggles that I go through on a daily basis with them. They only know that I have health problems because it sometimes makes it impossible for me to follow through with plans we've made, but they don't have any idea the true depth of them.