Back in the days of Tumblr I ran a fairly lucrative blog. Naturally, my feed was filled with all kinds of posts about my then current pop culture obsessions with a sprinkling of dumb viral post mixed in. I was just your typical dumb introverted college girl until I came across that post. Maybe you’ve seen it, perhaps you’ve even been mildly annoyed by it. That one, stupid sentence that has ruined my life.
“You are now breathing manually.”
I remember seeing it and laughing it off. Just one of those dumb psychological posts that came across every once in a while. But hours started to go by, and I couldn’t get the post out of my head. I was conscious of every breath, having to tell my lungs to suck air in and let it out. By that evening I was thoroughly annoyed. I tried everything to get my mind off of that goddamn post. Finally, I gave in and decided to go to bed and start over in the morning. Surely it would reset my brain.
I can’t have been asleep for more than a moment when I suddenly woke up gasping for breath. “No no no this can’t be happening,” I thought as I began to panic. Still conscious of my every breath, I logged back on to tumblr and found the post again. I looked through the reblogs and the tags. I’m not quite sure what I was looking for at the time as I was fairly certain this was a direct result of me going insane. Whatever it was, I didn’t find it.
That night, and for a week after, I never slept for more than two minutes at a time. It was the same pattern: doze off, gasp for breath, doze off.. etc. During the day I was a shell of myself. I couldn’t allow myself to think of anything but breathing. Allowing my mind to wander could have deadly consequences. By day three, my body no longer associated the gasping with panic. It became normal, and I had to be even more diligent in regulating my breathing. I stopped attending my classes, I couldn’t focus, and I had begun to see the shadows.
They whispered to me constantly in a language that, at first, sounded ancient. By the next day, their whispers began to sound more familiar but I still couldn’t place them. All I knew what that I desperately needed to sleep. This psychotic break was coming at me fast and at the very least I had to delay it. I was delirious, and despite being very aware of my breathing, felt like I couldn’t get enough air. I decided to visit the doctor first thing in the morning.
That night was mostly a blur, but the one thing I do remember is the moment the whispers became clear. “you have transcended,” they repeated over and over, their voices shrill with excitement. I had no idea what it meant. I felt like I was in a nightmare, almost relieved that I couldn’t go to sleep as there was no telling what would happen if I let my guard down. Maybe the stoners suggesting that the dream world was the real world were on to something. The next thing I knew, I was in an exam room, unsure of how I got there but grateful nonetheless. After a watered down explanation of my symptoms, my doctor diagnosed me with Sleep Apnea and prescribed a CPAP. It was a start. I picked the machine up from the medical supply depot down the street and headed home for a nap.
Nothing much has changed in the years since it began, except now I can hook myself up to my machine and sleep as peacefully as one can with that monstrosity hooked to your face. I have figured out how to function and multitask, and managed to bounce back and get my degree. All in all, despite the seemingly major change, I live a fairly normal life now that I’ve transcended.
In order to keep myself on the higher plane, sometimes I need to forget. I have to put the CPAP in the corner for a few days and listen to the shadows. It’s like an itch that I can’t scratch any other way. They tell me secrets that have been lost through the years. My life has never had such purpose before this.
Each time I bid them farewell and strap on my CPAP, I wake up to a new numbered step etched into the wall. They tell me there are only 3 left until I am able to start following them, and at the end, I will transcend to the final level, becoming one of them, and finding my protege through the post.