A Requiem for My Mind

Grief is a shapeshifter. It doesn’t vanish; it mutates, burrows into the cracks of who you used to be. Some losses are loud, dramatic, wailing in the streets. This one is quieter, like silt settling at the bottom of a river, like a house slowly rotting from the inside out.

Even before the diagnosis, I could feel the erosion. Thoughts that once came sharp and fast turned sluggish, slipping through my fingers like sand. I tried to drown the decay in smoke, in liquor, in neon-drenched nights where the music was loud enough to silence the whisper that something was wrong. But no matter how much I burned, the embers of myself never reassembled into the person I once was.

I grieved my social life—it kept me numb, safe, until safety became suffocation.
I grieved the future I had scripted for myself, now redacted by something out of my control.
I grieved the admiration in people’s eyes, the way they used to say, You’re brilliant.
I grieved soccer, the effortless rhythm of my body before my mind turned it into a battlefield.

But the heaviest grief is this: I miss my mind.

The one that was quick, electric, relentless. The one that used to devour books in a single sitting, spin ideas into universes, connect dots no one else saw. The one that, some days, feels like a myth I tell myself.

Now, my thoughts move like ghosts in the fog—unformed, unreachable. I forget words mid-sentence, lose my train of thought like a derailed locomotive. My brain, once a symphony, now plays a song I barely recognize.

I wonder if people notice. If they hear the hesitation in my voice, the pauses where my mind used to be a step ahead. If they see me searching for the sharpness I once wielded like a blade. Intelligence was my armor, my currency, my identity. Who am I without it?

And then comes the doubt, the cruelest ghost of all: Was I ever really as brilliant as I thought?

I move through the wreckage, searching for what’s left. Some days, I find sparks—brief moments of clarity, flashes of the mind I used to know. Other days, all I find is static.

I build altars to memory—sticky notes, journals, voice memos whispering reminders of who I am.
I train my mind in new ways—brain training games, slow reading, letting thoughts simmer instead of sprint.
I find new rhythms—sleep as sacred, movement as medicine, food as fuel, not afterthought.
I embrace slowness—not as a loss, but as a different kind of intelligence.

And then there’s neuroplasticity.

The idea that the brain is not marble but wet clay. That circuits fray but can be rewired, that the mind adapts, even in its wreckage. I hold onto that like a lifeline. If my brain can change, then maybe this isn’t an ending. Maybe it’s a mutation. A necessary one.

It's simply information going through my new mind, echoing the words of Basquiat.

But what even is a new mind?

Maybe it's not about clawing my way back to something I lost. Maybe it’s about surrendering to the alchemy of loss, to the strange, uncharted intelligence being born from the wreckage.

Maybe brilliance isn’t speed. Maybe it’s endurance. Maybe it’s learning how to think again, how to build a mind from the ground up, without the old scaffolding, without the old rules.

Maybe this new mind won’t be as quick, as sharp, as dazzling. Maybe it won’t turn heads, won’t gather praise.

Maybe it will be something else entirely—something unexpected, something unrecognizable, something that still belongs to me.