Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

by Susannah Cahalan

There are times when you feel like the best in the business, and other times when you’re certain that you’re a complete and total hack and should start looking for an office job. But in the end, the ups and downs even out.

We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold dear go with it.

“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness,” Aristotle said.

There are few other experiences that can bring two people closer than staring death in the face.

The girl in the video is a reminder about how fragile our hold on sanity and health is and how much we are at the utter whim of our Brutus bodies, which will inevitably, one day, turn on us for good. I am a prisoner, as we all are. And with that realization comes an aching sense of vulnerability.

“The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to.”