But he was wide awake.

It had sunk in that he was going to spend the rest of his life totally alone. He was trapped in his head, and after so many failed attempts to reach out of himself, he lost hope and accepted that he was powerless. At one point, his mother looked him in the eyes and told him that she wished he was dead.

As a coping mechanism, he began intuitively practicing detachment therapy by refusing to entertain these negative thoughts, letting them drift out of his mind just as easily as they would drift into it.

“You don’t really think about anything, you simply exist.”

“Is it peaceful?”

“No. It’s a very dark place to find yourself, because in a sense you are allowing yourself to vanish.”

It wasn’t until he reconsidered why his mother wished he was dead that he was able to slowly progress out of his head. He realized she had said to him from a place of profound love. From there, his motivation sparked and he began to track time by watching shadows move along his wall. To be aware of time, and the rhythm with which things were happening within that time, gave him a sense of control.

When negative thoughts would inevitably flood his mind, he wrestled with them, and envisioned a life worth living for himself. In time, with sustained positivity and a series of unexplained neurological synapses, he was able to regain movement in his body. Though he still can’t speak, he communicates through a logic board, and wrote a book about what it was like being locked in his own body for twelve years.

It’s a beautiful story, really. Mostly because it’s someone’s life; how the experience of another can be so unlike our own yet we feel for them, we are there with them. But it’s also a beautiful story because it testifies to the capacity of the human soul, and is proof that the degenerative thoughts we all have are indeed there and should be confronted, because we are worth it and should always strive for better.