I’m Matthew Wright

1. I’m narcoleptic. I was diagnosed in 2014 and began treatment in 2016. Up to then I didn’t know anything was wrong with me, physiologically. I thought I fucked my life up repeatedly through skill alone. Some of my fondest memories come from before treatment, but much of my life then was an exhausting, surrealistic slog. Everything I created before medication was short lived. I tore every life I started to the ground, so I could start over without the anxiety of a personal history. Finally taking medication was like coming out of one of hundreds of blackouts, sobering up, and finding myself in the life I created on my last bender.
2. I have depression. Ironically, it’s a common side effect of my medication. I can’t confirm if it was there before. There are quite a few symptoms in the center of that Venn Diagram. Since 2016 I’ve lost my meds 3 times, for weeks, because of insurance complications (it’s expensive and they love to kick me off it every few open enrollments). Each time I went back to the slog, within 48 hours. I feel like I can pin the depression on my meds because while exhausted, I’m more myself without the meds. My emotional range is wider. I feel so much more everything, bad and good. It’s like being in a thick fog, but reuniting with a twin in there. I can’t see much, but, “how have you been! God damn, it’s good to see you!” The exhaustion of narcolepsy comes from the inability to maintain deep sleep. That brings anxiety and paranoia, dreams so long and vivid you wake to hallucinations, cataplexy, irritability, diminished concentration and increased reaction time (fun for driving). Google it and you’ll find if you want to know what it feels like, stay awake for 2 days. Your third day without sleep is every day for a narcoleptic. I’ve been on both sides of it now, and that’s pretty goddam accurate. It fucking sucks.
3. I’m a web developer. I like my job, as much as anyone probably can, but I don’t love it. It’s how I pay the bills, period. It’s creative at times, interesting most of the time, the people I work for and with are genuinely nice and good. But, when I don’t have to do it anymore, I won’t miss it. I built this site. I’m no designer, I just wanted something simple and chronological. If you click on the upper left hand icon from any post it brings you back here. If you click from here, you’ll get the most recent post. Every post has a link to all posts.
4. I’m a writer. It’s not something I call myself often anymore because I don’t make my living doing it. I don’t submit my work. I hardly share what I write, but I never stopped, even when the dream of doing it for a living checked into hospice. I’ve completed a dozen novels, and have been working on a project weaving them all together. I don’t know if the end product will appeal, commercially, to an audience, but it keeps me going for one simple reason: I created and destroyed so many lives before treatment. I lost friends, lovers, careers, cities, whole countries. It was definitely me who lost them. Everyone and everything is flawed, and those people and places weren’t perfect, but they were all within the normal range. Unmedicated, I am not. Without the writing, all the loss is carnage. I don’t fictionalize it. My past is dead. It’s also mine though. Even an evil twin is family. He and I can’t make up for the pain we caused ourselves and others, can’t re-experience the joys we managed, but the need to make sense of it won’t go away. The fiction is somewhere for those orphaned emotions to go. It’s not a history, only the impressions left behind.