I wasn’t paying attention when I was diagnosed with a terminal disease.
That’s really all I caught when the doctor was trying to explain it to me. I
wasn’t in shock, or anything, I just didn’t care. I’m going to die in
prison, and that’s true whether it happens tomorrow, or ten years from now.
If you had asked me yesterday what went wrong with my life, I would have
blamed it on the world. I have a mental list of people who have wronged me
throughout the years, and to be sure, some of those people deserve to be on
it. Maybe even all of them, to some degree, but there’s one name I forgot to
include, and it actually ought to be at the top. Me. I should have taken
responsibility for my own actions. I should be on it both for the things
that I did, and also because I’ve lived in denial of my culpability.
Let me explain where this sudden realization is coming from. Government
scientists have developed a drug that they hope will help restore the
memories and general faculties of people with age-related diseases that
cause those kinds of problems. I have no such disease, but they needed a
control group, so I’m part of that. As an incarcerated terminal patient, I
was the perfect candidate. I didn’t even wait to hear the whole pitch before
agreeing to sign the documents. If the experimental medicine they gave me
resulted in my death, then as I explained before, it didn’t really matter. I
wasn’t sure what to expect as I sat down. I suppose I figured I would get a
flood of memories that I had either suppressed, or had just forgotten,
because they weren’t very important. If it should work on dementia patients,
why wouldn’t it work on me too? That’s not what happened, though. As I’ve
said, my memories were fine; probably about as intact as any normal
person’s. I didn’t remember anything special, but I got some new
perspective.
I was a piece of shit. I treated strangers poorly, and my friends even
worse. I alienated everyone who ever cared about me, and I didn’t even
realize it. Because they didn’t truly ever leave; our relationships just
never totally recovered. I had some pretty crazy ideas about the world too.
I made political and economical claims that—now that I think about it—didn’t
make any sense. The truth is that I was super uneducated, and to no one’s
fault but my own. I went to class, and I took the tests, but I didn’t really
care about the material, I didn’t retain it, and I was entirely incapable of
drawing reasonable conclusions for new problems. I just didn’t understand a
damn thing, but I thought I was so smart. Do you remember saying something
stupid when you were a kid, like how the older boys who stole your lunch
money would be sorry when you grew up, and were older than them? Or maybe
you lied to everyone about climbing up the side of a building. This is what
it feels like to look back at my past. I feel like a God, my hindsight is so
much better than 20/20 right now. I was so wrong about everything, and I’m
incredibly embarrassed of myself. It’s unfair, having this perspective so
late in life. I don’t have any time to go back and correct my mistakes. Plus
I’m still stuck in here. I won’t go over every epiphany I had while I was on
this drug, but I’ll say that the old me wouldn’t care about it. I’m smiling,
because even if it doesn’t technically do what it’s meant to, it should
still be able to help people. I just need to figure out how to convey this
data to the researchers. I’m about to die, I know this much. I don’t think
that should stop their research, and I’m worried they will if I don’t manage
to explain the results to them before I fade away. I have to get back to the
real world. I have to wake up befo—
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