When I sit down at the end of a long day to relax with my television, there’s one thing I want to watch above all others: supernatural and science fiction dramadies.  This love started with Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  The unwilling heroine that would have traded her supernatural abilities in a heartbeat for a normal life, one like I actually have, gave us a campy and self-aware humor along with versions of our own problems worked out in such a fantastical way that they became a way to relate to the fictional girl I’d have happily traded places with. These types of shows also have a way of striking right to the heart of what it means to be human, even when the rules of reality are up for grabs.

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Given the chance to help 500 dollars leave my pocket in the most pleasant way possible, I must admit the majority of it would be spent on books.  I’d obsess over which new release would make the cut to come home with me.  It would be paired with a classic to even my library. Of course then I’d be lured to the science fiction aisle and unable to leave it without grabbing another.  The books that promise new languages and scientific theory can’t be overlooked either.  As I leave the bookstore, it would be only then that I recalled I need new jeans, mine shredded to disgrace, leaving me to count the change to make sure I can buy at least one sensible thing for myself.

When I was 18, I was offered a job as an apprentice engineer. It was amazing and the best thing I could have hoped for. I was living with the love of my life in a beautiful flat in London, and had a good steady income. I was studying for my qualifications and getting distinctions consistently. Around 5 months in, I started to feel unwell. I couldn’t stop vomiting and I became depressed. It developed and I became worse, until I started having seizures. It took months of diagnosis, wasted hours spent in different doctors offices, and experiencing the worst side effects from every different anti-seizure medication around. I was finally diagnosed with epilepsy a few months later. I lost my job, had to move back home and my driving license – everything I needed to consider my life fulfilled. I’m still struggling to move on from this and can’t find anyone that wants to employ me in engineering as I’m an epileptic and it’d be dangerous. If I could, I’d do anything to not be epileptic and just have a normal life again.

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When I was 2 years old, I was in a horrific car accident. A drunk driver drove directly straight into the front of our car. My mother was driving, my father was sat on the left seat in the back, I was in a baby seat in the middle and my five year old brother was on the right seat. Upon impact, my mother’s head hit the windscreen and left her with brain damage, my father had his leg broken, my brother was left with bruises and I had my eye cut open. From that point onwards, our family was destroyed. The doctors prepared my father for my mother’s imminent death as she underwent neurosurgery, while my grandmother and aunties looked after my brother and me. Everything was bleak, my father wasn’t able to work and found himself struggling for money – the government wouldn’t approve his benefits, and work were witholding pay. Months later, my mother miraculously came out of her coma, and began rehabilitation. Within two years, she was able to communicate again, although she was left paralysed on her right side. My father somehow kept it all together, he paid my grandparents for looking after my brother and me, and he found the money for my mother’s treatment. As I grew up, my relationship with my father became strained.