Chapter 19

Let me take you back to what actually happened when I left vet school.

Because it wasn't just leaving. It was everything that came after. The unraveling, the figuring out, the slow and messy process of trying to find myself again in the wreckage of everything that had fallen apart.

I went through phases. Real ones. The kind that don't follow a neat timeline and don't always make sense from the outside looking in.

And I want to talk about all of it honestly because I think people deserve to know what it actually looks like when someone hits rock bottom and starts climbing back out. It's not a montage. It's not a revelation. It's a lot of ugly in between moments of something that almost feels like okay.

But here's the part that I know people are going to raise an eyebrow at.

What brought me back to myself, like actually back, was a show. Heated Rivalry.

I know how that sounds. But sometimes the thing that pulls you out of the dark isn't what anyone would expect. Sometimes it's not therapy or a breakthrough conversation or a life changing moment. Sometimes it's something that just makes you feel something again when you have gone completely numb.

So let's get into it. From the beginning.

Chapter 20

Toward the end of that fall semester, I knew something had to change. Not in a vague, "I should probably take better care of myself" kind of way. In a if I don't do something, I am not going to survive this kind of way.

So I started getting help. And that's when everything that had been happening to me finally got a name.

My traumatic brain injury had hit its threshold.

I had a TBI from the car accident. The same accident from the beginning of this story. But somewhere along the way it got missed. Nobody caught it in my ER medical records, and nobody treated it, and so for roughly three years I was walking around with an untreated traumatic brain injury while life kept piling things on top of it. Vet school. The stress. The isolation. The physical toll. All of it landing on a brain that was already injured and never given the chance to heal.

My body didn't give up because I was weak. It gave up because it had been running on empty for three years longer than anyone realized.

When I finally learned that, something clicked. The memory loss, the slurred words, the brain fog, the numbness, losing my words in both English and Spanish, all of it made sense. It wasn't me falling apart. It was my brain telling me it had been trying to hold on for way too long without any help.

We started treating the TBI.

And slowly, things started making sense again.

Chapter 21

After a few sessions of treatment, something started shifting in how I saw everything that had happened.

I was not at fault.

That took a while to land. I had spent so long being angry at myself, convincing myself that I had failed, that I wasn't smart enough, that I couldn't handle what everyone else around me seemed to be handling just fine. But the truth was I had been doing all of that with a brain that was never given the chance to heal properly. I wasn't failing because I wasn't capable. I was failing because I was injured and nobody knew it, including me.

The TBI didn't just affect my studying. It affected everything. The way I processed information, the way I regulated my emotions, the way my body responded to stress. It was all connected, and it had been quietly making everything harder for three years while I blamed myself for not being enough.

And here's the strange part I'm still sitting with: As painful as everything was, as dark as it got, if none of it had happened the way it did, I would have kept going. I would have continued living with an untreated TBI, never knowing, just pushing through and wondering why everything felt so much harder than it should.

The worst chapter of my life is also the one that finally got me the help I actually needed.

I don't know how to feel about that exactly. But I'm working on it.

Chapter 22

I went back home for a bit.

Therapy was continuing. The TBI treatment was ongoing. I was doing the work, but some days the work just felt like more weight. More appointments. More digging into things that hurt. More trying to explain to people what it felt like to live inside a brain that was not fully cooperating.

Then my sister and I sat down one night and put on Heated Rivalry.

And we did not stop.

Six episodes. Back to back. We stayed up way too late but neither of us cared. Every time an episode ended it was just okay, one more, and then another, and then suddenly it was the middle of the night and we were still there, completely locked in.

I do not even know how to explain what happened next without sounding dramatic. But you know by now I don't do anything halfway, so here it is.

I felt alive.

Not the kind of alive where you are just breathing and moving through the motions. The kind of alive where something inside you lights up and you remember that you are a person. A full person. With feelings and giggles and butterflies and opinions about fictional people who do not even know you exist.

I was giggling like a little girl. I was crying at a screen. I was invested in characters the way I had not been invested in anything for years.

And I remember sitting there thinking, wait. I can feel this? This is still in me?

Because for so long I had felt like a Sim. That is the only way I can describe it. Running on some kind of automated loop. Heart beating. Brain semi-functional. Going through the motions of being a person without actually feeling like one.

The dark space in my brain had gotten so loud that everything else got crowded out. Joy. Silliness. Excitement. Anticipation. All of it just gone quiet somewhere I couldn't reach.

Heated Rivalry reached it.

I know that sounds wild. I know people are going to read this and think it's just a show. But it was not just a show for me. It was the first time in longer than I can remember that my brain got so absorbed in something outside of my own pain that it forgot to be stuck.

It felt like a treasure chest opened up somewhere in my head. Like there were parts of me that had been locked away, the giggly part, the romantic part, the little girl who believed in love and got butterflies and screamed at her TV, and watching those characters do their thing just blew the lid off.

I cried. I laughed. I rewound scenes. My sister and I shared similar reactions at midnight like we were teenagers.

And the whole time, something in the back of my mind was quietly noting,

oh. there you are.

I have been looking for you.

That version of me didn't die in the accident. She didn't get left behind in vet school. She was just waiting for something safe enough and joyful enough to come wake her back up.

Heated Rivalry was that thing.

I will never apologize for that.

Chapter 23

I thought it would fade.

That it was just one of those nights. One of those random moments where everything lines up and you feel like yourself again for a second, and then it slips away.

But it didn't.

I watched it again, and it all came back. The same butterflies. The same laughter. The same scenes hitting me like I had never seen them before. And I remember sitting there thinking, this doesn't make sense. Why does this still feel new?

Because usually things don't work like that. Usually your brain adapts. The excitement dulls. The feelings quiet down.

But this didn't.

If anything, it got louder. I could replay the same clips over and over again and still feel that same rush. That same almost overwhelming happiness that made my chest feel too full.

And that is when something shifted for me. Not just emotionally, but mentally.

I started to realize this isn't random. This is my brain doing something very real. Very physical. Very measurable.

For so long, everything in my head had felt off. Slower. Heavier. Like it wasn't firing the way it used to. And I blamed myself for that. I thought I wasn't trying hard enough, or healing fast enough, or that maybe this was just who I was now.

But this feeling, this ability to get completely pulled in, to feel anticipation, connection, joy, all at once, you cannot fake that. That is chemistry. That is my brain releasing the exact things it is supposed to release when I am engaged and safe and emotionally connected.

And the fact that it kept happening, over and over again, meant something I had not let myself fully believe before.

My brain is still working.

Not perfectly. Not the way it used to. But it is adapting. It is responding. It is finding ways to come back online.

And suddenly all those moments where I felt stupid felt different. Because a broken brain does not do this. A brain that is overwhelmed might shut things down, might go quiet, might make everything feel harder. But it does not lose the ability to feel like this. It just needs the right conditions to find its way back.

And somehow, for me, those conditions looked like staying up way too late, watching six episodes in a row, and not wanting it to end.

Which still feels ridiculous when I say it out loud.

But also feels like one of the most important things that has ever happened to me. Because it proved something I did not know how to prove before.

I am still in here.

My brain did not fail me.

It protected me.

And now, it is learning how to let me feel again.

I Didn't Know I Had PTSD Until I Walked Into That Building

3-30-26:

I had a job interview today. And honestly, going into it, I felt really good. Excited, even. I walked in remembering how much I love this field, how much I have always loved it. Seven years of my life have gone into veterinary medicine. Seven years of studying, working, pushing, sacrificing. It's not just a career path for me. It's a part of who I am.

The interview was going well. The manager was showing me around and everything felt fine. And then we walked into the treatment area.

I saw the technicians. I saw the doctors. I saw other students from the school I use to attend.

My heart just sank.

I didn't see it coming. One second I was present and engaged, and the next second something inside me just folded. I wanted to run. I wanted to get out of that building as fast as I possibly could. But I was mid-interview, standing next to the manager, so I held it together the best I could. I smiled. I kept talking. I did what you do. Fake it till you make it.

The second I got to my car, I fell apart. Full on crying. Hands shaking. Chest tight. A panic attack, the kind that doesn't ask permission before it shows up. I sat in that parking lot and I just let it happen because there was nothing else I could dI have spent so much time being angry at LMU for what happened to me there. The toxic environment, the way I was treated, all of it. But today was the first time I realized just how deep the damage goes. I didn't just leave a school. I left carrying something I didn't even have a name for until today. That something is trauma. And it followed me right into that interview, into that treatment room, the second I was back in a space that looked like the place that hurt me.

That's PTSD. I know that now.

And I'm so angry about it. Not at myself, even though that was the first place my brain went when I was sitting in that parking lot crying. My first instinct was to feel disappointed in myself. Like I had failed somehow. Like I should be over it by now. But I didn't do this to myself. I didn't choose to associate a field I love with pain. That was done to me.

What hurts the most is that I have done veterinary medicine for seven years. Seven years of loving this work, loving these animals, loving this world. And right now I can't even walk into a hospital without my body screaming at me to get out. That's not nothing. That's a loss. A real one. And I am letting myself feel that today.

But here's what I also want you to know. After I sat in that parking lot and cried everything out, I got myself together. I drove to a new cafe I had never been to. I ordered a caprese bagel and a matcha. And it was, genuinely, top tier delicious. And then I opened my laptop and applied to new jobs.

Because that's the thing nobody tells you about surviving something hard. You don't have to be okay. You just have to keep going. Even if keeping going looks like finding a really good bagel and starting over from a coffee shop table.

I am still sad. I am still angry. But I am still here. And I am still moving.

That has to count for something.

And I keep coming back to this one thing that I can't shake. I did everything right. I worked for years to earn my spot. I trusted that school with my dream, with my time, with a version of my future I had been building since I fell in love with this field. And they let me down. Not in a small way. In a way that followed me into a parking lot and knocked the air out of me.

That's the part that stings the most. Not that it was hard. Hard I can handle. But I trusted them. I believed in what they said they stood for. And it turned out to be a lie. There's a specific kind of hurt that comes from being failed by something you genuinely believed in. It's different from regular disappointment. It sits heavier. It takes longer to move through.

I don't have a clean way to wrap that up. It's just a real shame. And some days you have to let it be exactly that.

Chapter 24

in progress...