My Personal Black Swan Event

      As an eight year old growing up in Vermont, playing in the woods was a way of life. So when I got bit by a tick, I didn't even notice, so much so that I don't even remember it. It wouldn't be until eleven years later huddled in a wheelchair in a doctor's office that I even knew it happened. That was the day I was diagnosed with Lyme disease, a particularly punishing disease that attacks organs, nerves, and fibrous tissues. It had taken eleven years, countless doctors, dozens of trips to the emergency room, one hospitalization, and coming within months of death for someone to finally make the connection between my symptoms and my time on the east coast. It had been five years since that initial bite that I even noticed feeling ill. I didn't think much of it, but that sick feeling that began as a nuisance would soon change my life completely. Those good grades I had always gotten started declining, the sports I'd always loved playing became history, and the faith adults had always had in me flew out the window. Over the course of just a few years I was forced to change high schools three times. I had to alter my plans of becoming a doctor. But more importantly, I was put on a path that would ultimately lead to discovering my abilities onstage and my passion for the performing arts. Coincidentally, my Lyme would also save me from a path that would have jeopardized it all. After high school I went to a conservative university that was kind of chosen for me for a major that was wrong for what I wanted to do with my life. While I was there my illness became progressively harder to ignore until I found myself sleeping twenty two hours a day and unable to keep food down. Concerned for my immediate safety, my parents flew me home. I left everything there and never looked back. After being diagnosed with Lyme, I spent a year at home in intensive recovery. Slowly I moved from a bed to a wheelchair, where I stayed until finally getting on my feet earlier this year. But the time that I had to lie around and think empowered me to do what I really wanted originally: to go to school for musical theatre. And I owe everything, both the heart wrenching pain of defeat and the incredible vindictive accomplishment of success to an insect no bigger than the head of a pin. Which just goes to show, one tiny thing can change the world entirely.