Recovery Michigan

Age 14, a sharp, distinct, intentional before and after: Before seizures, I was the shy, quiet girl drowning in baggy kitten sweatshirts and Wrangler jeans; after seizures, I showed up to school in fishnets, combat boots, heavy black eyeliner, and dyed red-platinum-orange-pink-black (whatever fit the mood that week) hair. While the other kids whispered Karrie is on drugs, Karrie is nuts, Karrie pisses her pants, Karrie is faking, Karrie is a freak, I said fuck it. I will show them a freak. My clothes got weirder. My writing got weirder. My musical tastes got weirder. My art got weirder. I got weirder.

I didn’t know until years later that Prince did the same damn thing. Prince had epilepsy, too. Prince gotfreaky as survival strategy.

In 2009, he talked about his epilepsy publicly for the first time on PBS with Tavis Smiley. “From that point on,” he said, “I’ve been having to deal with a lot of things, getting teased a lot in school. And early in my career I tried to compensate by being as flashy as I could and as noisy as I could.”

Prince was a walking disability poetics.

After that, when I listened to his music, I thought: Prince has a Sparkle Brain. 

Sparkle Brain. My term for my Epileptic, Bipolar, Chiarian, PTSD-brain–for any neurodivergent brain. Sparkle Brain is big tent. Autistic brains are sparkly. Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizure brains are sparkly. Sensory disordered brains are sparkly. Neurodiversity in all its forms is sparkly.

I mean sparkle literally: my brain is extra electric. When my brain lights up, it sparkles like it’s 1999.

But I mean it figuratively, too: sparkly, like a disco ball. A Sparkle Brain is shiny. A Sparkle Brain is beautiful.