#2: What time is it? I'm going crazy

Jan 16th, 8 a.m. Brussels Time. GMT+1.

My brain was absolutely convinced it was 8 p.m. when I woke up from a nap in the Brussels Airport.

Not in a vague, jet-lagged way. Not in a “maybe I should nap” way. My body was releasing all the chemical signals that mean night. Melatonin. GABA. The whole physiological chorus telling me to wind down, to sleep, to prepare for darkness. Except there was no darkness. I was watching the sun rise.

For a moment, I truly thought I had lost track of time entirely. I became deeply concerned about my flight path, convinced that the hours no longer aligned and that I had somehow misunderstood something fundamental. If the time was wrong, what else was wrong? I checked and rechecked, trying to reconcile what my body insisted on with what the clock said. They refused to agree. I was only halfway through a 36 hour flight plan (and I didn't know at this time that my travel would be much longer.....) and I was fully convinced that I missed my connecting flight somehow.

I needed to sleep on the next flight from Brussels to Kigali. I also needed to take an entire practice MCAT exam. Both felt urgent. Both felt non-negotiable. My body wanted rest. My future wanted performance. There was no clean solution. Just a mounting sense that there was too much to do and no correct order in which to do it.

When that happens to me, there is a familiar impulse. If everything feels impossible, I start to feel like the most reasonable response is to give up entirely. Not dramatically. Just quietly. To sit in the overwhelm and let it flatten me.

Up until that point, the jump to Uganda had still felt abstract. A decision. A plan. A sequence of flights. But somewhere over Europe, with my circadian rhythm misfiring and my brain unable to prioritize sleep over obligation, I realized that the jump had already begun. Not geographically, but internally.

This was the first loss of control. Not dramatic. Not dangerous. Just disorienting enough to unsettle the illusion that I was fully in charge of myself. I hadn’t arrived anywhere yet, but something had already shifted. My body was no longer following my plan.

The sun kept rising anyway. And in a very strange way it actually felt nice. I have been working endlessly the last few months to tie everything into a nice bow — the MCAT, Marie Curie, EMT, travel plans etc. It felt nice to realize that there was actually very little within my control in the moment. Breathe. Relax. You didn't miss a flight. Just do the next thing. After that, do the next thing. Time to wing it!

And I slept on the flight btw. MCAT practice exam can wait.