Chapter 21: The Silent Fall

‘’The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.’’

— Alan Watts

The bright morning sunlight filtered through white blinds, casting prison-bar-like shadows across his bedroom. In between, free-moving dust particles danced in slow motion under the control of minimal air disturbances. For a fleeting moment, Alex felt an inexplicable connection to his chaotic fluidity, so different from his carefully planned and controlled existence. The bathroom mirror offered no comfort in the mornings. Half of Alex's face hung slack, a cruel reminder of how quickly life could change. Morning sunlight cast harsh shadows across his transformed face, making the contrast between the paralyzed and functioning sides even more dramatic. Physical manifestation of the paralysis that had been creeping through his life long before Bell's Palsy made it visible. Yet in that asymmetrical reflection, something else caught his attention—a peculiar clear glint in his eyes he'd never noticed before; it felt like the person in the mirror was someone else.

            'What do you want?', "Who are you?"

Alex asked his reflection in frustration, his words slightly slurred from the paralysis. The bitter irony stung—his voice, once his lifeline for expression, now faltered, just as the stories he’d buried within, too fearful to unleash. Back in the bedroom, on his bedside desk, medical bills mingled with overdue tax notices, each letter some not even open; he knew what they were, feeling like a concrete block from his past pressing him further into immobility. Next to them lay his old school journal, the rush of creating something purely for the pleasure of creation, its pages filled with half-finished stories, abandoned ideas and drawings. He picked it up, his good hand tracing the worn spine.

When did I become so good at pleasing others that I forgot how to take care of myself?

The question pulsated through his consciousness with an unfamiliar resonance, like a bell tone that continues long after the strike. His world had always been carefully masked and choreographed around others' needs—a complex play of nodded submissions, unwanted agreements and swallowed objections.

Physical exhaustion from the steroids he was prescribed now melded with a deeper, soul-level fatigue, and in the spaces between exhaustion and rest, strange thoughts began to emerge. Sometimes, in the liminal state between waking and sleeping, he caught glimpses of a different way of being—like remembering a dream of flying only to find his feet still earthbound. Waking from bed, walking to the bathroom, he would see himself still lying in bed. Preparing tea in the kitchen, the next moment he realizes he’s drinking it in the bedroom, in his bed. He blamed the steroids for these shattered moments of memory, unaware they were the first stirrings of his awakening.

His phone vibrated sharply, not offering comfort “how’s your health, are you okay?,” but thrusting another work demand upon him.

"Alex, when are you able to work? We have big audits coming up. It this this time of the year" His duty manager, Yīnuò, was checking his availability. Alex knew it was a peak time for a big no less than million-pound store to be audited. Suddenly, Alex saw through how others had learned to exploit his self-sacrifice for meager earnings and a need to be valued, chasing proof of his worth. In a split second, emotion roused from somewhere deep. As his hand moved automatically to make a gesture that said, ''Fuck you!'' a shaft of sunlight caught the screen, momentarily transforming it into a mirror. In that dazzling flash of reflection, Alex saw not just his paralyzed face but a deeper truth—a crack in the facade he’d kept suppressed, through which his authentic essence gleamed.

'Doctor said it can take up to six months to fully recover,' Alex replied in a low, steady and calm voice, like distant thunder, almost unrecognizable. ''Oh! – she sounded surprised, ok, you keep me updated, and speedy recovery to you, Bey Alex.''

He opened the journal. Its pages held stories he'd written years ago—stories about how bad the Christian religion was, ironic to remember how little he knew about the thing he wanted to write. Back then, Alex didn’t grasp what or how to put into words, only yearned to pour out stories, but now he felt as if his words had frozen within. The paralysis had forced a four-month pause, creating a strange window of clarity in his daily routines. In the space between heartbeats, in the realm where commitment, action, and devotion resided, a silent voice urged him to write. Alex began to feel a stirring, not just a long-dormant desire for something more than survival, but a hint of something subtle trying to seep through the gaps in his meticulously crafted world.

'What if this isn't just paralysis?'

This thought arose unbidden. For now, he couldn’t name it, only somewhere beneath the surface of his consciousness it began to stir more loudly. Something within Alex began to thaw, like snowdrops—delicate white blooms breaking through melting snow—piercing the chill of his constrained heart. Alex started to contemplate in silence more often. Could these be the seeds of courage he had always prayed for, the resolve to speak his mind with knowledge, the beginnings that would eventually blossom?

Alex began to notice a strong voice in his awareness that started opposing his inner critic. It felt like a battleground where two entities, hope and doubt, sitting on his shoulders, waged an endless debate war. Where he was an observer to all of it.

"Write? You?" The voice of his inner critic sliced through his consciousness—sharp as a shard of glass in a silent room. "Have you forgotten the labyrinth of letters, the way words hide and shift before your eyes?" The moment the critic was unstoppable was the very moment Alex tried to write something. ''See, you don't even know how to put sentences together. You are not a writer; you are a loser!'     

Each syllable struck with precision, excavating memories of classroom humiliations and assignment papers marked in angry red pen. The whirlwind of undiagnosed ADHD stirred these painful memories into a tempest, scattering his focus like shattered glass across the floor. Yet beneath the chaos, a stronger voice emerged—no longer a whisper but a steady flame.

"My differences are not deficits," this voice insisted, growing stronger with each word. "Dyslexia taught me to see patterns others miss. ADHD gave me the gift of seeing interface of the chaos. These aren't my limitations—they're my lens for viewing a world that needs new perspectives." This wasn't just about writing anymore. Alex began to believe that he could write great stories. Over those few months of paralysis, Alex felt his unruly mind lurch between tangled words and sentences only he could decipher, soon gnawed by doubts about his ability to write. Financial insecurity increasingly crushed his self-worth, while his inner critic slashed: “Write? When? Debts are choking you!” The gravity of necessity crushed his new discovered passion like an iron fist, churning his gut with dread and dragging his soaring hopes back to the ground in a brutal, heart-stopping plunge.

For Alex, this inevitability manifested in the form of crushing tax and revenue debt, making him reconsidering his income, selling his family car, a Volvo S40 and replacing it with an old Ford Ka'. Next a conversation followed, the one he never imagined having with his wife, putting on the market for sale their unfinished dream house in Lithuania—all while the HMRC taxman was pressing on sending threatening letters to seize all he had in his house. He understood he had to surrender his precious calling, at least for now, and fix his life to a point where he would have time and freedom to learn how to write, now by the end of his recovery he needed a solution to his financial disaster. He gave himself a promise to make time to write and create great stories only he had no clue when.

Over Skype, before Anatig's father, pride crumbling like melting ice cream in a cone, he pushed the words out: Forcing a request for financial help, choking on the bitter ashes of his pride, he admitted that fate had struck him mercilessly, though he knew full well it was the consequence of his own choices. ''The moment I sell the summer house, I will return all the money.'' Alex made a promise. The father-in-law's response came wrapped in careful words with solid iron intentions.

"We don't know when you are going to sell the house, and what if you don't sell the house?' The current situation in the Lithuanian market wasn't doing well; Alex knew it could take some time.  “BUT…we’ll lend you the money...with conditions. For a moment, Anatiga’s father’s offer hung in the air: money for the land. Not just any patch of earth—an acre he’d bought from his friend’s parents, paid for with hard-won settlement money still glowing with the light of victory. Believing he had closed the final page of a painful childhood and deprivation’s story. To Alex that acre was more than dirt and grass; it was a promise to his family, a place where one day their roots would sink deep. Even now, as the shadows of divorce crept closer, that dream still lived, and he held fast to the hope that those roots would still grow here. "Collateral," Anatig's father called it.

''Just in case you don't pay back,'' said his father-in-law coldly.

But Alex heard what remained unspoken: surrender. For Alex, that land represented more than just financial security.  It was concrete evidence that he could contend and prevail and that his life did not have to follow the dictates of his limitations. Now, faced with mounting debts circling like vultures, he watched that symbol of hope transform into a bargaining chip.

“Does family take everything you cherish in the name of their ‘safety’?” Alex wrestled with this question, his thoughts tangled like grapevines. The answer crystallized in his mind like frost on a window—clear and chilling. The journey back to Lithuania, every step through Klaipėda’s streets, felt like sinking into twilight. In the notary’s office, the pen in his hand weighed like stone, the documents before him—the transfer of the summer house and land to his father-in-law. The father-in-law beside him, cold as a bank clerk, seemed not like family but a debt enforcer. 

Signing, Alex felt as if another concrete slab crashed onto his shoulders, this time crushing trust and heart. He recalled evenings at the summer house, when Anatig, nestled against him, listened as he spoke of their future under the stars, beside the garden where their dreams grew. That land was his field of victory, wrested from past poverty. Now Anatiga’s family, once close as his own, watched him across the notary’s gleaming table, not with care but with the emptiness of distrust and perhaps greed in their eyes. The respect he’d felt for them evaporated in the notary’s office, like smoke. The deal was cynically simple: the land and house—in exchange for their silent financial salvation. Yet, even after signing, Alex held a spark in his heart—that he would find a way to revive that dream.

Returning to Cardiff, the burden of taxes slipped from Alex’s shoulders, only to be replaced by a heavier stone—the shadows of “what if…” and “maybe it’s still possible…” weighing on his heart, questions ringing relentlessly in his mind. It wasn’t just a deal—it was a quiet, officially sealed loss of self. Why do the closest people hurt us the most? The same thought that had haunted him since childhood now twisted into a tangled knot. He had reached a chapter where he still couldn’t discern where true family began and where illusion ended.

He arrived at a chapter where the words were yet unwritten, but the feelings already trembled. And the strangest thing—the tangle in his mind no longer felt like an obstacle. It became material. Pain became form. Silence turned into rhythm.

Their true impact was yet to be understood.

“You’re still thinking about writing?” his inner critic mocked.

“You’ve just lost your safety net,” the harsh voice pressed.

But for the first time, that voice of doubt didn’t sap his strength—it returned something. Not confidence—more like a wistful smile.

“No,” he thought, “I’ve just understood the first chapter of my book.”

 NEXT WEEK! Chapter 22: The Freedom Promise – An Inner Rebellion

or

Get full copy here - - - https://tinyurl.com/ykxwyknx