Healthy People Cosplay

Alexandra Begau

Alexandra Begau was born in 1994 in Hildesheim, Germany. Despite migraine running in the family, she didn’t expect it to impact her adult life to the extent it does now. Alexandra is mainly writing poetry and short prose and is part of the literature collective Drama Streichfett. Some works have been published in magazines like Schliff and absolutzine. Others have been crafted into short audio plays. Small observations on daily life can be found on @wortgespinste on Instagram.

Healthy People Cosplay

The alarm rings, and I put on my healthy people cosplay. It comes with being well-rested and having a good routine. It also includes: a good mood, not scanning my body, and not hoping for the tension in my jaw to disappear over breakfast. It’s getting late, and I check my healthy people cosplay in the mirror one last time before taking the tram to the office building. The office is new with more windows than walls, and when I enter the space where my team sits, most of the good desks are already taken. In my shiny new office building, we have a shared-desk policy, and I sit at the last desk next to a window because I don’t want to sit in the middle of the room. I open my laptop and type in a cheerful “Good morning :)” message into the group chat before getting coffee with my coworkers. They are talking about the weekend, and I carefully pick a story to tell about going to the park. I leave out the part where I was lying in bed half of the day in pain until the sun was already disappearing. But I’m good. I keep wearing my healthy people cosplay, I am funny, likeable and productive. I grab my coffee and return to my desk. In the first meeting, we go through some analyses I have run. I feel tired. In the second meeting, I get my bosses’ input on a report I’m writing for another team. I want to hide in the bathroom for a bit of unobserved time to myself. In the third meeting, I’m brainstorming with my colleague about a project, and my left ear starts to hurt when I touch it. The pain is leaking to my scalp, but I am ignoring it. At lunch, we go to the cafeteria. I am queuing for 10 minutes to get my food, just to sit in an overcrowded dining hall, half-yelling some chitchat. My smartwatch gives me a high-stress alert. I ignore it, but my head feels like scrambled eggs. Afterwards, I sit back at my desk trying to write some code, but it’s hard to focus when everyone is having a call. It’s hard to focus when the sun shines too brightly, even though I pulled the blinds down. It’s hard to focus when the Excel sheet I am preparing is too white, but that’s hard to explain. “I don’t have time for this now”, I think as I try to find the aluminium blister in my backpack. I push out the pill and swallow it as inconspicuously as possible. I hide the empty blister in the pockets of my healthy people cosplay until it starts to burst at the seams. The pills are not kicking in. My head is on fire, and my words are stumbling. Before closing my laptop, I type a friendly “See you tomorrow, bye! :)” message into the group chat. I walk myself to the tram station, I let myself go home, I peel off my healthy people cosplay as I enter my bedroom, I close the blinds, I smear mint oil on my forehead, I lie on my back watching stupid videos on the internet because I know I can neither sleep nor be fully awake. I look at the shreds of my healthy people cosplay by the door frame and feel guilty, sad, angry – all at once. “I’ll make a new one tomorrow”, I think, but that makes everything worse.