I Died Once. Wouldn’t Recommend.

Hallucinations, regret, and the inconvenient act of surviving

There are moments in life that divide you into two people: the version of you before, and the version that survives after. This is the story of one of those moments.

I don’t mean “died” in a poetic, metaphorical way. I mean there was a point in my life when my body stopped feeling like mine, when everything went quiet, when the world narrowed into something small and distant.

A moment where I genuinely believed: this is it.

This is the part of the story where my body gave up on me because of some… questionable life choices.

That’s a whole other blog. We’ll unpack that chaos another day.

What I do remember starts with waking up in a hospital.

Except—I didn’t know it was a hospital.

I genuinely thought I was in space.

And honestly? Netflix has a lot to answer for.

I opened my eyes and reached the only logical conclusion available at the time: aliens.

Every “human” ( doctors/ nurse/ cleaners) around me looked orange, had antennae, massive droopy eyes, and spoke in strange echoing noises. The entire room glowed green. There was a vent on the ceiling which, to me, was clearly a spaceship window—tiny spacecraft drifting past in outer space.

Very cinematic. Very convincing.

Somewhere in all this, Hulk was there too.

Don’t ask me why. He didn’t explain himself either.

People kept asking me my name over and over again, which felt deeply suspicious. Why would aliens need my name? And why were there wires—sorry, cords—connected to literally every part of my body?

From my point of view, I wasn’t a patient. I was a test subject.

Doctors were pulling blood from me like I was part of some government experiment. Machines were beeping. People were whispering. Everything felt rushed and hostile. I was convinced they were trying to kill me.

So I resisted.

Every single thing they tried to do—I fought it. Not because I was being difficult, but because in my reality, these doctors were not there to save me. They were there to disconnect me.

Important context: I was paralysed from the neck down.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t escape. I couldn’t explain what I was seeing. It was just my mind and my eyes—and both of them were absolutely feral.

This went on for 72 hours.

Seventy-two hours of not knowing what reality was.

People talk about the “seven seconds” before you die. How your life flashes before your eyes.

Well… mine was different.

I didn’t get seven seconds. I got a full-length trailer.

Not the dramatic moments. The real ones. Laughter I forgot mattered. People I loved without realising how deeply. Versions of myself that felt unfinished. It played slowly, like my brain was reminding me of everything I was about to lose.

And when I felt my body give up, I didn’t feel brave. I felt regret.

Not regret for specific mistakes—but a deep, aching wish that I had done more with my life. Lived louder. Loved harder. Taken fewer things so seriously. All I could do in that moment was hope.

When your body gives up, life suddenly makes sense.

You start asking everything: What is life? Why am I here? What actually matters?

And then came the worst part.

The doctor turned off the lights and the drugs clocked in for their shift.

I saw her in the doorway. A nun. Just standing there, looking straight into me, like she could see everything I was trying not to think about. The nurse beside me had eyes that caught the light in a way that didn’t feel human—shiny, reflective, wrong. I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I fell—through what felt like a hundred dimensions, endlessly, with no landing point. Just consciousness collapsing inward again and again.

I saw me.

A completely black version of myself—no features, just eyes. Pulling at the cords attached to my body. Trying to disconnect me. Trying to kill me.

I ran.

Not physically, obviously. Still paralysed. But mentally? I was sprinting through horror-movie realities, chased by myself, knowing I couldn’t win, knowing I couldn’t wake up, knowing I couldn’t stop it.

In between the fear, there were moments that felt calm. Almost gentle. Moments where my mind stopped fighting and just watched.

The wall in front of me disappeared.

It turned into space.

Stars everywhere. Deep, Endless, Beautiful. The kind of beautiful that makes your chest hurt. I remember thinking it was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen—and being terrified at the exact same time. I can’t explain it properly. It didn’t come with meaning or answers. It just stayed with me.

The hallucinations weren’t a dream. They were my entire reality.

Seventy-two hours into this, things slowly started to shift. The aliens turned back into humans. Space turned back into a wall. Hulk disappeared. The spaceship became a hospital again. Everything faded, and I felt myself coming back—not all at once, not perfectly, but enough to know I was still here.

And I realised - No big revelation. No dramatic “everything happens for a reason” moment.

Just this truth:

Life is terrifyingly easy to lose.

So love your life while it’s here.

Stop worrying about the smallest things—the ones that quietly drain you but won’t follow you very far. I used to carry everything. Every thought. Every word. Every imagined future. It kept me busy, but it didn’t keep me alive.

The world can be cruel. Life can be hard. People can be ruthless. You learn to protect yourself, to close in, to harden at the edges.

But you don’t have to become less human to survive.

Say the thing you keep rehearsing in your head. Take the chance that scares you. Put your phone away. Look up. Talk to people. Let life be messy and unfinished. Travel as much as you can. Love deeply no matter what.

Because the hardest truth isn’t that life hurts—it’s that life can end before you’ve really lived inside it. So live now.

Most of the small things will fade. But moments won’t.

When I meet my seven seconds again, I’ll enjoy them—knowing I lived my life to the fullest, with no regrets.