ORIGIN of HALF-LIFE: THE AA BATTERY ADVENTURE

I sat opposite my doctor, a stunned expression on his face. One of those expressions a person adopts when they’ve been hit with some unexpected news, their thoughts retreating for a moment, their composure bleak, like you’ve taken the stool of life of which they sit on completely out from underneath them.

I’ve had a few eerie events in life that knocked the cliché wind out of me, so many simultaneously that I was struggling to see a future. Studying Psychological Science attuned my senses to understand my perspective more than anyone’s inclinations, even doctors. The deep internalised critical analysis of information I churned through constantly broadened my perspective of a world sometimes too intolerable to live amongst.

Too exhausting.

A thousand web browsers open at once, continuously draining me of energy.

‘Theres’s something wrong,’ I said in a drained monotone. ‘I’m always so tired… My mind is telling me that … if I don’t figure out what’s going on… I feel in my body and mind … in the ache of my bones … that I have less than two years to live.’ (And yes, ellipses did happen. Vocalising full sentences at that point was laborious).

I’d had a profound experience to come to this conclusion, one that shocked the doctor, one that produced a story I never was inclined to write. But a story I was searching for unconsciously to answer a question towards the meaning of life, nonetheless that was a necessity to create to address an issue of mental wellbeing that had arisen, that, I felt, was engrained and spreading silently in societies, misunderstood however, to the generalised whims of limited information. A phenomenon had occurred for me that pushed me to the brink of energy loss that hung my mind from its last dangling strands of electrical synaptic pulses over the abyss of complete mental death. 

As per usual, my Dr’s professionalism kicked in after the momentary stun I’d delivered him, and he was able to enquire how this understanding all came to be. I had an experience, I explained. For months I’d felt my body slowly shutting down, my movement slowing to a shuffle like a person experiencing a drastic dosage of anti-psychotic medication paralysis. My body was heavy, weighed down as if under a weighted blanket. My feet dragged as if concreted in blocks. Breathing was laboured and I often paused, a constant need to remind myself to inhale to kick start the next round. This led to pauses in speech, hence the ellipses, and I found myself cycling through my vocab database to choose the right words as to avoid energy depletion from repeating myself. I was viewing myself in 3^rd person, observing life from a higher perspective, tuned to dimensionality, but different to disassociation where one lives outside the mind to avoid the cataclysmic effect of trauma being active inside the mind. I felt the pain of my body and mind, torn down the centre, and it ached.

My thoughts swirled on these things as my dire monotonal voice revealed to my Dr that I had a near death experience, and I felt like it was slowly circling back around for a second attempt at ending me. And all from sheer collapse of energy to live. Unable to fuse my elements like a star shifting through phases of fusionable material as to not supernova, fending of mass collapse. I was unable to grasp onto life’s purpose for the fact my body and mind simply could not communicate to continue the fusion process. The countdown to complete energy depletion was on. In retrospect astrophysical terms, I felt like the mass of a collapsing star was on my shoulders, a dead star that evolves into a blackhole.

Months had passed with these sensations occurring in body and mind, my condition dwindling the longer I put myself through life’s routine. I found myself at work one day and had been juggling a job, university and family at the same time. Not to mention being an active foster carer as well as engaged in the pursuit of producing my second book. Many stories had formed and were drafted for this task, but I’d always found something missing, something integral … Elements, and despite the hard work that had been put into them, the stories were not quite there yet. As I said, something was missing, and it was extremely hard to understand death was part of the equation.

Far from being in my dream job, not far from finishing my university degree, but having done it long enough to feel intense failure, life seemed very pointless, even though I knew I had my family and friends. I wanted to survive for them but wondered how I would do that feeling so extremely drained of energy, completely lost, unable to fathom a positive outcome, lost to succeeding at another book. The second book. The one that says the first book was not a fluke.

Like I said, I was at work, in a factory, all by myself as I gathered items for a store order somewhere in Queensland. The lack of energy was present from wake up, but it was at work when complete energy collapse hit me. I started stooping, body aching, hunching over. I knew I needed to sit down quick and fortunately, my backside found a pallet of generic laundry powder boxes as my legs failed to keep me upright. My head fell forward, and as my chin dug into my chest, my eyes closed to thoughts of ‘what is going on?’ It was dark inside my head. There was a ring of light above as if I were past the Event Horizon of a black hole, the process of spaghettification stretching me thin, but able to see the ring of light above growing smaller. My energy thinning, draining, my jaw so sluggish trying to vocalise, only making spittle hisses around the hatch of my lips. The dark abyss surrounded me, growing as wide and cold as the nothingness of space.

What is happening! I thought, panicked yet drained, unable to react with my body. I tried to make sense of what was happening in that brief borderline-death moment. Tried to link the experience to something I’d experienced in life — ironic much? — talk myself through it like every problem before this, every stress, anxiety and trauma.

This feels like… I feel like… my thoughts struggled to find a comparison. I feel like… this is what… it must feel like to be… a dead battery.

I suddenly gasped a defibrillator’s breath as a spark ignited in my mind like a carbon rod arc gap, kick starting my mind. I stood up in an arc, gulping in air, checking over myself, paled and sweating, feeling much like Frankenstein’s monster. I paused at the phenomenon that had just occurred, not understanding it, thoughts scattered. And not telling anyone, nor seeking first aid or leaving to see my doctor, I just continued my work duties for the day, a new story lighting up my synapses.

I visited the Dr just to be sure I hadn’t had a heart attack, stroke or fainted, despite my biopsychosocial education and internalised alarm telling me such a thing may have occurred. Modern medicine gave me the answer in an undistinguished magnetic resonance image. To put it simply, my mind just couldn’t go on with all it had been dealt. It was a phenomenon known as psychogenic death. If you are unaware of psychogenic death, then to put it simply, it is essentially where your mind is pushed to the point of unbearable trauma where the brain shutdowns and you die. It’s commonly known as dying of a broken heart, where a person loses something significant in their life and they succumb to the chemicals that shut down their brain.

The signs were there for months, I just didn’t know what a dying mind looked like physically: slow movement, slow speech, numbness to life, detachment, disassociation, struggling to put one leg in front of the other. And I remember being at work, beyond depressed, looking around wondering if this was the purpose of my life. All for the pressures life had placed on me, the expectations I’d placed on myself, and for the grief I was experiencing because I’d lost a child, something that caused unwarranted guilt to consume me, being an empath and all.

I had my psychogenic death experience in mid-2023. I’ve lived off pockets of energy, had neurodiverse distraction attuned to improved focus thanks to diagnosis, but one sensation that has never left me, is the impression of living on borrowed time since 2023, as if I am the outcome of a favoured clash of antimatter and matter that creates life in the vacuum of space, something potentially not meant to be, and I am just floating, trying to understand my existence. No different maybe to the foetus in the womb, afloat in the dark, unawares to existence.

This psychogenic death experience is how a story of a damaged AA battery was manufactured, breathing life, ironically, into Half’s adventures he seeks with his friend Hope, all from an Electrician (that’s what batteries call us humans) being starved of energy and staving off mental death. This was one experience I will never forget, an experience I hope to not go through again, but share so others can understand the phenomenon.

'Half-life: The AA Battery Adventure' is fast becoming one of the most original and unpredictable success stories — a wildly inventive STEM-infused coming-of-age adventure told through the eyes of two AA batteries on the run. Beneath its playful premise it tackles identity, grief, choice, power, and the universal instinct to survive. It is already being championed by educators as a breakout text for switching kids on to STEM in an emotionally resonant way.

As the author of such a story, the experience overall was a lesson in the purpose and utilisation of energy and the entropy that lurks, defining it in the cataclysm of total mass of energy collapse that marked my half-life.