What is one word that describes you?
One word to describe me? That’s a toughie. How can you use one word to describe a person, after brain injury, which makes your future unrecognizable and changes you and changes you again and again and again?
Does the core you vanish under the onslaught of damage? Or is it still there, blocked from expression by damaged neurons between you and the outside world?
I think the reactions of people — family, friends, colleagues, groups, and especially health care professionals clinging to 20th century ways and views of concussion — change the core you more than any brain injury. They can support, advocate, and encourage healing and so restore you. Or, too often, they prefer to call injury malingering, neurostimulation treatments not getting on with your life or bogus, and isolate you while claiming you don’t accept their help or you’re toxic or depressed or whatever pejorative gives them an out and is accepted by others as truth.
It’s kind of like seeing an infant’s core self on vivid display, then watching the infant’s innate traits transform into an opposite trait or, like a slowly reversing mouse, vanish into the depths of their soul. How their parents (don’t) respond to their needs changes their neuronal connections.
We harm each other out of fear, avoidance of reality, wanting others to be like us, wanting to fit in with the dominant group and their paternalistic judgement of those not like them — more than any brain injury does.
I don’t know what one word describes me. I’m going to go have a cookie now.
