The Gift of Time: What I’ve Learned in Recovery

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As I move through my fifteenth year as a brain injury survivor, I find myself increasingly grateful for the passage of time. I know things today—things that I was blissfully unaware of during my early years as a brain injury survivor. There is an inherent value to lessons learned by living them. For me, they seem to “stick” more than anything I read in books or online.

Today, I know that recovery from what the uninjured experience without consequence can take me, as someone in lifelong recovery, a bit of time. We have just moved through another holiday season. For most people, it’s a time for families to spend time together, perhaps a shared meal. But for those of us within the brain injury community, it can be a time of added stress. Even with the benefit of long-term experience and recovery, conversations can still leave me exhausted.

As family gatherings are called just that, it’s only natural to be in the company of many people sharing and conversing at the same time. I sometimes have a challenge following a single conversation. Add to this multiple ongoing, concurrent, and varied conversations at once, and the effect can be akin to cognitive shutdown.

For the first few years post-injury, I knew none of this. In what amounts to a TBI oddity, I have close to no recollection of the year 2011, with only scant memories of 2012. Brain injury truth is indeed stranger than fiction!

But this past holiday season, I knew what to expect. I did my best to conserve cognitive resources, did a smidge better at honoring my limitations, and allowed myself to have fun. The key difference was that I knew it would take me time to recover. I can add a bit of a wildcard to this. I’ve also learned that recovery after pushing myself too hard is an unpredictable beast. It might take me a few days to get back to my baseline, but then again, it might take a couple of weeks. There is an immense amount of freedom in knowing this. I no longer second-guess myself post-holidays. I get what I get in terms of recovery.

Thankfully, I bounced back quickly this year. Was this because my recovery continues? Or is it because I am living more mindfully of my limits? Though I will never be able to say for certain, I suspect it’s a bit of both, and in this moment, I am okay with that.

And again, I find myself pondering that saying I heard early on in my journey—the one that says brain injury recovery is lifelong. For the first decade, unmissable milestones flew by. I learned to speak again. I was able to ever-so-slowly get back to work. I stayed working long enough to begin my retirement journey. My ability to read came back after a few years, something I remain profoundly grateful for.

But somewhere around a decade out, those milestones seemed to slow down and eventually stopped. What didn’t stop, however, was the accumulation of knowledge. And that increasing knowledge base means a better quality of life. A rising tide lifts all ships. When life gets better for me, it also does for my wife, Sarah. Those who love me see me struggle less, and their anxiety eases. So in its truest sense, the very act of continued learning and being able to convert that knowledge into management skills is also recovery.

Just last week, Sarah shared something that completely and utterly blew me away. “Your memory is better than it’s been in years,” she said in passing one day. My jaw visibly dropped. Those who know Sarah know that she is an overt speaker of the truth. She’s not a coddler, and I’ve come to depend on her perspective over the years. But getting better? My memory? Whoever would have thought that possible?

As I move mindfully and with as much grace as I can through year fifteen, I can look back on how much life has gotten better over time. This takes away my anxiety for the future. For a sixty-three-year-old brain-damaged guy, I seem to have found my way. And seen in this light, how can I not be grateful?