Uncomfortable Conversations & Other Realities of Brain Injury

Later this year, I'll be marking the 13th anniversary of the accident that forever changed our lives. It has been long enough that I've moved past the shattering grief and complete loss of self that comes with the early years of riding the brain injury bus.??

Mourning the loss of someone I can't even remotely remember is hard. Oddly enough, this no longer bothers me most of the time, except for a freaky experience just last weekend.?

Let me share more...?

Being an adrenaline junkie my entire life, I even jumped out of a perfectly good airplane at 12,000 feet last year—and lived to tell about it. In my pre-injury life, I was an avid SCUBA diver ,loving the feeling of strapping compressed air on my back and delving deep into the ocean's depths. I've had incredible experiences like shipwreck dives, swimming with sea turtles in Hawaii, and exploring the ruins of 19th-century schooners in Bermuda. It was an amazing life until the brain injury altered everything.?

Last week, I unexpectedly ran into my old dive buddy after over 15 years. We exchanged a few minutes of conversation, wished each other well, and went our separate ways. For the next hour or so, I tried to recall any memories of our diving adventures together. Almost none surfaced, and I had a moment of horrific clarity: those memories from that chapter of my life were erased. It's as if they never happened—a giant portion of my identity just gone.??

Without that encounter, I would have remained unaware of what was missing, much like a fish unaware of the water it swims in.?

Over the next few days, I made an effort to recollect other moments from my pre-injury life.

Memories I should have cherished proved elusive, leaving me in a state of shock and awe. Raising four sons as a single dad for many years, I attempted to recall the bustling household filled with children. Sadly, my success in retrieving those memories was not noteworthy. I'm still trying to process the profound loss of significant parts of my life.?

Sarah asked me if it bothered me, and it became even more complicated. My answer was both yes and no.?

Yes, because the thought of losing so much of my life is unsettling. To realize it has been gone for over a decade, and I NEVER EVEN NOTICED, is even more unbelievable.?

And no, it doesn't bother me because these days, despite a significant disability, I'm a relatively content person. I have a small circle of friends who accept and love me as I am. I am fortunate to work on something I genuinely love, with a sense of true purpose—sharing my experience to help others. While I still face substantial challenges, I've reached a point of acceptance after many years of struggle.

Now, let's discuss uncomfortable conversations.?

A cherished friend invited Sarah and me to dinner—a situation that, in my "old life," would have been a no-brainer. However, things are no longer the same. I've become adept at hiding my struggles from those outside my inner circle. Many people who know me now have no idea about my backstory, and I'm comfortable with that.??

So, regarding the dinner invitation, it would have meant a couple of uninterrupted hours of conversation. Conversations remain a challenge for me to this day. The biggest hurdle is how exhausting they are. Just last week, I had a 90-minute meeting with a colleague—no exaggeration—I was down for the count and felt out of it for two full days.??

This particular conversation was unavoidable as we will be co-presenting at a conference later this year. My colleague is also a friend and a fellow brain injury survivor. However, that's only half of the conversational challenges I face.?

"How so?" asked the guy in the fourth row of my mind.?

Here's where it gets doubly difficult. I grapple with significant memory problems, and I mean significant. With a poor short-term memory, I often forget what I've already said. So, I end up repeating myself, sometimes even three or four times, just to be sure.??

While I manage short conversations relatively well, anything longer exposes the extent of my brokenness to others. Frankly, it's embarrassing. There's a bit of pride and ego involved, but nobody enjoys feeling embarrassed. Knowing that a couple of hours of intimate conversation would leave me struggling like a fish out of water for days, coupled with the fear of making a fool of myself, I decided to decline the dinner invitation.?

It saddened me and didn't please me at all to be a brain injury survivor. But over the years, I've learned to identify the things that can negatively impact me, and when possible, I avoid them.

It took a couple of days to gather the courage to explain this to my friend, but I eventually did. Yet, I still feel embarrassed—indeed, I still am.?

If you've read this far, you might be nodding and saying, "Yeah, me too."?

And if that's the case, simply making you feel less alone in your struggles gives purpose to mine.?

At least that's what I'd like to think.

?

~D