When I was busy burning out brain cells in New Orleans during the Mardi Gras and elsewhere in the South, I didn't think much about that. A passing nod perhaps, and an intrinsic reaction of horror when I realized that the young woman next to me dropping purple micro-dot was pregnant. "Preggers?!?" I screeched. "You're preggers !!!" I knew nothing about brain damage then. Or traumatic brain injury. I did know about chromosomal breakage. We covered that one in Biology class. But nothing useful about the brain.
Working for many years in the human servitude field, I began to acquire bits of knowledge about t.b.i. I knew generic stuff like, "People with traumatic brain injury make the same mistakes over and over again." And, "The woman at the front desk of the Running Sores office has one of them and she is cheerful."
When I came down with my own t.b.i., generalities and chromosomes did nothing in the area of helping me cope with the realization that I had no sense of who I had been. Even today, as more memories of my past life pre-accident filter back in through the chinks of the walls of broken and unconnected synapses, I cannot describe who I was. More and more however, I can write about the things I did.
But do actions make the human being? That is one for the philosophers and the scientists and forensic shrinks to debate and toss about.
My old self was a mangled puzzle and one day I left it somewheres where it became absorbed into the energies of other displaced selves. The process of acceptance worked its magic on my newest self.Acceptance is not approval. I didn't have to approve of any of it. I just got on with it.
My traumatic brain injury has made me more practical and much less of a mystic. Car broke on the way to vacation. Did I have it towed and just go home? Or rent a car and get on with the vaca that I had looked forward to? I called a logical person and talked my way through my own thoughts about finances and disappointment. I rented the car. If a logical person wasn't available that morning, then I would have told my self that it doesn't matter what I do.
What would my old self have done? I don't know. She is lost in the droves of displaced personalities and I don't much care.
sapphoq healing t.b.i.
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