Hi personfriend,
before you get into this story, I want to tell you the end. The end is: keep going. It’s worth it. You’re worth it. I promise, healing is possible and in all likelihood, it’s already happening even if all you’re aware of is the hurt. The end of this story is that this story wasn’t the end. So if you need a story that reminds you that this isn’t the end, this one is for you. I love you.
CW: Complex Trauma, Suicide
It’s been just over a year since the car accident that changed my life.
So right about now is when I thought I’d be planning to die.
I didn’t tell anyone, but about a month into my brain injury, I made a deal with myself that I only had to make it through a year and set everyone up for success, and then I didn’t have to be alive anymore if I didn’t want to.
I knew better than to tell anyone. I said “It’s bad.” And “I’m scared,” and “I think there is no point in living but I also think that injured brains have unreliable thoughts.” But the only way I could deal with the all-consuming void of my injury, which was itself at the end of 2 years of chaos, was to promise that I would allow myself anything I needed, once I’d recovered enough to take care of anyone else.
A quick summary of the 2 years before the car crash. (TL;DR telenovela writers would have rejected this script for being too unreasonably dramatic, redundant even).
My uncle died. My dad entered a long and dramatic end-of-life and then he died. People were, in general, incredibly shitty to me about his death. I got disowned. I had a surgery that was very badly botched but I spent six months being gaslit by the surgeon about my results. Then, I realized my husband was an abusing alcohol (and you can guess how shitty things had to be for that to happen) and I had to kick him out for him to choose to get help. While dealing with that, I had a cancer-scare (like a very scary, family-history-related one), had to extricate myself from an abusive academic program after fighting all semester for student rights, and a very close family member suicided. Another close person was abandoned by their abusive spouse, my profession lost it’s credibility (to me) and I had to figure out what to do with it. Some friend shit got weird, I was left out of a Big Life Event due to homophobia, and we were almost a year into the US experience of covid, during which I was an essential worker/healthcare provider. I dated some people who were EXTRAORDINARILY bad at doing their own emotional and intellectual labor, got dumped via text, and my hair started falling out.
And yet, in all this, I felt strong. I felt proud. I took every hit with a “Fuck you, you won’t take me down,” attitude. I honestly did so, so many good things. What didn’t kill me didn’t make me stronger, but I did. I had never had better boundaries or a clearer sense of who I was, where I was going, or how I’d get there. I believed every problem was either solvable (in which case I’d solve it) or survivable.
Then, one Sunday afternoon I chose to take myself to get a treat, and a woman whose brakes went out ran into my car without ever having slowed down.
The car was fixed in 2 days. I wasn’t seen by a doctor (other than the ER) for over a month.
I had thought, previously, that I’d lost everything I could possibly lose. I’m not exaggerating when I say I’d clawed my way out of several hells. I felt, in certain ways, invincible because all The Worst Things people can imagine, I’d dealt with. What I’d forgotten to take into account was that while I’d been snatched away from myself many times and come back, I’d also since built myself into more. I was more me than ever. Which meant I had more to lose.
I can’t make any statements about if things could be worse in some distant future. I don’t want to think about it. Forgive my deficits but there are still many things I handle by putting them on a shelf to be slowly and methodically exposed during future therapy. Some day, I will process all the parts of this pain. But I won’t demand that I do that any faster than my eldest-daughter tendencies already demand.
Here is what I can tell you about that time. The dark time. I can tell you that I was fierce and impressive. Every doctor I saw commented on how hard I was working, how much I was doing, and one even said, “It is unjust that in this much distress, you have to be the strongest you’ve ever been. But that is the only way people heal from what you’re going through. The people who don’t get their abilities back are the ones who don’t have this fight in them.”
I was a championship fighter, but I can also tell you, I wasn’t fighting for me.
Very early on, I had an overwhelming calm thinking of not being alive anymore. I wasn’t desperate to hurt myself. I was just sure that if I stayed in the condition I was, I was not willing to participate.
I also had the overwhelming knowledge of my professional training and personal experience screaming at me, saying “INJURED BRAINS DON’T MAKE RELIABLE DECISIONS.” So I didn’t make a decision, I made a plan. My plan was: ensure that everyone will be taken care of if I’m not around. And once that is done, re-evaluate.
So I fought, tooth-and-nail, for everyone else, knowing that once I made all the plans and arrangements, I could figure out a way to go that wasn’t unduly traumatic for the people in my life. There’s not a person who knows me, who really knows me, who doubts I could have done it. I’m not going to discuss how I imagined it, I just told myself, “Make the resources. Get the will. Prepare an emergency plan for people to follow so that clients are not left without a helper. Do everything you can, absolutely everything, to try and avoid this end. And once you’ve done your best, if you still want it, you can have it.”
Most days, for almost 8 months, I had this thought quietly in the back of my mind. “I have to do X because Y will happen if I’m not around, and it needs to be planned for.” And everything that would make my people set up for success in my absence, also happened to help secure my presence.
I’m not that deep. I didn’t mean for to trick myself into healing-hyperdrive. It’s just that in the deepest darkest trenches, I was full of compassionate thoughts for others. I knew didn’t want anyone to go through an ounce of what I was. And they were. No one was okay. No one is okay. Everyone in my life is a scraggly ragamuffin doing their best and looking worse for wear. I thought, “A very lot of people will be in a very lot of pain if I don’t get better, do better, and keep getting up..”
So I did. When I had no hope, I had an iron will of “I will not make this worse on others.” I was so. goddman. determined. It was exhausting. I was not gentle on myself, I was constantly, quietly plotting. I would ironically have healed better, faster, if I were gentler but I didn’t have the ability to be gentle and keep going. I was noticing every area where relationships could be better. Patching up every hole I had access to. I had family meetings, demanded that people say what they need and that others take those needs seriously. I saw clients for months in a dark room, wearing dark sunglasses and a migraine ice-packet-hat. I broke the vow to never stay in a situation where I had to beg, and I begged for my humanity to be seen by drs and lawyers and relatives. I begged for them to give me a chance to not devastate my loved ones. I took advantage of every available resources and made accessible every resource I had available for others, and I made an estate plan for all the of the people it’s my role to do that for.
And then, on my birthday, the sun was shining and I was able to be outside in it. My injury took away the sunshine for eight months, but I persisted. So on this day, I’d had a cupcake that didn’t make me sick, and I was able to be in the water, and the sun also didn’t make me sick and I was with my soul twin and my goddaughter and my now-sober and back-home and better-than-ever husband about whom I was no longer worried. And I looked up and I said, “I think this might be the best day of my life. Because I don’t want to be doing anything other than exactly what I am doing.”
And that’s when I knew I’d get better.
To be honest, I know not everyone does. And I know I might not get back all the abilities I had pre-injury. I know I’ll never again be who I was before I lost the ability to trust my own brain or feel at home in my body in such a devastating, swift way. I’ll never be a person who didn’t go through this.
But I know I’m someone I love, and someone who others love and need in the best, most community-oriented ways. I know that I’ll never be grateful this happened, but I also won’t let the violence of it happening keep me from doggedly sucking the marrow out of every moment of life. I know that when “everything” was stripped away, I was still someone I’m proud of and impressed by. I know that my ego is half-dead and I am not interested in reviving it, but that my confidence is newly-forged, on a higher plane and deeper-rooted and I did that. I did it with help, but I did it on my own plan, and I did it on purpose, even if I didn’t do it for me at first.
I know that no one is made better by me getting stuck in the what-ifs. I can answer them. If it had been worse, or longer, or I’d had less help or less fortitude, I’d be dead. I can look that straight in the eye and say, “Yes, that is a reality that could have been mine, but it isn’t, and I will insist on living in and getting everything I can out of the reality that I have.”
I know that I learned several new things while suffering from neuro-cognitive deficits and that while suffering from a burnout so severe that I went completely non-verbal and had to wear my sunglasses at night, I auditioned for and made it into the dance troupe of my dreams. I know that while in a personal shit-show, when people WOULD. NOT. STOP. DYING, I threw a fit until all the stubborn asses in my life put aside their pride and reconnected with each other and everyone got back in therapy and started taking care of each other. I literally yelled “I WILL NOT GO TO ANOTHER FUNERAL AND DEAL WITH THIS BULLSHIT. GET IN THE CAR WE ARE GOING TO YOUR MOTHER’S AND FIXING THIS BEFORE SOMEONE ELSE DROPS DEAD!” I have thrown, conservatively, all of the fits. I have cried in ALL of the places. I have stuttered and stumbled and gotten stuck in a language I thought I couldn’t speak (brains are so werid). And in my worst moments I was purposeful and fallible, limited and loved, stretched and stressed and still shining even when I couldn’t see.
After having not been sure about anything, and even so newly on this side of the journey, the I-want-to-be-alive side (and not the “I will stay alive so others don’t suffer” side), I feel like a siren and a superstar and a shitty athlete who will need Texas-sized patience to regain whatever strength I can… and will give myself that patience.
I think I’m as committed to me, now, as I was to everyone else a year ago. And with all I did for them, I know I’ll bloom as I continue to do the same for me.
I’m not well but I’m better. I’m not back but I’m moving along. I’m not who I was but I’m who I’m glad to be.
I think that’s not a story, or a part of the story, we often get to hear from the messy middles. Well I couldn’t be a bigger mess but I also couldn’t be more sure that’s okay. So there ya go.
I love you and I love you and…. I know I needed to say this so I hope it is exactly what you needed to read.
Xx,
May-never-again-remember-anyone’s-birthday Tia.