When a friend of mine acquired a brain injury and became disabled, I said some bad things. I assured them their years of martial arts had engrained enduring strength; that despite their brain damage, they will always be a fighter.
“Just stop”, they pleaded. “You don’t get it.”
I thought I was cheerleading the meta of who they were, assuring them their identity hadn’t budged. But my denial of their reality was ableist. I tried to give comfort but no spirit I approached it from, worked. It wasn’t about reassurance. Their life was traumatically, irrevocably changed. It was the truth and I didn’t understand.
I couldn’t connect with that specific loss after a significant event. I was ignorant to the psychic death-plane one is forced to reside in as you transit from a past to current self, because it hadn’t happened to me. Yet. Now, I’m in the section of time that doesn’t exist where my friend once was, grieving the personhood everyone knew them as, but is no longer.
I still vividly see their tears when they rhetorically asked, “How deep can denial go?”, after hitting a physical limit that far preceded their mental intent. “Deep,” I replied, not knowing my own shallow version of depth would give way a few years later.
This vestige of me is imprinted on everyone I know. I was always myself for better and definitely worse, but only to the limits of my own self knowledge. I never masked in the way of having to undo other’s’ false beliefs of me. I have nothing to reveal or step into but whoever I was the last 30 years is over.
I fear the rest of my life will be work. Gardening my mental health as others with stable lives walk past the weeds I desperately try to fence in. But it’s not as though life up to this point wasn’t me frantically pruning my anxiety enough to cope day to day, I just didn’t know what I was tending.
Going through the diagnostic process has unearthed too much for my brain to handle. I’m experiencing flashbacks now more than ever. These are places, people, events, snapshots of life my mind and body recorded but never replayed. Imagine 100 TV’s turned on at once, full volume, different channels. This everyday garble follows me into my sleep space. Nightmares of floods and tornados snake around choppy narratives of people who once were moored to my life. Objects or structures are always leaking, breaking, shooting, coming towards me with no control; seeking shelter, avoidance, cleaning, moving and escaping is what my dream character does. I wake up sweating or caught in a gasp, even more tired than when I laid down to rest.
The identity I lost is the person who kept trying to achieve things in the face of constant loss. The person putting in 200% to be met with so much less, personally, professionally and materially. I have no hope like I used to that the next thing I try will be the breakthrough.
If you ever find yourself trying to comfort those having to rearrange themselves from a shattering experience, I offer words of advice unknowingly given to me all those years back:
Just stop.
You don’t get it.