My Story

From the outside, it probably looked like my mind had gone blank.

I couldn’t speak. My hands were shaking. If I could manage to write, I would scratch out a few simple words, trying to communicate whatever pieces I could catch.

But my mind wasn’t blank.

It was deafening.

Thoughts were rushing through so quickly that I couldn’t hold onto one long enough to turn it into words. I knew what I wanted to say. Somewhere in all that noise, the words existed. I just couldn’t get them out.

Then I’d get frustrated because I couldn’t speak.

More noise.

I’d get angry at my shaking hands because even writing wasn’t working the way I needed it to.

More noise.

The harder I tried to force my brain to cooperate, the louder everything seemed to become.

Before 2012, this wasn’t how my brain worked.

Then I had a traumatic brain injury.

That’s a very short sentence for something that changed so much of my life.

For a long time afterward, I thought the answer was to fight my way back to the person I’d been before. I kept trying to make my brain work the old way.

Eventually, I learned something that would change the way I approached my disability, and my life:

I Kept Trying to Be Who I Was Before

I didn’t need to find my way back to my old brain. I needed to learn how to live with the one I had now.

For a long time, I tried to force myself to handle things “better.”

What I really meant was the way I used to.

I thought if I tried harder, pushed harder, concentrated harder, I could make my brain respond the way it had before the injury.

Eventually, I realized I was asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking, How do I make my brain do this the old way? I needed to start asking:

How does my brain need to do this now?

That distinction changed a lot for me.

When something stressful happens now and I feel my brain beginning to lock up, I don’t immediately fight it. I step back. I breathe. I recognize that my brain is trying to sort through an enormous amount of information and find a solution.

I give it time.

Then I start piecing things together.

Strangely enough, I think I handle some stressful situations better now than I did before my TBI. Not because the problem disappeared, but because I finally learned how to work with my brain instead of constantly fighting against it.

My Physical Therapist Prescribed Overwatch

Yes. Really.

During physical therapy, I told my therapist that I enjoyed playing Overwatch. She essentially gave me a “prescription” to keep playing.

Overwatch requires hand-eye coordination, constant visual processing, and rapid decision-making. For me, there is something about that combination that seems to settle my brain and help me think more clearly.

I also developed neurological tics after my TBI, and I’ve noticed that gaming sometimes seems to help when those are happening, too.

I’m not saying Overwatch is a treatment for traumatic brain injuries or neurological tics. I’m saying that, for my brain, something I already enjoyed became one of the unexpected things that sometimes helps it.

That’s been an important lesson in itself.

The things that help you function don’t always look the way you expect them to.

So I Label Everything

Memory has been another challenge.

My refrigerator can probably testify.

When I buy food, I label it. I write down when I bought it. I mark the expiration date. When I open something, I write down the date I opened it. If the package says it’s good for a certain number of days after opening, I’ll write that down, too.

It might look excessive to someone else.

It works for me.