The Panicked Jumble of Brain Injury Level Confusion

Ever since my first severe concussion over two years ago, I’ve been adjusting. I’ve had to adjust to a plethora of different experiences, emotions, limitations, etc. But the one thing that’s been the hardest to adjust to has, without a doubt, been my slower mental processing. In my brain’s best moments sometimes the delay is hardly even noticed. In the worst moments it’s an absolutely chaotic jumble of information going unprocessed as my mind freezes and goes into ultimate panic mode while my face is so completely blank people become uneasy that I’m staring at them for longer than usually accepted in society. The majority of the time my mental reactions fall somewhere in between these two extremes, but that doesn’t make even the slightest panic moment any less frightening.I’m a visual learner, I always have been. The most effective way for me to study for exams was always to read the important words over and over again or write them down repeatedly where I could see what I had written. I realize this also makes me a kinetic learner in the sense that the action of writing helps me to remember, but most frequently when I’m sitting at my desk taking an exam trying to remember some important detail about the cold war or photosynthesis or whatever, I remember the answer by picturing the way I wrote it on the page or read it in the book. I could tell you what side of the page and where on the page the answer would be found even though I couldn’t tell you how far back in the book you’d have to go to get there. The essential point being, I think in pictures.

Because of this when people ask what my headaches feel like I’ve come up with a multitude of strange and weirdly descriptive situations to describe them, including, but not limited to: my skull being squished by two very large cement blocks compressing against opposite sides of my head, a flaming hot steel arrow being constantly shot through my skull, someone standing over me with a brick in each hand slamming them repeatedly against the top of my head, the tip of a mace rumbling around in my skull like one of those bumble ball toys as it tears my brain to shreds, blah, blah, blah, you get the picture.

However, though the picture describing my brain pain has changed many times and will surely change many more, the scene I visualize in the panic of my new found mental confusion has always remained the same. I see a looming dark grey cloud that blinds my thinking process in a mass of ever spinning swirls that give no hope of finding the way out. When my brain locks up this cloud is what I see. I don’t think of the cloud in the midst of thoughts, but my one and only thought is the cloud; the ever swarming cloud. Similar to how, in a dream when you see someone, even though you never actually see the specifics of their face, you just know that you’re looking at your long lost best friend, or that girl that sits 3 seats to your left in econ every day, when I see the wisps of cloud swarming and tumbling around me I just know that they are the millions of thoughts and connections not being made, but I can never see the details of those thoughts or see which connections are going unmade. My hands start to shake the longer the cloud takes over my brain and I get anxious and frustrated and scared. So scared.

I can honestly say one of the most frightening things I’ve ever experienced is just how blank my mind can go when this confusion takes over. I’ve driven alone through the absolute darkness and chaos of a tornado very shortly after getting my driver’s license, I’ve witnessed someone trying to sneak into our house while I was just on the other side of the door. One of the freakiest things that I’ve lived through, though, were the multiple asthma attacks of varying degrees that have left me dizzy and choking, desperate for air to get through to my lungs.

It’s a different type of scared, absolutely, between the fear of someone or something putting your life at risk, and the internal workings of your body stopping completely. And I will be so bold as to say that the latter is desperately more terrifying. I say this because though, I couldn’t see barely a foot in front of my car as I drove through the tornado, and though I was only around the age of eight when a stranger tried to open the front door to our home, there was something I could do about it. There were choices for me to make and to act on once I had made them. There were steps for me to take to increase the chances of my safety. As I drove I decided to keep pushing forward to get to my destination rather than to pull off of the road into grass I was assuming was there but couldn’t see to be sure. When the door started to open beside me, thankfully, my big brother was with me and I simply said his name before I had even begun to react to it myself and he slammed the door back shut and pulled me down to the basement where he had two of his friends take me into the bathroom and lock the door while he and another friend called the police and prepared to fight back if necessary. My point is: there were ways for me to remain in control of the situation or at least for me to feel more in control.

However, when you are running sprints with your team or simply sitting in a chair in the choir room not even singing and your mind starts spinning and you feel your lungs and throat muscles rasping for breath and you realize that you are choking from lack of air, not because someone is keeping you from breathing, but because something in your body went wrong and there isn’t a single thing you can do about it, but to try to ask for someone to help you, it’s one of the most truly terrifying things in the world. I would say, second only to your mind going absolutely, completely blank when you’re in the middle of talking to someone or doing something. Why? How could that possibly be more terrifying than a lack of oxygen to your body or someone threatening your safety?

Have you ever felt so utterly helpless that you were by every definition trapped inside your brain? So helpless that there weren’t even words coming to mind let alone making enough connections to reach your lips? So helpless that you couldn’t even attempt some silly form of charades to express yourself because you can’t reach the thoughts that need to be expressed? Have you ever felt like your brain was mentally choking on air as if it was aching for thoughts, for connections to form, and they just weren’t forming at all?

Somehow though, in the midst of all of these mental blockades keeping you trapped within yourself, your tear ducts know when you’re scared and they betray you to the watching world. The hardest thing for me to admit throughout this process is that I am not normal. And I used to be one of those “Well nobody is normal just learn to express your individuality” people, too, but bear with me. I have had to admit to myself that I cannot keep up with the people around me like I used to do. I cannot go to school like the rest of the kids in my class are getting to do-or at least have the choice of doing even if they decide not to. I cannot exercise like I used to and like I desperately want to. I am damaged. I am broken. I am faulty. And I am not capable in the ways I used to be. There is more to my “not being normal” than individuality’s sake and my personal quirkiness, though I have plenty of that, too. My “not being normal” came on as quickly as if I was walking down the street and in the blink of an eye someone dropped a brick wall on three sides of me and said “You’re not allowed to walk any further in any of these directions for the rest of your life, enjoy!” I can tell you right now that was hard. I wanted nothing more than to walk in those three directions and every direction in between.

Now, please take a minute and try to understand how raw this post truly is. I have been using my blog as an outlet to express different pieces of my struggle in the hopes that other people with similar issues will read this and know that they aren’t alone in their fight. I hope that people who have never experienced anything like what I’ve gone through can read it and understand even a little better what people like me are going through and to, hopefully, learn to give them sympathy in the areas of their lives affected most by their struggle. But, despite all that, this post has by far exposed more about my personal emotions and tragedies than I’ve ever let slip to the public eye. Only those closest to me have seen me desperate. Only those closest to me have seen my meltdowns. Only those closest to me have witnessed what this injury has really taken out of me. And even they haven’t seen me sob in the shower when life is too much to bear. Even they haven’t heard me cry myself to sleep on nights when I admit to myself how much I’ve lost, how much I’ve changed, how much I will never ever be the same. Only God and I have witnessed that. Only God and I truly understand just how deeply the emotions I have over this run. And even I deny most emotions on the subject nearly all the time. So, really, only God sees how deeply I have struggled and how much it has affected me. And God is the only one with any control in this situation. This injury has made me so utterly dependent on God that I cannot imagine surviving this without him. People get so hung up on how there could be a God with this much devastation in the world, but how could there not be a God seeing as I have been blessed with every single thing and person that I have needed to be able to survive this kind of emotional, physical, and mental blow? One less crucial person in my life or one less opportunity could have so easily been my undoing. So, it is for that reason that I am opening my mind and my heart up to people across the states, and across the globe, so many of whom I have never even met and am already more vulnerable to than I could ever have imagined being. It is on God’s wings that I ride this battle and it is by His grace, His never ending grace that I am making it through.

I am pointing all of this out because I want you to understand that, though I said above I am broken, disabled truly- though I still struggle to even type that word out in correlation to myself as if it’s some omen to curse me even further- I am damaged, broken, faulty. But, and this is so, so important, I know that I am damaged for a purpose, I am broken to be made new, and I am faulty in some areas so that I would turn and become incredible at others. I know that I am going through this because God has desired it so. I know that I am going through this because I could not succeed to my greatest potential if I continued down the path I was going. And I am adjusting, be it slowly, maybe to this new life that God is directing me towards. And even though there is nothing in this world that I have experienced more spine-chilling, tear-inducing, frightful and utterly terrifying than when my mind goes completely blank, I will continue to endure because I know that someone else is experiencing that, too, and they are scared sick, literally scared to nausea, by it like I was and they need someone to comfort them when nobody else can.

To you people reading this that have felt what I have felt and have been scared to your core like I have: I want you to know that it is okay. You are not falling apart. You are not unworthy of a future. And if you scare people away because of what you’re going through like I have, be confident that they were not the people you needed to survive this battle. If you’ve felt the dark cloud’s wrath, the cyclone within your thoughts, causing your mind and muscles to freeze and your tear ducts to open wide, stay resilient. You are a fighter. You are capable of what you’re meant to do. You are able. You are strong. And you are not going to be lost to the tossing waves. You can survive this. And I, for one, love you and your disability very much. Because I know that it will allow you to do amazing, incredible things, you would not have been able to do without it.

Stay strong, fight on.

Sydney.