Published by HeadStrong Health
Brain and body, night sky and the dawning day; a mixture of opposites that hold no distinction except in the visibility gained by the extra illumination. Both are just air and pollutants to a blind person. They must learn the clock and keep it because the rest of us can’t bare it if we were to capture two seperate, even opposite things as one thing with two ways to see it and our own need to categorize and save energy makes the two distinct concepts as two separate forms that come to be is careless though helpful. We don’t look fully into what might catch us looking and ask for us to become involved. We’d prefer to make those choices after scouting the situation, so obscuring full awareness keeps chaos compartmentalized and everyone loves organized closets and catacombs. Not everyone can organize a closet or find their way through a maze like a catacomb. I can’t. I took 24 hours to organize one box of files. I took three days to figure out how to put together a three piece vacuum. I’m 98 percentile IQ per estimates premorbid to my brain injury, but after it I’m missing a few points, most of the days I’m missing the whole point, actually. But few people are missing me anymore. I’m disabled. I am excluded. I am compartmentalized.
I joined the mass wake up call one day at age 28 when I woke from hours of unconsciousness in a hectic, filthy emergency room. Five years later I’m excluded from offering the contribution that my capacity once could, would, and was welcomed and invited to do so - I was a freshly graduated law school student and came from real poverty and a traumatic, loving, tearful, affirming, and turbulent childhood that was not a son story to me. I knew I held a leg up on my peers who knew in their hearts the tragic family dynamics and death in my family was not something they’d be prepared to handle. I knew the other side of it. We only got to be middle class because my parents chewed through their ropes with uniquely rare and complimentary gifts - my mom had her heart set on wholesome interests and pursued writing and heard her father’s children’s books he wrote throughout his life after the War, but having no education stopped him from even trying to get an opinion on publishing. The barrier was a fence he’d pass to my mom, who finished college and was told women don’t teach English. She figured it must be true and began social work school in Berkeley. She’d lost her first husband to Leukemia as he finished his last year of law school at Yale; she was not long for the East Coast after meeting my dad in Berkeley and recognizing him from their slummy neighborhoods of New Jersey. She had always thought of others first and never considered herself. She didn’t have low self esteem, she didn’t ever know she mattered enough and what mattered to her was helping people in need. My dad may have been in need once, as I may have looked as a kid just around 12 when he died. But he didn’t impress upon us the reserved of a guy who had much longer to live; “it’s hard to rise up a class, and harder to be accepted into it once you do. People don’t relate and just expect you to adapt so they can feel familiar with you. Our backgrounds aren’t anything you’re familiar with.” My dad was the eleven state expert on psychotic disorders and behavioral abnormal personalities in children (parlance of the times); he’d of made a ton as an expert witness or private practice but when you are a homeless teenager you learn to develop yourself or stay down. He’d read Freud’s entire works before high school and was known for his chemistry labs that often caused flames and neighborhood annoyance. At the fires. Not at the fact a boy was practicing chemistry and psychology on the street. Naturally, the best advice my dad gave that I remember was that recurring discomfort in life needs to be solved as soon as you can. If you let it build it is a stress that compounds in load and someday you may feel despair and helplessly try to drop it but we can’t ever give up the junk in our garage sales very easily so the life and identity stuff are much harder. For example, he was beaten daily by the older kids and robbed and had an occasional home with my mentally ill grandmother who dressed him up as a girl and called him Suzie until he was old enough to put a stop to that before children could know how odd she may have appeared. I remember she sent us boxes of junk, and one had a handgun and I knew how sick she was as my mom snatched it from me and yelled at my dad to get rid of it. I must’ve been 6 or 7, and a few years later he’d get rid of himself with that gun. But he’d never do something like that unless he didn’t have any more to give, or at least his thoughts were of that kind. Actually, he had started a medication that month and we now know these can cause rare cases of suicide early on. I digress. It’s my disability. My roots are important because my brain injury took years to recover independent living skills and that’s not even a sure thing because I have not successfully lived on my own very long. I lived in the residential brain injury rehabilitation programs and was full time every day learning anything from social awareness and feelings (I recall the odd sensation of the water from the bay glistening under the sun and shooting into my head without the normal confusion or agitation. “I am feeling nature’s beauty. I used to love nature. I have been more impaired than I can know and I’m going to work nonstop until I learn how to empathize with others and truly have feelings like I used to, it’s the only way to save my relationship. The girl who saved me. She’s close to gone if I don’t improve in this second year of rehab.” More to follow, but the tenacity and resilience I knew I had I earned as a child. I struggled painfully through what every fiber in me wished to avoid or settle or let delusion persist. My awareness helped the other patients soon, and a few great books helped me with mere groundwork. I still haven’t figured out the rest! By the end of that year I was down to a few hours per day and lived on my own with supposed home health aides nobody told me about. My girlfriend snd my mom checked in and kept me alive. But a couple near misses leaving ovens on and a grocery store walk down the hill that I lost my balance escaping a car on the street vacant of sidewalks but tenants of lose concrete chunks were there to fall and have another little head injury. “You’ll be fine with some rest.” The Doctor at the ED had said. “No. You’re a doctor and you don’t realize I did not want to come here. I was found by my neighbor vomiting through the screen door and my mother had to be woke to come bring me. I’m almost three years into rehab and wrapping up a lot of recovery - I couldn’t tie my shoes when I had my other TBI. You dumbass emergency room doctors can’t read a pamphlet or keep up at all? Falls are the biggest cause of brain injury and the elderly AND the young adolescent to early adult are disabled or killed by brain injury to the tune of hundreds of thousands - maybe more nobody tracks this. 3.3 million are living disabled with it and it is the leading cause of disability for my demographic. Because I’m not hemorrhaging or currently dying on your operating table you assume your patient is fine? So it’s life or death and you recover or don’t with brain injury for you, still, huh? Doctor. Did you ever try reading a book to keep current with your craft? You don’t use leeches here, right?” (Security guard was ushered over as if I was suddenly gonna leap up from my bed and savagely attack a doctor for offering shitty medical advice. No, I was in my early stages of advocating for this cause and outraged every time a professional demonstrated a part of the weakness in identifying and treating people with brain injury. They don’t know, often, and if nobody tells them to at least get checked out or asks relevant medical history then they’re fucked. Later I’d heal more and heed a different approach than my dad’s swift decision and swift action rule: if a bully hits you then punch them in the eye. I don’t care if they’re bigger they will get away with it once or a million times - you decide. That was the case, and my dad had to learn and teach others in the neighborhood about boxing and weightlifting. His name is on the dedicated to page by the author of The Development of Muscular Bulk and Power. I still have a copy. My dad boxed to pay to live through school and worked teaching disturbed youth before earning a ph.D in clinical psychology and once we lived in the west coast we settled here for good in the Clinton era middle class. But he couldn’t relate. He felt excluded and every thing he did took twice the effort for a lifetime that he had nothing to give but the relief of his addictions and the dangerous impact it had on us kids. He was gone for a week before I opened the door one morning to two police officers and let them inside. My mom told me after school and I cried. I then made a joke to my brother. “It’s not funny. This is serious.” “It is both, probably more.” I said. He disagreed and found less of a way to cope and claim the male authority figure role than I. Most frustrating was my mothers lack of ability to have us heal by confronting the reality. This worsened and I was resented for tying to help raise my sister and tell my mom important points about money. Of course she would feed the other kids and not me if she ran out of food. I remember her later saying she’d cry herself to sleep thinking how alone she was with three kids and she couldn’t manage to get more than hotdogs or a sac of dried beans and rice many weeks prior to payday. She earned her teaching credential and reclaimed that dream - her anger at the “you can’t do that, it’s not for you” sentiment must have been astronomical - “now I need to know how to do that or learn this because I’m widowed twice now with three fucking kids.” She missed my offering to help be the swift and decisive guy and later I would pay. After my ED from hitting my head again I soon was moved half time between her house and my girlfriend’s family home in her temporary downstairs conversion. Not the honeymoon we’d imagined - her a recent doctor in occupational therapy and me one nudge from being a lawyer. She stayed and sacrificed with me. She still does. She’s the reason why the distinction of night and day is so relevant. The reason why harmony is all around us but it’s the balancing of the weight each opposite holds that doesn’t come in perfectly equal quantity. Life is brutal and periods of mourning and sadness might last for a long while. But time is your greatest friend just as it’s ticking down on the life you have left to look forward to. It’s awful when we hear an alarm before work, but children on Christmas Day can’t spin it forward fast enough. A vacation goes by so fast and a dental surgery feels like gravity pushes time to a halt. Everything opposite has its own silver lining; not necessarily one that helps or is even relevant to us in this day and age. A girl you just buy a ring after three years apart for grad school and a good four years apart only for undergraduate school three years prior, the two of you felt it was the mature thing to do as 8th grade through high school the love of your life was growing up with you and knew you more than anyone. She hurt and was tempted to leave. But she stayed. It took a while to rekindle more than the pretense of a relationship after her caretaker role and her trauma seeing me totally gone and behaving like a five year old has stuck with her. We just celebrated 21 years together though. We just finished a year living together and being normal partners as best as we can. I need to move more in my way to get hired somewhere but progress is around and lightning will strike. The people who conpartsnentalized us; the friends who never even asked how we were doing. The ones who couldn’t be around me because it was a downer to see me so disabled and down. I’m sorry to all you guys for burdening you with my disability; I’m sorry to walk in and remind you that the future is uncertain and you didn’t have the chance to practice hardship or find your resilience. You don’t know it yet, whether you’ll stay or leave your partner. You don’t know if you’ll persevere without support and sacrifice everything. You will be glad to have people like us to get some insight and wisdom later on in life when you step in shit. I’ll be here. We’re gonna be around. We already know helping others is the goal and tending to ourselves is a necessity but a luxury we deserve in whatever form it comes. The break is what’s important. Some of us never were off break and those, I find, are the ones who categorize the disabled out of the realm of possibility for themselves and figure they’d overcome - but meanwhile they can’t overcome the fear it might be a potential in life! Let’s all clear the air and speak now so others can listen and speak back. I bet the distinction amongst us all fades quite rapidly.
A California native and an active and engaged guy who isn’t all that difficult to understand but pretty simple to miss the importance of it. I help the disabled and I coach and guide people emerging from catastrophic injury or illness rediscover their lives and realize their dream again. I’m an advocate and defender of discrimination as it so often picks this population apart. I advocate for policy abs legislative matters that keep the disabled at the very least further below how they are constantly campaigned to be stomped down in further.
remains active and interested in many corners of life. In November of 2015, Sean suffered a moderate traumatic brain injury from a fall; his life since has been solely devoted to the topic of this blog - TBI and other forms of acquired brain injury. With his passions and life as he imagined it to be on an indeterminate hold during his rehabilitation and recovery, he began this blog and a TBI health advocacy group. Through uniform rules of professional responsibility and ethics, he hopes the health advocate profession may be an affordable adjunct to the team needed by every brain injured person and those caring for them. He hopes that this blog will continue educating and supporting survivors of brain injury, their caregivers, and anyone interested in this devastating medical sojourn, alongside the discovery of a new self and a meaningful life outside the treatment environment.
Sean is active in supporting mental health and suicide crisis support, various manifestations of trauma in children and adults, and is a Doctor of Law with a focus on health and science law. He is also an athlete, poet, writer, and nature enthusiast.
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