| By Lauren Taglienti |
How to survive a TBI:
You might not want to at times.
When you wake up and have no familiarity with the language you spoke yesterday and not a thought in your mind, you'll feel like your life is over, your dreams of becoming a writer unfathomable, traveling farther and farther from you faster than the tennis ball that did this to you. Yes, a tennis ball ruined your life. A tennis ball. Struck you in the soft spot of your skull and then suddenly the floor below you became the walls around you as you struggled to find your footing, upon which was solid concrete minutes ago but has now distilled into its liquid form. You fall.
If you feel like you can't do something like walk, you're right.
As time passes:
when all you can do is feel emotions without the thoughts to process them, you'll feel
hopeless.
you won't be able to read, so don't even bother keeping this list around.
you will hate your brain and your body for requiring someone else's help to do
everyday tasks that you used to be able to do alone.
you hate change and the living delta you've become.
you will want to shake off the flesh prison of a mortal coil at some points.
you will hit your head again. It will be terrifying.
your head will collide with the following:
Shelves, plural
The top of the car as you enter it
The freezer door as it swings unabashedly over your head while you grab a snack from the fridge
The ceiling above a stairwell, even though you're incredibly short
Cabinet doors, plural
Literally anything, as though your skull gravitates toward objects, like a planet gone rogue headed straight for the fires of the Sun that will obliterate it.
you will eventually recover, after several years of rehabilitating your body and mind,
albeit not entirely:
you will still poke your face with a straw several times before you get it into your
mouth because your aim is off.
you will still spill drinks on yourself when you miss your mouth even though you
think you're about to drink from them.
you will still have a slight lazy eye.
you will still not be able to smell things unless they are incredibly pungent and you
take a massive sniff of them.
you will still not be able to audibly process what people say, have to lip read, and
ask people to repeat themselves frequently.
you will still be obnoxiously loud because you forget other people can hear more
easily than you.
you will still be the clumsy blonde who everyone thinks is unintelligent because
you make fun of yourself and never take yourself too seriously because even you
can see the comedy of your situation and the caricature you've become, even
though you were actually Valedictorian of your college because you wouldn't let
the people who said you would never be able to accomplish anything be right.
you still let others laugh at you or with you and don't care which, as long as you
make them feel something. You don't care what they think of you because you
couldn't think for a long time.
you grow to love who you've become and try to take care of your brain, body, and
spirit as best you can because tomorrow isn't guaranteed. You embrace the
several cliches in that statement.
you will never enjoy the feeling of being very drunk or slightly high because it feels
eerily similar to trying to walk with a TBI. You never want to feel that way again. But
you might, and from another blow to the head at that. You don't know. You can't
predict the future. And you just have to accept that.
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