Always an eerie day
For most the 4th of July typically means a celebration of friends, family, cookouts, and hopefully nice weather. And while I also partake in these activities that accompany the celebration of America’s birthday, the date also marks the anniversary of my sustaining a Traumatic Brain Injury. It’s interesting how the day is not an entirely somber one of grieving. Although many cognitive and physical deficits continue to affect how I live my life on a daily basis, I’ve been blessed with such phenomenal gains in recovery that I honestly don’t find my injury a barrier to living a full life, albeit certainly a different life than I expected.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing I face on any given day is dissatisfaction with my abilities or performance on a given task. And while I acknowledge the TBI’s lasting impact; namely issues with executive functioning and emotion regulation, along with left-sided hemiparesis, I find the most difficult aspect of life as a BI survivor to be something I think is more a human struggle: Making peace with where I’m at while continuing to improve. As I sit here typing 15 years to the day after my car crash, the fact that I’m typing a new blog post leaves me full of gratitude, let alone that I can sit up on my own in a chair. Just the possibility that sharing my experience along this TBI recovery journey can help someone in their own life, or provide even a positive thought, gives me joy!
Now back to why this is an “eerie” day. Along with the many synonyms for eerie offered by MS Word is “unnatural”, which is probably the best descriptor of my emotional state each July 4th. I say this because it’s the day that will most likely have the most impactful effect on every day of the rest of my life, and although I know what happened 15 years ago, I have zero experiential memory of it. It’s as if the period from a few days prior to my injury until August 10th have either been erased from my memory, or were lived by some type of Avatar.
I can hardly believe that it’s been 15 years since the day that I sustained a Diffuse Axonal Injury at 23 years old. I really don’t spend too much time pondering, “What my life would be like had the crash never happened?” It’s not that the natural curiosity to know if things would have happened more in line with my plans isn’t there. Would I have used my economics degree, got a good paying job, and… While that childhood dream of being a professional athlete had been tempered by the reality of my stature and lack of extraordinary talent, like most people I had some pretty big dreams.
The bottom line, and I think a good place to be, is the somewhat conflicted acceptance I seem to find myself in today. Am I happy about all the choices I’ve made and all the things that have happened over my almost 39 years of this life; no, of course not, I’d hardly be human if I were. However, I can honestly say that given the opportunity to step into a parallel universe and a life had I never drove into the woods that night, I’d stay right where I am today: Able to participate in life and hopefully help others.