Brain Reflections
The scared, severed, damaged parts of my brain exist outside yet alongside what it was before the accident and head injury. The before when it was whole, an integrated functioning part of the rest of the brain but it doesn’t see itself as the separate before part. It exists within the framework of the brain’s normal function. It is still there and also not there. Not anymore. I have seen and wandered through those scared canyons scattered haphazardly throughout the landscape of healthy tissue. Healthy tissue that is seemingly untouched, physically but due to the innumerable violent assaults and jarring of the soft brain against the jagged, bony interior wall structure of the skull nothing in my head escaped injury. Either through severed pathways, ripped membranes, the dying and dead sections and the trapped memories of the event. Was there anything that was untouched? Is anything as it was before? I don’t think so. I have for the first time, now that I write this, realised that the whole of my brain experienced the trauma and injury, damage, the death of the many sections of it. It knows, I know. Nothing is untouched, not felt, not intimately aware and involved in any injury to the body. When a finger is cut every part of the body knows and reacts as signals are sent to the brain which sends the appropriate rescue team to the site. Every part is connected. As everything in life is connected to one another down to the grain of sand and the air we breathe.
Many times I have walked through the remains of the shredded, mangled corridors of my injured brain and mind. Brain as the whole and the mind, the awareness, spirit/soul the ethereal awareness. I wandered dazed by what I saw and I touched and spoke gentle words to the battered pieces around me and I cried. I grieved for all that was lost, in pain. I grieved for the loss of me even though I wasn’t aware then of the extent of my injuries. I don’t nor does anyone else know. I saw disconnected pathways, vital links that were savagely severed and I wondered. What functions had been destroyed and altered to maybe re-connect and perform in new ways that I was yet to discover or understand.
Gradually and sometimes not at all I, my family and doctors recognised some of the changes of how I functioned and more, much more relevant, how I didn’t function. This was very difficult for me to acknowledge and I don’t know that I have fully accepted it because to do so makes it real and permanent and I know that I had lost too much of who and what I was so I didn’t want to make it real. I want it to all go away so that I can be the ”normal” me again.
I changed:
- Cognitively
- Creatively
- Experience/d Brain Malfunctions
- Brain Misfirings
- Mysterious, Unexplainabl e and Frightening Brain Episodes
- Episodes of Blackness
- Death/Life/Bewilderment of where I fit into life again
- Being out of step with myself and everything around me
- Walking down the street, in a supermarket, on a bus, wherever I might be and feeling people’s tiny inner unexpressed and often not even recognised kernel of distress, pain and disillusionment of life.
- Immensely and overwhelmingly feeling the world/earth’s pain, tragedy and sorrow of what man in the guise of benevolence, the corporate sector, governments of the world and that handful of people who seem to revel in the destructive power and control they have over us, has done to it indiscriminately and savagely with no regard to what they are leaving behind for our children and all future generations. Their greed is evil. I often wonder – do they live in a cocoon, do they not have families, children who will reap the sad legacy left behind.
- And then, the amazing and extraordinary creative gift that was given to me.
