How I Used Writing As Healing Motivation After My Brain Injury

I never understood how people could start to define themselves due to one account of their life, or how one word could describe them. Maybe because I feel that I am a collection of everything I even learned, experienced, loved, and because I will be everything I discover moving forward from this point on. However, I can take moments from my life, dates to be specific, and connect the dots to see how they shaped me.

March 13, 2012 is one of those days that will always put an enormous amount of weight on me as much as I shed pound by pound by. And to be clear, by no means am I waiting for the mass of that day to lower me any more than the ground we stand on every day only because I am too busy trying to keep my feet off this earth.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with my story, here it is.

Three years I suffered a traumatic brain injury on the side of my temporal lobe. In the process, I fractured my skull, resulting the bone to break in and push my brain of its normal resting position. Immediately, this caused hemorrhaging in my brain. When I was in the critical condition room in the hospital, it was determined that accident lead to the lost of language or the term the doctors referred to as “expressive aphasia”. My thoughts were the same, but every time I tried to speak words, or write them, they never came out.

Early in the process, there was no timetable of when I would speak. It wasn’t until three weeks of being in the hospital that the doctors were hopeful that I would be able to speak or acquire vocabulary twelve to eighteen months in. Those words for my family at the time was probably a way of the doctors instilling hope in them, but hope for me was a stage I skipped. Hope is another way of saying we are wishing and desiring something.

I made my destiny a long time ago when I found writing to be more than words on a paper, but an extension of who I always been. I spent a month in the hospital thinking about my reunion with this relationship with words. Just as my family and friends served as a motivation tool to get healthy, writing was a huge part of the healing process. Still to this day, I feel that moment in many ways. From ringing ears and headaches, to shooting pains to parts of body, numbness in my hands and feet, and seizures, I realize it’s something I need to deal with and admit that it’s part of me, but it’s one letter in the long definition of who I am.

And every day, I am defining and shaping myself towards forward, never backwards.