Musing

 I had a brain injury eleven years ago last month. I've learned not to talk about it, they really are not at all understood. Unless one shows some physical sign of damage, people tend to dismiss the brain injured who can walk and talk. Even doctors don't seem to get it. 

I have realized in the last few years I've always been depressed, but it was so normal, the way I felt, I didn't know it was depression. My brain injury ramped it up, in the couple of years afterward I wasn't functioning well at all. I finally understood I needed help and went on Prozac. The deeply depressed should not be in charge of their depression treatment, but no one can tell them (me) that. The drug stopped working about four years later. I tried a couple of others, I couldn't tolerate the side effects, so I fumbled along for another couple of years. Through a book a friend recommended, written by a local psychiatrist, I found an over-the-counter medication which is a prescription in Europe. It has helped me, I am still often low, but not always. And my lows don't take me to the darkness.

What is a common theme with TBI, from what I experience and read on a brain injury group, is depression and a loss of who you were. There's the loss of balance and memory along with various other symptoms, but the one that seems to cause such a feeling of loss is the loss of self. For those who haven't lived it it's impossible, or so it seems, to understand living in your body, seeing yourself in the mirror, interacting with people...and not feeling like yourself. I'm not me, not the me I was. I work at accepting this, I understand grieving the loss of something which will never return becomes a fools errand. And yet, I and all the many others I know, do it anyway. I don't know how not to. Yes, I know it's not time well spent, but there it is. 

The pandemic has not helped, as it hasn't for so many. Isolation is the last thing someone like me needs, it's too easy to slip into the cocoon of solitude. I have never had many friends and that is more the case now than ever. Two I knew for decades I let go over the past two years. One, a much younger woman, without meaning to was sucking the life out of me and I broke. The other, also younger, went through some life changing events in her life which either changed her or made her more confident in showing something I didn't understand was there. I had to move away from that, as well. Living rural is an easy path to isolation.

Coming back to this abandoned blog strangely gives me some comfort. I have good memories here. It also allows me to say whatever I want, no like button or emojis. Putting my food photos, my animals, my history, it feels better here than on Instagram. For a few minutes I forget about the noise in my head and make something someone may look at and smile. That's pretty good.