Trauma is a fact of life. It literally changes our bodies and brains. Yet, traumatic and acquired brain injury are particularly difficult to navigate for survivors, caregivers, and most everyone else. Fortunately, just as trauma victims have new hope and advancing medical understanding to help reclaim their lives, so too is the field of brain injury research – and the examples of patients like us – now exposing the tremendous power of our own capability to hurt and to heal.

To educate or see brain injury can never do justice, will never truly inform demonstrably to an outsider, just how painful and wonderfully weird the experience of survivors exists in their innermost feelings, behaviors, thoughts, and on the impact on our very own personalities, identities, and the complications that grow with our closest of friends and relationships. Perhaps most precious of all is the loss of life’s most precious commodity – memory.

Join me as I tell my tale, or share stories, resources, and invite discussion. Feel free to write or express that misunderstood part of you that comes with brain injury. If we all share, we cease to share in silence. Let us work to inspire, document, and assist patients, families, friends and others enduring the same or similar struggles.