Mother told me that a few Dartmouth researchers we know were impressed by how I handled the material last term. (It’s a small New England town.) They said the average person would have found the work extraordinarily challenging. While I am not average in many ways, I suppose that I am extraordinary enough to be smart enough to have done well enough. It’s a compliment, but my overachiever self thinks that this is the underachiever’s nightmare. I am happy with my hard work until I hear that I am so smart because then I feel like I should have done so much better. I wonder exactly where does all that brilliance go but then I remember—Right. Oh right. That’s right. Right into managing this disorganized mess of a mind so there is not much left over for brilliant prose.

But when I said so, Mother said that I must live through the nightmare to see the dawn. Then Alex said that it was a good metaphor. I grumble because they’re right but I suppose that’s what family is for. Even though there is still a very real reality I manage every day, there is also a very real history of continuous improvement. I’ve recently crossed a threshold, proven a thing or two, and now a new path stretches before me. I am venturing into new territory, practicing new skills.

But it’s not really new. I remember the last time I was here. I was sixteen.

Let me tell you a story about how I continuously tell the same story, the tale of my life for the past twelve years, and how twelve years later I am so done with people continuously telling me that I am too wrapped up in this story, as if my injury were like that of a broken wrist and with proper care I could regain almost if not full function. But no, I say. No, it’s not like that. Imagine having your wrist unable to turn a certain way. Imagine having to wrap your life around your injured carpals. Imagine your hand slower, your fine dexterity subtracted for the rest of your life. Certain items are harder to hold. Certain tasks are harder to complete. You are lucky to still have your hand, but life is just, simply, different.

I’m smart. I’m capable. I have my life before me. When people say that I am amazing to have overcome the obstacles thrown across my path, I have to agree. But the truth is that this is something that I will never fully overcome. I have so many tools and so much support, but when I wake every morning, my mind still feels heavy, slower, unable to play with the vocabulary I reviewed the night before. This is my life. I am destined for mental lethargy.

So when people say that I shouldn’t be so focused on my disability, I want to scream. I want to cry. I am continuously faced with those who don’t understand all the work I perform to appear just somewhat spacey. Every day is a process to manage my mind. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have much of any.

I’ve told this story before. I’ve told it again and again. But let me confess this for the first time: People telling me that I’m still so smart and capable move me to misery. This is my life after severe brain trauma. Imagine how smart and capable I was before.

And I live with this knowledge every single day.

It’s Week Three of the Tuesday Three Hours Of Section And Lecture, and if you’re anything like me, you forget to take your Adderall in the morning and the ADD kicks in around Hour Two (and you know it’s really TBI but they have the same number of letters so they’re almost the same thing). You stop taking notes because it’s far too much to keep up with the lecture and presentation and diverting student questions all at once, but you’ll review the slides tomorrow and you’ve done Parkinson’s before, so it’s no big deal if you have to freshen up on the Molecular Pathway Of The Week later on Boylston with cocoa and cream.

Right now a word has caught your attention. It’s not a hybrid like some others, like neuroscience, neurotransmitter, or dysfunction. No, it’s a word made from only Greek roots, like those you’ve learned when you were a child, like dinosaur, haploid, or metamorphosis. You’ve seen it before (because you’ve done Parkinson’s before) but you wonder if you really know bradykinesia, like, really, know its origin and evolution. You’ve done Latin and Greek so you know that brady- comes from βραδὺ and -kinesia derives from -kinesis, which is from κίνησις. Put together, bradykinesia roughly translates to slow movement (like a Largo but not really) and since bradykinesia is a condition where one is slow to start moving, it all makes perfect sense.

But then you remember the Largo in your hands and the ritardandos are grave as they slip from your fingers and you wonder if the Latin is related to the Greek because the Latins are known to borrow liberally from the Hellenics (or maybe Virgil was just the most annoying about it). You are Jack’s complete lack of surprise when you learn that largo is Italian meaning broad and that it comes from the Latin largō, which could be the dative singular or ablative plural of largus, which means large. (You are also Jack’s ego-affirming pretension when you see that the latter is a descendent of the former.) You broaden the space between the notes to slow the speed, so it all makes perfect sense still.

The real question, however, is whether the Latin tardus is related to the Greek βραδὺ. Alas, the academy doesn’t know. But you manage to find a very interesting name for a very interesting creature, the tardigrade, which is a polyextremophile, and immediately you couldn’t be bothered with that hybrid construction because an organism that can withstand both extremes of temperatures and pressure as well as heavy doses of radiation, all while dehydrated and in outer space, is just the coolest thing ever.

Its name comes from the Latin tardus but it also comes the Latin gradior, so it roughly translates to slow step, and we’re back again to slow movement and Parkinson’s and finally you are starting to understand just what the lecture has been about this past hour. Parkinson’s is characterized by an acclamation of α-synuclein into aggregates called Lewy bodies and the oligomers disrupt the integrity of the mitochondrial membranes so the organelles gain toxic function. The question is why there is only cell death in substantia nigra pars compacta, but you assume that will be answered next week—same PCD-time, same PCD-channel.

Now class is over and you are so done with Parkinson’s and you are so ready to get your dopamine on. It’s almost Valentine’s so you think that you will spend some quiet time with some wine and chocolate, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll stay out until 4 AM on Wednesday, charm some free bourbon on Thursday, and fuck during office hours on Friday. Finally, on Saturday, you’ll remember to put the Adderall somewhere obvious so you’ll take it first thing in the morning because while this has been a lovely and interesting and educational diversion, this is also the most long-winded way ever to say that if my most recent challenge is only my lack of focus, then I really must have it really good.

He asked if I painted. Surprised, I said no. More often the question was about writing or music or writing music but we were talking about synesthesia and colors, so his question was not too out of place.

It’s true that I don’t paint but the truth is that I almost had. I tossed the watercolor washes and put away the brushes long ago. I couldn’t continue when I couldn’t envision the piece, when I couldn’t focus and practice the strokes. It was over. I knew I had to let go. But I wanted to push through, to pull something—anything—from the ruins. I tried. I did. Then she saw what I laid out in red. She said, sadly, that it just wasn’t the same. I looked at the lines and colors. I saw that she was right. I saw how deep the rabbit hole went.

I tell stories about how I lost my mind but I say very little about how I lost my soul. When your self is so damaged, you’re forced to choose what to heal. Facing one loss is painful enough. I couldn’t manage mourning both. So I spent years tending my memory, my mind, and the rest I stashed half-hidden in my closet, on my bookshelf, on my self. I admit: I refused to let go. But I couldn’t do so I couldn’t be. So I hid. But I hoped.

But here’s another truth: I have just passed a threshold. I can think. I can remember. I can read. Now when I look over my dusty library of technique and theory and history, I think it’s time to put away the tomes. They will be replaced with paper and pencils and pastels. There will be sketches. Perhaps, one day, there will even be a frame.

If I can think again, perhaps, one day, I can create, too.

The first lecture was an introduction but it was also a review of biochemistry and cell and characteristics of neurodegenerative diseases. For the first time in years, a review felt like a review. What I knew from previous classes reassembled to form a new and different set of knowledge, a different set of stories. These were not just facts loosely-bundled into one topic. This was a narrative that I could follow and retell. Finally, after twelve years, I understand.

Twelve fucking years.

I keep saying this: I’m here. I’m here. I finally made it to the horizon. I can’t emphasize enough how different my life is about to become. I can now process information at a rate appreciably similar to others. I still need to demonstrate that I can recall a similarly appreciable amount of that information in a month, and then craft a thesis at the end of the term. But it’s clear that after all those years practicing learning, I have learned how to learn. I’ve done it. I’m doing it. I can do more.

Still, I’m intimidated. Achieving one goal means that you have to start on the next. The exams and assignment lay a clear path for me, but I can’t see beyond those tasks. How do I form new ideas? Who should I find to help me along? How do I find those people? What else should I be doing? I will figure it out (because I will have to figure it out), but I hope that the road will be less rocky this time around.

And it will be because it always has been. It has always gotten easier. I have always gotten better.

For so long, I’ve felt dead, a ghost in the shell of a human being. But I live, so I must live because I can’t come back from dying.

But you can come back from almost dying. I’m surprised that it was such a long journey from there to here, back to life. I wonder if it would have been easier if I had made different choices. But then I wonder if I could have been any happier with how I am now.

No, no. I am so happy to be alive. I am so happy to feel alive, too.

I’m feeling the gaps again, the spaces in time when life is moving just a little too fast, when there is far too much new information and my mind is struggling to track each detail. I know what it is these days and I have made my peace. The papers that go to disability accommodations say TBI, but I effectively have ADHD (with profound memory loss). Just that change in perception has changed my relationship with my relationships, my mind, my self. My quirks can be easily explained and managed. I have scripts to cover the holes in my memory. After so many years of faking it, I have made it.

But I’m starting to face new challenges: complex time management, managing complex relationships, compiling new information quickly and creatively, learning the expected affects in different social situations. I’m terrified again (because classes are starting again), but I have just enough memory to recall my life in the past year and I know that I wasn’t ready then for what I’m doing now.

My life has been an endless stream of stress, trauma, depression, and anxiety. I think that this is it, that this will be the rest of my life. But as I move forward, I realize that I have gotten more and more skilled at managing my tiny little world. I have opportunities now to broaden my horizons. Life is now more than mere survival.

I laugh uncomfortably when others say I can do so much because I am so smart. Let me tell you about smarts. It’s not a trait but a skill, one that took a huge hit all those years ago when I got hit. I had to relearn how to be intelligent, how to memorize and regurgitate facts, how to think logically, how to talk about what I have learned. No amount of ingenuity could have made me who I am today, not when I so easily forget what I know. I am years of hard labor and hard lessons. No, I am not smart. I am resilient, weathered, slow, and stubborn.

I am no longer the agile hare of my youth, when I could sprint circles around the block before most others could get halfway. I miss being witty. I miss being clever. I miss being cultured, remembering esoteric lore.

But if I remember correctly (and I am never sure that I do), at the end of the tale, it is the tortoise that wins the race.

Finally, after twenty years, I have a nude posted without my consent on an Asian fetish site. I am surprised that it took this long, considering that I have littered the Internet with all sorts of sexual nonsense. I am not, however, hurt or offended nor do I feel violated. I have personally made peace with the Internet, and what I release I assume will be consumed without my input or consent.

But that attitude comes from a lifetime of violations.

Through child abuse I learned that my body and mind and purpose are not my own. Lacking healthy boundaries, I wandered into abusive relationships where I believed that I had to be good for my partner. I have been exoticized since I was a child and either punished for not fulfilling fantasies or assumed to be happy correcting misinformed misconceptions. Brain damage took away much of my personal agency. Then people I trusted insisted that I had no right to my thoughts or feelings because of my condition.

You have to understand: This is my life.

Still, I feel safe because I am lucky enough to have the right people at the right times in the right places to give me a healthy support network. I am incredibly lucky to have my social space be my safe space. Though I have quietly removed people from my life, the number of violators is still very small.

I feel safe today, but I have lived the years of having people continuously righteously wrongly tell me how I shouldn’t speak, that I have no right to voice my thoughts, that I need to listen to other people tell me about my life. I understand, deeply, what it is like to be silenced. Others are understanding, generally, when I present my story, but I know that some aren’t as willing to listen to those who aren’t as lucky, who have been through so much more, who talk about their lives rightfully with fear, anger, and disappointment. Let me tell you this: Their stories should be heard, too. When you tell someone that they need more perspective on other people violating physical, emotional, and cultural boundaries, you are adding to that violating experience by not listening.

So, listen. Some tell their stories with anger. Others are filled with sadness. Me, I weave inside my narrative a tired resignation. But behind all these stories is one simple message: This is my life, and look at how it has happened again.