At first I thought my head injuries were purely mechanical. My sore neck was sprained or strained. My forehead was bruised. The cuts on my face were just that. Easy, musculoskeletal stuff. I had dealt with those types of injuries before. Give it sufficient time and rest and things get better monotonically over time. By Monday I was back to work (remote due to pandemic) and joking with my colleagues that I felt fine.
Then I started noticing small mistakes. I switched the girls' lunches when putting them in their respective back packs. I had a hard time with mental math. Typos. Reaching for that perfect 10-dollar vocabulary word, I'd come up empty. That name for a face, that memory, it all seemed just a bit further beyond my grasp.
Then I noticed how tired I was getting. I'd start off the day well enough, but after a couple hours of work (coding or meetings), I'd be cooked. I took naps during the day. I was becoming sensitive to bright light, loud noise, and stimulation, like I was neurodiverse. I had a concussion, and I felt an urge to burrow away. It felt like a primal instinct: I was a wounded animal who knew it needed to lay low to survive. I needed "cognitive rest".
Over the next few weeks I did the bare minimum at work and at home. Being around family was as much social contact as I could muster. I asked them for grace. Your dad hurt his brain. Things might be different now. Please be patient with me if I'm slow or forgetful. And please let me know if my personality changes (cue the story of Phineas Gage, who became a real jerk after a railroad spike punctured his brain). I'd joke with them, calling them by each others' names. They laughed nervously, because I laughed nervously, knowing that this could be real.
As I accepted this new state of my mind, a form of self kindness through introspection took hold. The following weekend, starved for exercise, I left my phone at home and went on a long meandering walk for several hours. I got myself lost at the local community college campus (West Valley), which is beautiful on its own. I felt the drizzling rain on my skin, breathed the damp air. I used all my senses, like an animal, avoided people and didn't speak a single word, like an animal. I was having what I now think is called an "embodied" experience.
In my disrupted cognitive state, I felt a new sense of gratitude for whatever cognition remained. I could hear the birds. I could envision our girls. I resolved to prune my neural networks of unnecessary worries and mental clutter. I gave myself permission to never need to do mental math, to prove that I could calculate a tip in my head. I let go of the pride I felt from deploying that SAT word at just the right time, probably a hang up I had growing up in a non English speaking household. I grew confident in my decision to interview for a new team at work-- my brain cycles too precious to waste on a stagnant project going no where. I accepted that my working years were finite, my cognitive capacity finite, and heck even our time on earth counting down. And I decided that it was Ok, even beneficial, to slow down.
In the past, I would have freaked out over losing my grip on cognition, over losing control. Kind of like the first time I got stoned off weed. From my childhood till young adulthood, I lived as though my brain was my power. To be able to control my mind meant being able to control my destiny. This combined with inherited immigrant's grit and willpower was my narrative towards success. Nerdy hard-working Asian, that was my identity. Not because I had a wealth of options, but because it was the best choice I had growing up the way I did. Through academics, my brain got me out of that environment and into ones less stifling, where I could try out different versions of myself. It got me an engineering PhD, a good career, and allowed me to start a family. Whatever difficulties life presented to me, I reasoned that I'd either cogitate or white-knuckle my way through, fully in control. Hey-- it worked well enough so far. It's not like I didn't have difficulties, but I did lack empathy. When I saw others struggle, I could not relate. Addiction, mental illness and their interventions and therapy were for the weak-minded. Oh how foolish I was!
Dare I say that the "radical self acceptance" I felt after my mid-life brain injury was only possible because of the conditions that came after the arrogance of my 20s. It's hard to draw a straight line, but these come to mind. First: marriage and having children. Second: losing my dad. I won't go too deep into these now, but I will say this. Life and relationships will fucking catch up with you if you think you can "white-knuckle" your way through suffering. For me white-knuckling meant avoiding, ignoring, and closing myself off to any version of reality different from the one I fabricated in my head. I owe everything to Julie, for growing and fighting with me for our marriage, who forced me to confront my avoidant tendencies. We owe a great deal to our coaches/therapists, in particular an English gentleman who never ligitated but always served the relationship, over Zoom. Therapy saved our marriage, and it saved me. It opened me to the humbling thought: "What I'm feeling is 100% valid. But what if what I'm thinking is wrong?"
I'd also offer a third precondition for my self-compassionate recovery: my history with psychedelic mushrooms. I won't go too deep again, but I will say that practicing self-compassion is like exercising a muscle, and on the numerous occasions I've occasioned the fungus, I've experienced a profound sense of self forgiveness. Plus, experiencing an altered state of mind -- hitting my head -- it wasn't my first rodeo. My brain injury was by no means like a mushroom trip, but that embodied, burrowing animal feeling was definitely familiar. It reminded me of how tightly I had been clinging on to my own reality, to hold control over my mind and perception. And it challenged my perceptions as subjective interpretations, bordering illusion.
And that's how a mountain biking accident brought clarity to my outlook on life. 🚵🏽
