While I never thought too much about it, if I was honest, in the past I would have thought that having a brain injury would “look” a particular way.

As someone whose brain is damaged, I now know that most of those ideas were either vast generalisations, completely wrong, or very shallow.

Perhaps the hardest part for me of having had the tumour, brain surgery and cancer treatments, wasn’t actually the recovery from the surgery, the radiation and the treatments (but maybe I’m forgetting the crappy bits).

It seems to me that the hardest bit to navigate has been relatively recently. Being given the “no evidence of disease” call was liberating in many ways, but then….

Life comes back, although I should be more specific and say “my life comes back” and then life itself seems to diminish a touch because of that.

At the time of being sick, I was off the hook. I didn’t have to worry about the mundane, in fact, the mundane was exquisite. It was the first time I’d experienced the incredible miraculousness of everyday experiences. I didn’t have to worry about the chores, obligations and expectations I’d built into my life. Trees were shinier and birds more beautiful,… (even people were 😀).

And then my life came back,….. but, with a surprise.

The life I’d built over years, came back, but to a different person. This Mark was not the same one.

I’m not saying the new “me” was bad. In many ways it’s a better version of the old me.

It’s just that my brain won’t do stuff it used to.

I have a brain injury.

We all have (if we dig deeply enough) issues of being “less than” in some way. We collaborate with family, society and peers, and make that little stone in our shoe as children.

It’s there, annoying, distracting, and deflecting us until it hurts enough to actually really notice it, and how much it has impacted our dance with life.

My “stone” was about being stupid.

Being easily bored, a dreamer and fundamentally cheeky, gave people the opportunity to reinforce that narrative. For those reasons (and others) it meant I always felt not quite smart enough, and so, never quite felt completely comfortable.

I can see now how that drove my interactions with others, and the strategies I developed all my life to try hide it, and to try to fit in.

The results weren’t always great, but I muddled through, and then….the brain thing happened.

After the dust settled, I tried to fit back into “my” life, but now, with a brain that won’t do some of the things it used to.

It’s a very strange experience, to not be able to manage something I once did without thinking about.

I came face to face with something that’s “simple”, and that I shouldn’t struggle with, and yet…

The look of confusion on others faces when this “simple” thing stops or slows me, is mostly managed (my friends and people close to me understand).

Mostly I just say, “soz, got a brain injury”, laugh and move on. No problems.

Sometimes though, tact is forgotten, and peoples’ inability to understand is very, very, clear.

That the task is simple, isn’t lost on me. I’m in a micro-machination in my head, trying to get my brain up this seemingly tiny hill. Peoples’ responses can look like many things superficially, and at the same time, that “stone” in the depths of that shoe finds the tender spot at the base of the big toe, and there it is…. “you’re stupid”.

My brain injury isn’t obvious.

Most would never know, and even when it rears its head, I move past it with a joke (or claim it with a joke like “take no notice, I’m a high functioning idiot”, or “I’ve only got half a brain).

Laugh, done. Move on.

But sometimes.…it really hurts.

There’s sometimes grieving for the loss of the old functionality, (before the good changes are seen) and other times there’s a profound sense of vulnerability.

Helplessness.

We place so much stake in “knowledge” and “knowing” stuff, but often that knowledge is only used to reinforce our identity, our opinions, and therefore impact on our life experiences, and not always in optimal ways.

I’m learning ways to unlearn, and learning ways to remember .

I’m learning to unlearn the noise, that idea that “I’m stupid”, and learning to keep remembering the lessons the tumours taught me.

When I forget them I suffer.

Cancer teaches that “security” is a delusion.

There can be a wonderful glorious freedom in that realisation.

We blobs of sweat, slime and goo, in a thin skin of air, around a lump of dirt, hurtling through space, right next to a massive nuclear reactor that keeps us alive, forget that everything is in a state of flux.

There’s no such thing as security in the universe.

In that forgetting there is the source of our suffering collectively and personally.

I don’t have to survive cancer.

I just have to keep remembering, over and over again, about the ebb and flow of the universe, and the insignificance of “Mark”.

I may struggle with a few things, but luckily I can still remember to keep doing that.