The wind is moving through the trees, the sky has changed, and the world seems to be bracing itself for whatever this storm is going to bring. There is something so fitting about publishing this while an actual storm is moving in around me. That imagery sets the stage.
Because at more than a year after surviving my severe brain injury, while the storms roll through, I am still all mixed up.
It’s very sticky, moving like molasses, being mixed up sticks around.
Despite the weather, rain or shine, despite all the things happening outside of me, I’m stuck inside a snow globe that someone has swooshed and rattled. I imagine it must be beautiful to look at from the outside.
Even from the inside, depending on the moment, there can be a strange kind of beauty in it. The swirling pieces can catch the light. The chaos can become almost poetic. Beauty can be deceiving.
From the outside, you see the snow falling. You don’t feel the force that sent it spinning. You don’t know how long it will take for everything to settle, or whether it ever fully will. Perhaps that is part of what makes brain injury so difficult to understand from the outside.
The moments of survival can be beautiful. The milestones can be beautiful. The story itself can be beautiful. Behind those beautiful moments can exist an exhausting, disorienting reality that is much harder to see.
Even at its worst, there can be poetic beauty in what has happened to me. But that does not mean it has been easy to live inside it.
Though the world outside the glass has not changed, here I am, feeling the effects of my world being flipped upside down. The pieces are still settling. Will the snow stop falling inside while it’s also storming outside?
In fleeting moments, I can see clearly. Just for a second, I can see through the snowfall. Other times, I am in whiteout conditions and cannot quite tell what belongs where, or whether I am facing up or down. Sometimes I know exactly what I want to say, but the thoughts seem to be floating somewhere just beyond my reach.
Most rooms are far too loud. Light stings my brain. Conversations are too fast. Too many things are happening at once, and suddenly the entire landscape becomes difficult to organize.
I am not lost. I am just swooshed and rattled, snow falling all around me.
More than a year after surviving a catastrophic brain injury, I still experience this with surprising regularity. I can be attempting to live out an entirely ordinary day when something inside me suddenly feels scrambled.
The most interesting part of the experience is that no one knows this is happening. They are on the other side of the glass, still among the same scenery, but not having the same experience at all.
It is difficult to explain because, from the outside, nothing looks wrong.
It is beautiful to look at a snow globe.
My brain quietly reminds me that the inner workings underneath the snowdrifts still work differently.
Our brains are not photographs. They are complicated, busy networks. Billions of connections are constantly communicating with one another so the brain can field the thousands of tasks being thrown its way: understand what I am seeing, find a word, remember why I am here, regulate the amount of information coming in, shift my attention, interpret a sound, organize a thought, decide what to do next.
After a brain injury, those systems can become disrupted. Shaken inside the snow globe.
Information can take longer to process. Memory can become unreliable. Sensory information can become overwhelming. Communication can require more effort. Things that once happened automatically can suddenly require conscious attention.
It can feel, in the simplest terms, like everything is there, but the connections between everything are harder to navigate.
Like tangled Christmas lights. When you know the lights work, you just have to figure out where one wire ends and another begins.
You can know something and still struggle to access it.
You can understand the words being said to you, but it takes extra effort to formulate a response. You can literally feel the gears turning, grinding. My brain gets tired much more easily, like there is sand in the gears.
Maybe snow.
You can remember your life while simultaneously struggling to remember what happened five minutes ago. When something is happening that I know I will want to remember, I already know it may slip away almost as quickly as it happened.
Being with my children is perhaps the strangest example.
I love them with every part of my heart while sometimes forgetting the small details. It is a strange sensation: holding an enormous amount of love while watching pieces of the moment itself slip away through my fingers.
There is the sand in the gears again.
I can be intelligent and still feel cognitively slow.
I can be capable and still become completely overwhelmed by simple tasks.
I can look fine and feel profoundly disoriented.
The world is not unfamiliar.
My relationship to the world around me has drastically changed.
When someone shakes a snow globe, the scene inside does not disappear. Nothing has actually been removed. Everything has simply been thrown into motion.
The pieces slowly fall.
Some settle quickly.
Others take longer.
That is what living with a brain injury can feel like.
Not broken beyond recognition.
Not starting from nothing.
Constantly trying to find where everything belongs now.
The frustrating part is that there is no predictable timetable for when the globe will settle. And even when it does, it can be shaken again.
My adrenaline does not seem to operate normally. It feels like it is always running, like an idling engine.
That engine can be switched on by the simplest things: A bad night’s sleep, Too much noise, Too much heat, A crowded room, A complicated to me conversation. An unfamiliar environment. A day that asks too much. Parenting two small children. A memory that has disintegrated. Words that disappear halfway through a sentence.
My engine is running again in the background, humming.
Fatigue. Stress. Sometimes I do not even know what caused it.
I simply notice that I am suddenly inside the globe again. Something sent everything swirling.
Progress can mean recognizing exactly when the snow starts moving again.
It can mean learning what makes it move the most, what precipitates the swoosh and the rattle.
It can mean noticing earlier that my brain is getting overloaded.
It can mean stepping away before reaching the point of being stuck in a whiteout.
It can mean being unashamed to rely on calendars, alarms, notes, and reminders, without seeing any of those tools as evidence that I have failed. They used to be guides for life.
Now they sometimes feel like messages from the past. There is something strangely Memento-like about it. In the 2000 psychological thriller, the protagonist cannot rely on his memory, so he constructs a system around himself to preserve what his brain cannot. Notes, photographs, reminders: external evidence becomes a substitute for what memory can no longer reliably hold. Ultimately, it was a construction of reality instead of coping with unbearable trauma.
I now understand that life way more intimately than I ever expected to.
It means accepting that my brain needs something different from me now.
There is no going backward in time, though I certainly think about it.
There is only learning how to live my best life inside what has happened, mid-snowfall.
I am still discovering what my brain can handle.
I am learning that adaptation is not the same thing as surrender.
There is a major difference between saying, This is all I can do, and saying, This is what my brain needs from me today. One is a limitation, the other is information.
I have become much more aware of the machinery of being alive.
I notice the things we so easily take for granted: the effort required to concentrate, the simple miracle of word retrieval, the complexity of holding several pieces of information in my mind at once, the way exhaustion changes perception, the way silence can feel restorative, the way your body can tell you something long before your conscious mind catches up.
Before my injury, I rarely thought about any of this.
My brain was simply my brain. I lived inside it without thinking about it. Now I am aware of it in ways I never wanted to be. There are days when I desperately want the globe to stop shaking. I want all the snow to finish falling. I want to know where all the pieces belong.
I would love to stop calculating how much energy something is going to cost me.
I want to walk into a room without wondering whether the noise or light will overwhelm me.
It would be nice for my thoughts to arrive when I need them.
It would be incredible for memory to feel automatic again.
The snow does eventually settle, not permanently. Maybe not exactly where it used to be. It can settle. When it does, I can see my life again.
The person I have become. My children. My husband. My home. The person I am still becoming. I am not living in the aftermath of my life as though everything meaningful ended the day I was injured. I am living in the continuation of it.
Brain injury rearranged my life without erasing it.
It changed my capacity without eliminating my worth.
It made ordinary things harder without making them meaningless.
It left me feeling mixed up without meaning that I am lost.
More than a year after surviving, I am still like a figure inside a snow globe. Shaken. Disoriented.
But I have stopped thinking that being mixed up means I am going backward. Sometimes it simply means I am still finding my way through a world that was violently rearranged.
The globe is still mine. The life inside it is still mine.
And even when the snow is falling so thickly that I cannot see clearly, I am still here. Still becoming. Still living. Still finding my way home.
Feeling rattled does not mean I am failing to heal. It means my brain is still doing more work than most people can see. The world may look ordinary from the outside, but sometimes I am processing it through a nervous system that has survived something extraordinary.
I am learning not to judge myself for snow falling during all four seasons, but to recognize it for what it is. I am still inside this snow globe that is my life, but I am no longer frightened by the falling pieces. I know they will settle. And when they do, I will still be here, still finding my footing, still learning this life, and still becoming comfortable in the world that exists on the other side of survival.
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