My Life in Brain Injuries

Mid-twentieth century phone use can seem primitive to people who have always had telecommunication mobility. Except for being able to speak directly to someone, the mobile phone of today and the phone of my youth have little in common.

The telephone, a heavy hunk of technology, was usually a boxy black unit with a clear Lucite dial on the front. There was no voicemail, no texting, no caller ID, no call forwarding. Only a couple of years before, there had been no dial.

In the households I knew, the phone was centrally located – usually on the wall in the kitchen. In our home, however, the construction workers who had built the house 30 years before had created a shallow grotto in the wall between the kitchen and the dining room. In that shrine-like nook sat our (in my teenage mind) sacred telephone.

On the day in question, I was home alone in my upstairs bedroom. I had just turned seventeen and things seemed to be going pretty well for the moment – there was a boy who had asked me out. He was from a larger town about half an hour away. (I hadn’t dated any local boys, presumably because they knew me too well.) Anyway, I was feeling good and that was remarkable.

The phone rang.

I remember bouncing as I hopped down the stairs – a joyful celebration of embodiment as I felt each step to be a mini-flight until I reached the last step and slammed the top of my head with all the force of my entire body weight into the door’s crossbeam.

That much I remember.

I came to when my parents arrived home – no idea how long I’d been out; certainly no idea who had called.

The unraveling of my inner life accelerated, but I clung to “normalcy” trying to keep my chaotic emotions and visual processing problems from being evident at school. I had to drop out of AP English because I couldn’t keep up with the reading. My relationship with my mother became fraught and I spent as much time as I could at the school, immersed in extracurricular activities.

I tried to stay in theater, something I had always enjoyed, and was cast as a lead in a high school play. Under the Sycamore Tree – a play about ants gaining consciousness. I was the queen ant. I knew my lines – or thought I did. While I delivered my soliloquy, center stage, in front of a full auditorium, the stuff of nightmares happened. My brain stopped cold in mid-sentence – abandoning me. I had no idea what I had been saying – what I was supposed to talk about. The character I thought I inhabited dissolved, and I stood there, stammering that I didn’t know what to say.  Because of my difficulty with auditory processing, I received no comprehensible clue from the prompter hidden by the curtain behind me. I stumbled through the rest of the play but that was the end of my acting career.

Visual processing became profoundly difficult (see my last post) and I started experiencing unnerving moments that can be characterized only as “out of body”. I remember more than one situation, generally when I felt threatened or didn’t trust someone, when I suddenly “exited” and hovered above myself, watching – wondering what was happening to me, but feeling an eerie safety – unreachable. I observed from a distance while the embodied version of myself navigated encounters with others.

Despite my reading issues, I searched for books that would help me understand what might be happening, but nothing I found described my experience in a way I could relate to. It wasn’t until years later when attending a talk on transpersonal experiences presented by Stephen Larsen, PhD that I learned it is not uncommon for people who go through such out-of-body experiences to have had brain injuries, particularly on the top of the head.

That I survived those episodes and haven’t had a similar event in several decades speaks to the ability of the neurological system to heal. I attribute my initial turn toward healing to several fortuitous circumstances and just plain dumb luck. As I have stated before, I had no idea any of my experiences were attributable to brain injuries until years after the fact.

If I can overcome what I thought were impossible situations, there’s hope for others. Please, don’t give up.