I started to speak in 2006

...A dispatch from bewilderness

This story combines life-changing improbability with staggering fragility. It would be a different story if I regained my former life, complete with my former mind. I didn’t.

It would also be great if blind people could see. They can’t. The challenge: How to live with presence. How to live with absence. How to live with permanent absence. Sort of like brain damage. Every thought an upheaval, every page an amputation.

I imagined seeing inside my skull. It looked like a shattered vase. Then things improved and it looked like a smashed vase a sturgeon put together, I mean a surgeon, no, I mean a horse. Then it looks like something else I can’t say because I can’t speak.

Not long ago, no one was Neurodivergent. We were retarded instead, and did not have special needs. Now I’m Diverse, Neuro-Diverse, and brain-damaged, too.

In an instant, I couldn’t read or write, and could barely walk or talk. That meant I couldn’t do my job, or live in our home, or put on my shoes or say the word “sock.” The part of the brain that allows you to speak is about the size of a penny, as in a penny for your thoughts. Other spots just as small let you recognize your child, your mom, your home, your hand. Or not.

Problems can come to a head, especially a head-injured head. Like you forget where you live or lose your keys in the microwave or miss twelve years of your daughter’s life. Make that nineteen. She gets a new mom or two who aren’t brain injured, feels hurt and scared and mad at you. There are smaller problems, too.

Cognition gets stranger, stronger, wronger moment by moment. I imagined my brain as a puzzle with pieces falling out. The “means” fall out. The “ends” fall out. The tips. The tactics. The dos and don’ts. The stuff I used to write about. I couldn’t read or write yet, but I did start to speak.

Collage by Judith Hannah Weiss