Imaginary therapist appears again

...a dispatch from bewilderness

A freelance career in media is fairly long if it lasts a heartbeat. Beyond probability, mine lasted thirty years. My clients got the credit and I got the cash, which worked fine for me. We ate my words at every meal, and they paid the mortgage, too.

One moment, I was a single mom – making dinner and deadlines all over the world, perking up headlines while picking up kids – and the next, I was on a gurney in an icy, airless room filled with words I didn’t know.

When your brain breaks, so does your present and future and past. It’s like hearing a radio stuck on static most of the time, then finding something that comes through clear. No, it’s like being a radio stuck on static, then being someone who comes in clear.

At various times in my year of outpatient brain rehab, I was assigned a Physical Therapist, an Occupational Therapist, and a Speech Therapist, but not a Psycho Therapist.

So I invented an Imaginary Therapist who let me talk with broken words and seemed to like me, too. The first time we met, she asked if I knew why I was there.

I said, “Something happened. It was my last day as me. I knew things then like what is a thumb, a bigot, a spigot. I could make headlines, deadlines and dinner.”

My eyes were getting hot.

She asked to hear more. I said, “One minute, I was in media. You don’t walk, you race. The next minute, you don’t walk or talk. You’re rolling Play Doh balls or pounding plastic pegs in boards. With a bunch of other people who are parked there with you.”

Somehow I kept going, “Because your brain is damaged, you don’t know how damaged you are. That takes three months or five months or two years or never. Then some of us got better and could recall a few events. The gunshot, the fire, the broken vow, the Tuesday you got hit by a truck. I mean the Tuesday I got hit by a truck.”

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