Learning to Read at Age 56
...A dispatch from bewilderness
Your mind is racing. It’s going 268 miles per hour. How do I know? That’s how fast information travels in a normal human brain. But mine isn’t normal and hasn’t been normal for eighteen years.
A piece of brain tissue the size of a grain of sand contains 100,000 neurons and 1 billion synapses. I lost a few billion of mine. Eighteen years and lots of work later, I am well enough to devise work-arounds that disguise how hard I work to seem normal much of the time.
Fyi, it’s a myth that you only use 10 percent of your brain. You actually use all of it. And need all of it, too. A three-pound blob the size of a turnip controls every blink, breath, heartbeat, every thought and every word, plus if you can talk, walk, chew, swallow and button a shirt.
But put it through a windshield and you might forget things you’d known forever and thought you would never forget. Plus things that just happened a moment ago. You might wake up as an entirely different person. Or you might never wake up.
You don’t mainly need your brain to sound smart or be smart or make friends or make friends and influence people. You need it to stay alive.
I learned to read at age 56. Or rather, relearned to read by teaching myself what I knew before I’d been hit by a truck. It was tough. I tried reading magazines, newspapers, books and screens and found words looked like endless ants speeding, blurring, blowing up. Letters moved forward, backward, up and down.
This would be a different story if I regained my former life, complete with my former mind. I didn’t. Eighteen years post-accident. I still think with a stutter, speak with a limp, and have less usable space in my brain, so I run out of memory fast.
I can spackle all I want but underneath I’m still broken. One broken brain and five — no, six — broken bones in my back. I frustrate others by leaning on them and by not leaning on them, and baffle them both when I seem pretty together and when I don’t.
OMG, it’s maybe impossible to describe what hearing this does to me. I’m always kind of afraid to open your posts, Judith, and to listen to them (still so much easier than READING 13 years post brain injury). You say so many things I’ve experienced, thought and felt, things that are also kind of impossible to communicate to those who don’t know what living through, living after, brain trauma is like. Appearing to be whole, “normal”, while none of the staggering amount of work it takes to function is visible. Thank you, thank you for the work you are doing to articulate what it feels like, what it means, to live with this kind of injury, to be always laboring to make a life out of broken bits that will never quite fit together. I am so moved by your courage, and by your love of language.
yes, the invisible nature of brain damage is tricky, folks don't get it. my brain bleed meant the blood sat there for months ( no drain up there) and the blood killed the brain cells underneath it , oh well. can't get those back, you know about that. so you look somewhat normal but aren't so much. I walk like a drunk but don't drink at all, so many contradictions. but we soldier on, Judith, even in our old age, and can always blame it on that!