Capital Punishment

Life before the brain injury was, looking back. A fairly straightforward case of Imposter Syndrome (sic?).

Life afterwards, however, was characterised by this sense that I am being punished for something; that, deep down, I’ve been ‘found out’ as sub-optimal and now that my coping mechanisms have been removed, life is going to Let Me Have It. Because of something deeply, unspeakably wrong about me, that I can’t define or describe.

Let me tell you something about brain injury; it somehow peels away layers of work that you have done to cope with things in your life that have made you self-sabotage and crept up, despite your best efforts, to drag you down.

There is, literally, no escape. It’s inside you; you don’t want to close your eyes because it’s in there, like a partially obscured labyrinth or maze, sucking at your energy and all of your confidence. But, with your eyes open, you are conscious of something you didn’t seem to have or notice before: a deep, indigo, midnight bluish purplish sea, whose depths are endless; which follows you and is inside you, all the time.

Sixteen years on, I reach a point at which I refuse to apologise for my existence; over the years, with reference to the injury, it has felt like anathema to continue to talk about it. Characters in soap operas, for example, Phil Mitchell and the Policeman in Eastenders, have sustained them and then simply got on with their lives as though nothing had happened. Well, good for them.

Perhaps the most difficult thing about my life after brain injury has been the almost obstinate refusal by others to acknowledge its effects; that’s because they are on the outside of my head, I suppose. If you ‘came to’ without realising it, lost several weeks of memory except for a few instances where you were probably spaced out from the sedatives as well as the recent bruising to the brain, and spent every day thereafter with a kind of ‘scream’ in your head that you couldn’t describe, perhaps you would understand.

Let’s be honest; before the injury I was clean and sober for eight years, but I was still self-harming despite going to work and doing several AA meetings per week. I got into a relationship of two people with different low self-esteem levels, who came to resent one another and, when I should have stood on my own feet, I did the equivalent of hiding behind a parent’s apron strings or briefcase: went to work for my Dad or for people who didn’t expect too much of me. Engaging with reality was something that I struggled with for most of my life, pre- and in recovery for drink and drugs; the ‘demons’ remained at large, but manifested differently in those days.

What the brain injury did was to leave me, largely, intellectually intact; but the coping mechanisms were gone, and even self-harming wasn’t the same – perhaps due to the brain injury my nociception was different.

My brain was ‘quirky’ from the start in any case; the mixture of my parents’ genetic material and psychological modus operandi resulted in an intelligent but troubled child, who couldn’t quite shake off negativity – domestic circumstances; getting something wrong at school, not quite feeling part of the human race, et cetera.

Many things came to pass on account of that quirky wiring, one of which was a Failure To Launch in various guises:

I got into a wonderful university after I had taken a year out following my A-levels. I was too scared to go travelling, so I stayed at home and got a job as an Avon lady. That way, I could stay close to all that was familiar, all the creature comforts and stability.

University came as a shock; I delayed it until I was 20, I dare say out of fear; and got the shock of my life when I was no longer top of the class, but one of many.