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Cooking with Chaos

September 6, 2022
More Than My Brain Injury

In the spring of 2016 I fell and hit my head, and this massive concussion changed my life profoundly. Though my experience is not necessarily typical, I know there are others who share these type of symptoms and I would like them to know that  healing is always possible.

In the middle of the night I woke with the urgent need to… We don’t need too many details. Suffice to say I lost consciousness and fell off the toilet, landing squarely on my forehead, splitting a gash above my right eye. Three months after my head injury the filters between my dreams and perceptions, the knowledge that I am safe in my body, disappeared, and the delicate balance of sanity was severely disrupted.

For my entire life I have heard voices in my mind advising me on what to do. Also, some voices with horrible things to say, as well as visions of beings, people, creatures bizarre and familiar, and moving lights. This was something I lived with without much difficulty; still managing to go to work and to communicate with seeming normality.

After the head injury I found myself plunged into some weird and wacky world where I was just learning to crawl, yet was expected to defeat terrifying monsters, to “hide before they find and destroy me”, and to protect the innocent from what I dared not imagine. There was not a moment to wonder about what was going on, even while this remained the highest priority.

Each moment I was convinced would be my very last. Yet I was determined to do my very best with this last moment I had been given. Then somehow I would be miraculously granted another. This caused my anxiety level to rise substantially throughout the day, building to a fever pitch where I would loose track of the physical world without realizing that I had.

It became important for me to forget what just happened two seconds ago — also to forget yesterday, a week ago, and what happened when I was 11 — in order to attend to the present moment, and have some sense of safety thereby. The storm of emotional chaos was made worse with demands of action, threats to my safety, and warnings of mysterious threats towards others which I could not, and can not sense nor understand.

I practiced, diligently, techniques to forget what I had just seen and heard. Even the brutal murder happening or long ago had happened somewhere in the world, or the monstrous being, even worse the unknown unheard indescribable something at the edge of my perception (seen and unseen in my minds eye), could be forgotten. I dearly needed to forget in order to preserve the next 8 hours. To keep myself from trying to understanding something which my mind could not. “Stay present!”

This I now know was my brain trying to understand what happened to it without the ability to self diagnose. Using the language of dreams while I’m awake in order to find and create new connections after the old ways have been damaged. That being said, no one will ever convince me that these beings and places aren’t also real, that lives are saved and lost, that people learn from me and ate teaching me through the ether, knowledge being the gift to give again. It’s both of these things and one in the same.

From time to time I would remember that I could take a break, in fact I had been encouraged to do so. Then each time I would try to take a break, those in my mind and in my visions would start to freak out!

They would say, “Why are you doing that?!” To which I would reply, “You said to take a break so I’m taking a break.” Apparently I was not doing it correctly, because everything would all start up again 20 percent worse; the cries for help, the cruel voices and threats, the unknown sensations, the super sensitivity, and feeling like great work was needing to be done.

I soon resolved that there would be no taking a break, and learned it was better to just never stop the inscrutable process of finding balance. Be it balance of brain chemistry or balance of karma with beings great and small, the effect was the same. Therefore I continued for another 4 1⁄2 years in a state of perpetual mental collapse and reformation.

Thankfully it has now been 6 years and counting since I fell on my face. Stability is returning, and I’m learning to do again what I was distracted from doing for so long by an ever present sense of eminent demise.

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The following story I think illustrates the complexity of navigating the world while living with brain injury. It was 2019 when this happened; the story goes like this.

It was evening time when I decided to cook two tilapia filets in the oven. A bit of oil in the skillet, salt, basil, turmeric, and garlic powder, tilapia — that’s good eating. It had been a very long day of sorting chaos into neat shifting piles, like leaves waiting for a passing child to jump into and scatter again.

I placed the thawed filets into a pan, while simultaneously communicating by gestures and intuition with a being in the center of my vision. While adding the salt and seasonings, the lessons where speeding up, and the anxiety was building.

Into the oven went the pan, onto the couch and into a dream went I. While the fish was cooking I continued the never-ending process of reprogramming in the form of dreams. Each response within every scenario was another bridge to a new life.  Knowing there would be a new balance, slowly and steadily approaching each day.

The timer went off and I stood up. I walked the short distance to the kitchen and also ran swiftly the long distance around, over, and through half sensed people — each with a strong opinion of me for good or ill. After I walked the 5 steps to the kitchen the lessons continued.

With the being in the portal in front of me, I used a hot pad to take the 425 degree pan from the oven and the set it on the stove. The lesson of the week was about giving something I couldn’t see to someone I didn’t know for reasons I could only guess, but it worked to decrease the anxiety level by about 8 percent (most changes were 1 percent) so it was very worth learning.

The hot pad was on the counter as it was time to plate the fish. The pan on the stove appeared just as it had the many times I have fried fish on the stovetop so I naturally assumed…

In the time since I had taken the pan from the oven (over three seconds earlier), I had forgotten the event of oven cooking and yet was still getting ready to bring fish to plate. It was already too late before I realized — what already happened 0.4 seconds from now was playing out despite my futile attempt to prevent it, and it was going to hurt a lot.

As my hand shot out for pan handle the woman in portal in front of me silently yelled and gestured “No!” and as time slowed to a crawl as I watched. The best I could do at that point was to send “drop pan fast” to lessen the burn. When my hand gripped the handle, time snapped back to it’s usual 3 times speed. I lifted it for a brief moment and then quickly dropped it again back onto the stove.

There was no pain at first, then slowly the heat became excruciating. I turned on the cold water and thrust my hand into the stream until the heat went away — relief beyond description.

The lesson had changed as I filled a different pan with cold water, and plated my fish. Other beings had arrived to help out and lessen the work load.  They assured me quite lovingly that the giving back I was doing could be done with only one hand while I worked out how to not get distracted by the pain in the other.

The only solution I could think of was to take my hand out at irregular intervals, in order not to anticipate the timing, to let the pain increase well past what I found to be tolerable. Then when I would finally drop my hand back into the water. I would find complete and total relief for about 15 seconds, before the water became no use at all. Then repeat for 5 hours as needed.

Refilling the pan with fresh cold water, this went on until I fell asleep, exhausted with my hand in the pan. I woke with barely a blister and no peeling, almost entirely healed and with no pain. Also without peeing myself as the legend suggested I might.

Living with a brain injury is something that we all struggle with. Although this will manifest in different ways, there are many similar challenges we each face. This story is a prime example of how brain injury effects our ability to function, our ability to feel safe, and how that sometimes leads to us making foolish mistakes.

That which falls apart will fall somewhere,  land somehow, and take shape. This is a place to start healing, and every injury can be healed from, no matter how devastating it appears to be. I still bake my fish in the same pan and in the same kitchen, but now in a toaster oven and with a new brain.

 

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