The Internal Sunshine of the Dull Mind
Concussion thoughts
"How's it going, Nic?"
"I'm good, my dude. You sound a bit weird. What's up?"
"I think I may be concussed."
"Really? What happened?"
"I was surfing on Saturday, and I got smacked by my board. Not too sure how. I didn't black out or anything, I just felt it was a pretty hard knock so I immediately got out. I went for lunch with my friends and then drove home, thinking I was fine. But yesterday, I couldn't keep my eyes open. I was trying to read a book, and I must have slept a good five hours in the day. And I'm just feeling so out of it."
"That's definitely TBI - sorry medical jargon - traumatic brain injury - which isn't necessarily as bad as it sounds, it's just the term for a concussion."
"Shit."
"Yeah, it's a real ball ache. You need to take some time off to rest. That's the only way to heal this sort of thing. You should be fine in around seven to ten days, although some people take a little bit longer to recover. Avoid screen time, reading, loud noises, anything overly stimulating. Drink lots of water and make sure you have good sleep hygiene. Supplementing with creatine is also helpful for brain recovery. But whatever you do, don’t rush back into work. Trying to get back too soon can slow you down. Sorry dude, it's a shit one."
Over the next few days, I existed in a constant state of kind-of-asleep or barely-awake. Some cursory research pointed to the fact that concussion was much more serious than I had ever previously considered, and whilst most people recover within a week to a month, some people take longer than six months to return to normal.
Intrusive thoughts began to surface.
What if I'm one of those that takes six months to recover?
What if I never get back to where I was?
Will my income protection insurance be enough to cover me? What is enough?
The dullness was the scariest part.
And paradoxically, the most insightful.
On one level, it was strangely enjoyable to not overthink things or get stuck in negative thought loops (the above examples notwithstanding). There's only so much cognitive looping I could do before concussion brain went, "Whoa, that's enough." Back to kind-of-asleep.
Anne Lamott once said, "My mind is like a bad neighborhood. I try not to go there alone." Despite much personal work over the last seven years, there is still, unfortunately, some resonance in this statement. My sharp, analytical mind is very much a double-edged sword, and when it turns inward, I become my own worst enemy. This unexpected mental dimming was a reminder of the sometimes harsh brightness of full cognitive function.
Thankfully, this is less true than it used to be. The years of meditation, metta and embodiment practices have definitely started to shift my baseline. I've been learning to treat my mind like a garden—to tend and befriend, rather than deweed and wage war.
And yet the concussion was a reminder of how easy it is to spiral into the negative. Those mental grooves are well-oiled, and it's my responsibility to form and choose better neural pathways.
On another level, losing the ability to think clearly was terrifying. A few days in, I went for a walk with a friend and I just couldn't keep up, mentally and physically. The words were jumbled in my head, and I took a wrong turn walking in my own neighborhood.
Some disturbing dreams also emerged, as the subconscious revealed its hand now that the conscious was taking a back seat.
In one, a child was crying uncontrollably while being bullied by a larger, vindictive figure. I woke with the uncomfortable realization that both figures were manifestations of myself—the vulnerable, injured part seeking rest, healing and validation, and the impatient, demanding part insisting I should be "better already" and that my tears were not welcome.
The vulnerability of my injured brain mirrors a deeper vulnerability—my own internalized pressure to perform, to think clearly, to be "on" at all times.
Who am I without my mind?
Where is my worth, if not in mental performance in the work sphere, and being a thought partner to my friends?
Am I still worthy of love and connection, regardless of my state of mind?
It's now been eight days since the knock. As I write this, my mind is slowly returning back to normal. The sharpness feels likes it’s coming back, which is admittedly a relief. I'm still feeling low-level dizzy all the time, like a few too many glasses of wine are working on the balance department of my brain.
During this time, I felt drawn to revisit John O'Donohue's "Anam Cara", which serves a potent reminder that the journey of love starts within.
To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of an inner world. This wholesomeness is holiness. To be holy is to be natural, to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you.
Maybe the dullness is a teacher for what unconditional self-love looks like?
But for now, I'm grateful for the slow return to clarity, whilst I hold space for what the dullness has to teach me.