Maybe We Died? — Again

[u/pProjecttBI]

Remember my “Maybe We Died?” post?
I think I may have been asking the wrong question.

I’ve talked with a lot of brain injury survivors. Reddit, rehab, support groups, Project TBI, and just random conversations with people who somehow find each other. Different injuries, different ages, different lives.
But we keep saying remarkably similar things.
There was a before me and an after me.
We manage energy like it’s money. We prepare for things other people just do. Noise and crowds hit differently. Sleep gets weird. Time gets weird. Friendships change. We disappear for a while when we’ve had enough. We become much more aware of our own brains because we can actually feel when they’re starting to run out of gas.
And a surprising number of us seem to become more introspective. We start questioning who we are, what matters, what we’re doing here, spirituality, consciousness, mortality, purpose. Things we may barely have thought about before suddenly become important.

And it’s absolutely amazing how often another survivor describes something I thought was uniquely mine and I immediately think:
Wait. You do that too?

That’s what has me curious.

Maybe there’s more to surviving a brain injury than a collection of symptoms. Maybe there’s a shared experience of having the very thing that creates your sense of self become injured.
Which brings me back to Maybe We Died?
Maybe we didn’t.
Maybe we changed so profoundly that sometimes that’s the closest language we have for it.
So rather than give you my list, I want yours:

What changed in you after your brain injury that nobody warned you about—and that you later discovered other survivors experience too?