A couple of weeks ago I had an accident. It was about 11:30 at night and my dog tripped me. I fell down and smashed my face into a tile floor. I lost consciousness and when I came to after what seemed to be ten minutes or so, I was in a pool of blood. My teeth had implanted themselves into my lip and I had trouble maintaining awareness for the next few hours. Because of my stumble, I fractured a tooth and needed to have it removed the next day. Here’s what it looked like.

At the dentist. The white stuff on my lips is from the cast they took of my teeth for my replacement tooth.

Quite a looker, I know.

I’ve since received a replacement tooth, a denture of sorts, that I can wear for cosmetic things like photographs but is otherwise useless and annoying. My teeth are the least of my concerns now. My lip still hasn’t healed fully and so I regularly have bloody lips when the wound tears open. Even the constant pain of having an open sore in my mouth isn’t my biggest worry.

It’s my brain.

Although I was not technically diagnosed by a doctor as having had a concussion, I’ve them before and I can say that I’m 99% sure I got another one. This one feels a lot different though. After my accident, I had blurry vision and a weird, fuzzy feeling for a few days. And while my vision is back to normal, my brain does not feel like it’s healed much.

It’s been really hard to focus lately. I have trouble concentrating and everything feels slowed down within my processes. Writing has become a struggle. I get confused sometimes. Where I could once sit down and write for hours, getting a paragraph or two takes forever. The words don’t come to me as easily as they once did. And my craft has undoubtedly suffered because of it.

As I review my writings since the accident, I can tell a definite difference in both the creativeness and quality of my work. If you’ve been a loyal reader, you might have noticed the same. It’s been very challenging to string together coherent, connected thoughts and some of my work lately has felt disconnected. For a writer, there is no scarier proposition than being hobbled with a brain that doesn’t work like it used to.

Every day that I sit down to write, I hope that that day will be the day that my brain responds like it used to. And then I start typing and my fingers type out the wrong words. Or I misspell them. Or they make no sense when read together. I find myself editing my work way more than I used to. It’s frustrating to feel like everything is a slog when it used to come so easy.

I don’t know what I am going to do in the long run. I’ve read that it can take months for a brain to heal from a concussion, longer if you’ve had multiples. So all I can do is wait and hope my miraculous body can repair itself. I’m sharing this because I’ve always tried to be honest in my writing and if anyone has noticed a difference in how I write, I want them to understand why.

I appreciate my readers and want to always deliver the best I can do. Sadly, in my current state, I can’t always deliver on that. So bear with me these next few weeks (or months) as my broken brain tries to repair itself. I’m mostly going to focus on creating music since that seems to be less impacted by this for whatever reason. I’ll still write posts but probably not as much.

I’m worried about the long-term impacts of this. If things don’t get better, I might have to do something else. For now, I am going to keep slogging on, trying to help my head remember what it used to be like. I have to hope that it’ll get better. This is the brain I’m going to have for the rest of my life. If only they could make me a new one, like my broken tooth. Maybe someday they will be able to. But for now, this one will have to do.

Thanks for reading.

My Brain No Worky So Good