Getting a severe concussion threw my understanding of myself, as well as my worldview, out of whack. My brain’s systems and balance were no longer running the way that the world and I had constructed them, and I was left continuing to live but with no firm ground of what reality was.

Warped Sense of Self

My sense of self became wobbly: I had been a fairly intelligent person. But after the accident, I felt I could no longer claim that, based on my inability to recall words and concepts, and the extreme fatigue I would experience trying to process basic information.

Other activities and identifying factors changed too. Music, which had always been very close to my soul, was out of the question. All music gave me a quick and vice-grip headache, so I no longer had the comfort, nor the distraction, of my favorite tunes. Silence was my most constant companion.

I’d been a productive person. No more. At my concussion-era “peak,” I was only able to work at most 8 hours a week of online tutoring. Luckily I was already an experienced teacher and had lots of materials to fall back on. During one of those classes, I nearly had a panic attack because I’d pushed myself too hard. I had to cancel.

My neighbor, who only knew me as the unemployed wife of a businessman, told me that I just needed to get a job and I’d be alright. It was a bitter realization that people I was meeting in our new town likely thought I was a lazy, freeloading foreigner. I didn’t have the energy to prove otherwise.

(That said, during my “languishing” year there, I wrote an academic paper that was published in the local university’s linguistics journal, and I studied for and passed the C2 Spanish test!)

I had prided myself on being a good listener. But after the injury, I could no longer look people in the eye when I listened to them. Empathizing would cause all my symptoms to spike, and the only thing I could do was withdraw – and require empathy of others.

Who was I then? It was a long, slow, agonizing process to realize that I was just whatever physical reality surrounded and clung to the wild will to live, as Parker Palmer says of the soul.

Scary Worldview Shift

The most terrifying of all was that my old childhood fears of the devil, of ghosts, and of the dark came back with uncommon force.

Underlying all this, without knowing that what was happening to me was physiologically-based, I was terrified that I was experiencing “being possessed.” My brain struggled between an intuitive feeling that this was a reality and my previous spiritual and rational mental processes that believed this wasn’t possible. Fundamentally, it felt like I had no control over the physiological and psychological changes happening in me, and so something evil (aka chaotic and unpredictable) was taking over my brain and my self.

Every unidentified noise I heard in the house was now a ghost. We’d been told that the former inhabitant of the house we were living in – a house near the sea in SE Spain – was an older British man whose wife had died there, and he had kind of gone crazy afterward. I became terrified I was going to follow the same pattern of going crazy. Similar to how I reacted to eye contact, all I could do was shrink away from this spike of fear.

And of course the dark – it was just a cover for all the bad things, a symbol and a manifestation of the bad that was happening to me. Chaos of unknowing: no ability to see, to know, to have any direction.

Changing Course

Of course, I fought against these fears with everything I could. I tried CBT therapy (not a first choice for a brain injury! but we didn’t know it), anti-depressants, exercise, Vitamin D, sleeping, pushing myself to be as much “me” as possible.

But, I was getting worse. I knew it, and it terrified me.

Eventually, thanks to a few very wise people who showed up for me, it became clear that, in order to survive this, I needed to move to where my family of origin was. I was becoming convinced by then that I indeed had a concussion – as well as mental illness – and there were good doctors for this in Oregon. I flew across the world alone, desperate, my uncle and aunt picking my up from the airport and taking me in. Their friends’ daughter was going through the rough road of suffering from a concussion too.

I would, once finding the correct doctors, come to learn that everything I was experiencing, the lack of recognition of my self and of my worldview, including the spiritual fears, all had a physiological basis. All could be treated medically. I said to one, “I used to be smart.” He said, “You still are.” I was so relieved to hear that! A few weeks later to the same doctor: “I am terrified all the time, especially of the devil. It sounds stupid to say it.” He said, “That’s the concussion. It’s physiological. We’ll fix it.” I wept in sputtered, consoled bursts.

And I would do all the therapies and exercises religiously.