A note before diving in: the following is the third post in a series on revelations regarding my catastrophic traumatic brain injury inspired by discovering an unexpected healing opportunity this summer - 14 years later. To catch up, here are the prior posts:
A life well lived - scroll to the 2nd section
And a little bit here - The root of the root of the root
Thank you for your presence here.
I called my dad as I was driving down the 6-lane I-80 highway back to San Francisco from the far flung suburbs, white knuckling my steering wheel. The roadway felt like it was vibrating beneath me under the roar of traffic. I blinked hard and urged my eyes to focus on the trunk of the car in front of me, following it like a lifeline as other cars careened past. I gripped tighter on the wheel to resist the distorted perception that I was out of control.
"Hi I just need to be on the phone. I'm freaking out. Talk to me so I don't crash," I squeezed the words out of tight lungs.
"Where are you? Why don't you pull over? Catch your breath."
"I can't, I'm already almost at the bridge. I can't handle exiting right now. I just need to get home." I left no room for debate.
"Okay well try to take some deep breaths now, you'll be ok, you'll get there, just breathe. Why don't you tell me what's going on."
I was on my way back from a functional psychiatrist's office who sent me back home, after a five-hour journey, feeling like my limbs were slowly detaching from my body and a car accident was most certainly imminent. I just had to... hold.. on... thirty twenty ten more minutes.
"I know you're having panic attacks but there is nothing indicating a health issue I'm concerned about, it seems like chronic stress, definitely some vitamin deficiencies."
She paced around her darkened office, riffling through the peaks and valleys of sprawling stacks of papers and journals on every possible surface, stumbling over piles of books. If she was looking for something, she'd completely forgotten about what it was but was too distracted to even admit that to herself nor to me.
"You know, you remind me of a patient I saw once who did ayahuasca and never came back. Completely blasted himself open and couldn't return. He's still miserable, in the throes of psychosis." Her eyes glazed into the past.
"Here," she said, jolting back to the present, remembering me in front of her. "...let me give you something to try, some B12, it'll calm you down... and if you like it, this may just be enough to help you get back on track. We'll get you set up with injections. You can do it yourself, in your thigh, painless. Huge benefits. You can't go wrong."
My brain felt slushy. My skin felt tight. I held some innate trust in this woman, recommended for her brilliance and the holistic breadth of her approach. I didn't want what was in the cup, but I took it reflexively, muddled by her pedigree and prestige, desperate to get out of that building.
"Ok, thanks doctor, I'll check back in."
I rushed out and left her wrestling the chaos on her desk for something she probably never found. I'd never done ayahuasca. Why would she would compare me to that guy? What does that have to do with me? Was she saying I'm in full blown psychosis? Like him? But with no cause? I felt wrecked for that guy and horrified for myself.
I stuck those needles into my thigh night after night but the panic attacks didn’t quit. Instead, they only increasingly permeated my reality. Dinners at raging restaurants in hot San Francisco neighborhoods were suddenly nightmares in which cacophonous crowds and blaring lights made the room feel wobbly, like I was speaking to my then-boyfriend across the table from underwater, miles away. The screeching BART subway train that dips deep below the Bay and makes your ears scream were little torture chambers collapsing in on me, tunnels about to implode under the weight of the water overhead. What I'd taken for granted became intolerable. My world narrowed. But I didn't have time for this inconvenience. I had just left Google and returned to my passion for community organizing as economic inequality and housing scarcity were escalating into a full-fledged crisis. My days were busy coordinating with unhoused individuals and homelessness service providers and affordable housing funders and policy makers. Trump was running for office. My 6 year long relationship was crumbling. And only my parents and my soon-to-be ex knew how much I was suffering. I would barely admit it to myself. There was too much to do. Too many others to help. Too many places to go. The fire alarms sounded within me and I shoved them deeper. I couldn't listen to my body, to the decades of needs gone unmet, to the generations of ancestral pain gone unaided. It was too much. Better to tackle the "too much" out there than in here. This was all I'd ever known. In fact, it’s how I got through the brain injury in the first place. With a big “I’m not looking at this for what it is” filter. After 3 months of rehab, jumping through hoops, passing tests, my cousin - a neuropharmacologist who oversaw my treatment - begged me to stay and continue healing, thought it was a real bad idea to board that plane. I said no. I said “look Eric, you said I could go if I passed your tests, and I did. Give me the anti-seizure meds, cousin, I'm going to Buenos Aires!" I left no room for debate.
I pressed through. And PTSD erupted in the form of all of those panic attacks that surely had nothing to do with my horrific brain injury. And I pressed through that too. No time to waste.
It took 7 years for the vast majority of people in my life to even learn about my brain injury. In November 2016, I finally shared it on Facebook of all places, on the 7th anniversary, surrounded by family, belly full from an extravagant Thanksgiving meal, motivated by nostalgia. I was in a good mood, proud of how far I'd come since pushing cold, rubbery slices of turkey and chalky mashed potatoes around on a styrofoam plate on that same evening in 2009, shivering with pain in Evanston Hospital. Comments flooded in from people from every corner of my life - college sorority sisters, high school acquaintances, old teachers, friends' parents.
"I had no idea this happened to you!"
"OMG thank God you're ok!"
"WOW I wish I could have helped you through that difficult time!"
Mostly I was met with compassion and a flood of love, but from some I could feel the shock, especially from people very dear to me. How is it possible that I did not know this about you? I saw you in the café, on the sidewalk, I just thought you finished finals early? How? The ache of my wounded survival pattern of dishonesty by withholding strained and even shattered relationships.
For probably 25 years I lived a dual reality. When I was performing (academically, professionally, athletically), a warrior stepped into the spotlight and wanted to be seen. I had nothing to hide, and everything to display for all to see, to celebrate (ideally!). But in every other moment, I was a ghost, or better yet a doll, dressing up as pretty and perfectly as possible. I couldn't quite see it, but the people closest to me could.
Sharp memories surface. Like my friend Sarah who reveled at my silliness when I naively put a $20 bill in the machine to buy a $2.25 train ticket and a thunderous waterfall of quarters rushed down. I cupped my hands to catch them, I dumbly showered myself in them, gesturing like I won the lottery, both of us gasping for breath between big belly laughs. Tears welled in her eyes and I was breathless.
“What’s wrong???”
"I don't think I've actually ever seen you this joyful, this free, in our entire friendship."
And this was in the cavernous underworld of a subway station, for just a few seconds. It stunned me.
Or another time, when I came back from a rare therapy session in college, absolutely raw, to find my roommate Kat in our dorm hallway arriving at the same time. "Wow, you look beautiful! Did you just get a facial?!" It was such a surreal thing to hear. I'd never had a facial in my life at that point. Couldn’t she see the pain in my eyes??
"I just spent 3 hours sobbing," I said, her mouth agape with confusion. I crawled right into my bed, turned my face to the wall, and woke up the next morning with my mask back on, not skipping a beat. Or another time when my friend Rebecca left a card on my bed that I found when I got back from burying my Omi in Baltimore. I didn't even remember telling her my grandmother died, and here was this note, saying "you can talk to me, I'm here."
There is no doubt that this prolonged, buried sorrow accumulated in my collapse in 2009. I have journal pages from the summer prior. I didn't want to go back to college. I was devastatingly depressed. I needed a break. I wrote a pro's and con's list for returning to school, struggling to decide, with no one to turn to for council at the time. The pro's list was tragically short but I forced myself back. Only a few months later, I'd find myself on the bathroom floor of a nasty apartment I shared with an emotionally abusive roommate, with a big crack in my skull and my brain bruising and swelling.
Everything in my existence felt fractured, a thick veneer plastered on the facade to make it look just right, kind of the like the apartment I lived in then, where my mom and I painted the lime green walls white, but by then the layers of paint were inches thick, heavy, chipping. We did our best. I did my best. And then I couldn't do it anymore. And my skull itself fractured, as though some wild, transcendent part of my spirit put it all on the line, pushed me to the very brink to break through and grasp at some beautiful and real life -- nothing to hide, no more lies. Wake up, Rach, it's possible! And even then, I couldn't. I kept hiding. I kept running. I got on that flight and never looked back.
Until December 2020, when at another rock bottom I had no choice but to radically transform my existence. I didn't understand that the strongest bonds are built through vulnerability until I had no choice but to reveal my despair to the few, intimate friends that persisted, if I was to survive another massive reckoning. I had to tell people I wasn’t okay so that I could live.
It took 3 years of brutal soul recovery work to unhide myself, to strip down all I stacked on to lose myself to who I thought I should be, and finally I gained the key to the cage I sought desperately. I pushed the door open and a deeper knowing called me to Santa Fe, and this place is orchestrating the most significant healing I could imagine. When I got here, I was done with all that denial and withdrawal. I said boldly, loudly, "I can't live like this anymore. I can't tolerate this level of pain." And I asked for help. And it came in the most unexpected of ways.
Again, like in 2016, social media strangely offered a breakthrough in authentic self-expression. I shared on Instagram that my chronic pain had reached unmanageable levels and I sought resources. I was referred to a Naprapath -- a field I'd never heard of -- and immediately felt a "yes". The practitioner asked why I'd come in, and for some reason my intuition called me to say this: "I have no real evidence for this, but I think my pain has something to do with my traumatic brain injury... but it was 14 years ago so… I’m not sure…."
Her face lit up.
"I'm really good at what I do, and you're going to walk out of here feeling much better,” she said, “but it won't last. If you had a brain injury, this pain is probably just a superficial symptom of something much deeper and if you don't handle it neurologically, you'll spend thousands of dollars and years of your life getting superficial treatment and no actual recovery. If you're open to it, I know an incredible functional neurologist who can help you." That loud yes sang in my heart again.
And that's how I found my way to Ruidoso where, for the first time in 14 years, I received the rehabilitation I needed for my catastrophic brain injury, and it’s likely, that I also rewired and repaired the underlying issues that may have preceded it and even caused it from childhood/early adulthood traumas that caused serious strain on my body and brain. The doctor told me during one of our treatments that a patient came to see him after developing symptoms of schizophrenia after her traumatic brain injury. She traveled far and stayed for 3 weeks, like I did, and she left completely resolved of psychosis, able to free herself from all antipsychotic pharmaceuticals and to step into a totally new life. And I believe it. My brain feels like a miracle to inhabit right now, a refreshing revelation, an oasis of refuge.
I woke up Friday morning after my last day of treatment and for the first time I said with conviction: "I love my life."
And I never have to go back.
What I know for certain, after all this, is that brain health is mental health.
I think about my great grandmother Birdie. She was the sweetest, gentlest, most loving soul you could imagine, until dementia took hold and anger erupted volcanically from deep within. She would bang her cane and thrash around in my mother's car, demanding to get out. She would scream in blood curdling rage. And I wonder, what pain did she suppress her whole life only to lash out when her brain's degradation removed all those tightly build filters? What feelings, what traumas, generated those physiological symptoms that led to a miserable death? What was stored in the body that could never be shared? What connection and care could have been possible in her lifetime, if she could have been real while she lived it? What stories were trapped in that troubled mind that could have shifted timelines for my entire family, preventing trauma from being transmitted to my grandmother and mother? What love might have been unlocked?
I knew I had to heal so that I could break the chain. I had to liberate my brain, to liberate my lineage.
I think about pervasive physiological dysfunction being plastered and painted over with pharmaceuticals. For example, the doctor also told me about how ADHD is often a mis-diagnosis for optical issues that are overlooked. Children have issues with their eye musculature and nerve functioning that can be easily diagnosed with specific eye tests, but we often only check for vision. So the kids lose their childhoods to ritalin and then their adulthoods to benzo’s, when a simple neuro exam could have solved it at age 6. With more time, more patience, more transparency, what transformative healing could be possible? What struggle could be validated and relieved with more committed forms of care that reach for true causes instead of cheap fixes? What joy could be accessed? What lives could be lived?
I think about the people causing violence and harm through dysregulation and depression, delusion and distortion (including most people in positions of power) wrecking havoc and abuse onto others when really they need brain care.
How can we trace it all down to the root and make more room in our culture to not only be honest with our struggles, but to boldly embrace the revolutionary possibilities of accessing deep wellness? How can we increasingly see the brain as the portal to thriving?
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Brave, articulate, and tenacious. You heal our family and the world. I'm grateful for you and your gifts and I love you so much.
Beautiful writing as ever. I'm so glad that you're getting the right treatment now and feeling so much better.