When Your Mind and Brain Fight With Each Other

I’ve said before that recovering from a TBI (and, for me, after a coma) is like moving back into your brain. You’ve been away somewhere, then you regain consciousness and come home. But while you were gone, your brain has been reorganized. Some things are worse, some actually better, some just different. All of it continues to change as time passes.

I think your mind has returned to your brain. Mind/brain is a huge area of study – scientific, psychological, and philosophic. (If you want to find a vast collection of self-important opinions, just research this.)

I’ve read some of the material, and I find that I don’t care about the various scholarly points of view. I have proof that my mind and brain are separate things. I’m living it each day. I know what I know: Mind and brain are in a continuous, changing relationship that is sometimes an argument.

Now, a little more than one year out from “the unpleasantness”, my brain wants my mind to get over it, already, and move on. In fact, I can feel my brain walling off the injury, giving my mind a safe place to be.

Each day my memories of the trauma become more fragmented, and are moving farther and farther away.

That’s why it’s so important to set this all down while I have fresh memory – not what someone reminds me happened.

Because what has happened…and is happening every day is that my mind is reestablishing control over my brain. I am increasingly in charge of my new brain – it has to learn to take direction. (My visual here is of a western movie…there’s a new sheriff in town.)

How very peculiar it is to be in touch with your own brain and mind. Until the “unpleasantness” I ignored the separate reality of both…my mind just living in my brain the way it had done since my birth. I had never had the experience of being severed from both or either, and so I presumed this is the way I feel…and everyone else does, too.

Preposterous. My brain wants me to forget. My mind wants to remember, sort of…but more than that it wants to soar past any physical limitations. To try everything. To feel everything. To remember everything so I will never forget that mind is eternal and capable of so much more than we ever try.