… in measured time, it's been a while since my head injury – 24 years, 2 months, 2 weeks to be nearly exact. It was just about half of that time – a dozen years – before I started making enough sense of the world and of people to get by, I think.

Early on I had “lost” lots in worldly ways, maybe unnecessarily. From being worldly-successful, everything was just zipped up and taken away – friends were gone too (while some pretended), understandings, settled confidence, energy – to merge together things and people and abstracts.

Then the everlasting afterwards – sorrow then anger with the losses, struggling to regain, hardships getting by day to day, emotional rollercoasting, the purposeless exhausted stagnation, plain ordinary depression, and all a whole catalogue of misunderstandings, clashes, fury, fatigue, desolation … much that's well-remembered, unfortunately, unlike the perfect starting oblivion of being in a post-accident coma....

So what does that go to show? Anything more than another trivial human's saddish setback? So that anybody could just maybe be respectfully politely silent and move on?

Yes but, or yes and …

Very eventually, I think this way – in my individual ledger of loss and gain, I've actually done great, although maybe at big cost. I think straight now, and also positively-emotionally, which doesn't impair the logic of thinking. Much more importantly, there isn't an individual ledger of loss and gain after all. It's been nearly a quarter-century and I've met lots and lots of other people now who've had massive challenges after their brain injuries, and also people really strongly allied with their loved ones' brain injuries, and finally I think I PROPERLY understand something ultra-valuable –

it finally really comes to me, each of us AS WE ARE is interesting, worthwhile, beautiful, has very much that's develop-able, enjoyable, to be experienced with, to live in the moment with, to savour, to delight in.
Part of me automatically shrinks from vague diffuse gooey “love-speak” like this sort-of seems, but the severely practical part of me points out how very much of the “losses” and setbacks of brain injury actually come out of, or are greatly enlarged by, the human-social acceptance-rejection see-sawing and judgementalism.

Maybe there's no adequate vocabulary of love, acceptance, support. They're tiny words for the biggest parts of human potential. But maybe, just maybe, there's an insight which helps us be more effectively positive for one another, lastingly. What d'you say?