I've tried to explain it a thousand different ways to my family and friends, but I really don't think there's any one thing you could say that would bring people to understand what you're actually going through. At this point, I tend to just tell people how I'm doing at the very moment that they're talking to me, as opposed to how I'm doing within this grand overarching context of "my injury".

It's weird though - I've been getting a lot of good therapy for a long time now, and although it's yet to bring me all the way back permanently, it has brought me all the way back (or at least to a place where I wouldn't know the difference between where I used to be and where I am) for short stretches of time, and even then, when I was only an hour or so removed from an unhealing brain injury that I'd had for 4+ years, I couldn't understand my own PCS problems that I had been dealing with for so long.

I actually find this odd fact comforting... it's like, if I can make it out of this, I'll be so far removed from where I am right now that I won't even be able to understand where I've been for the past 4 years. To me, that's the ultimate in liberation.