Thank you for your kind words. But you have brought up something, well, the one thing I found most interesting about my head injury. Like many head injury victims I recovered a great deal in the first 3-6 months. But, initially, especially in the first month I was very impaired. I had tremors. I couldn't regulate my heat properly. I would feel like I had a fever and then be shivering with cold soon afterward. I had a lot of trouble sleeping and could only sleep on one side (for a long time actually). And of course I had serious memory and organizational problems and was nearly always in a brain fog. I had difficulty understanding people who spoke fast. Especially on the phone. I couldn't read and really understand very much. I stumbled over my words when I tried to speak. I must have sounded like English was not my native language. But the most interesting thing was that I really felt as if I had lost my 'soul'. That the essential me was just gone. That is truly how it felt. How it seemed.

I have always been interested in philosophical questions and I was sort of fascinated by this. First of all the dog analogy I gave before is pretty apt. That *is* what it feels like. It became crystal clear to me, that the only thing inside of us that represents our 'soul', all that feeling of 'me-ness' is just our brain. That is all it is. Before my injury I suspected that that might be the case, but I was never 100% sure. But I could really feel that that 'me' was just gone. Vanished. I guess it is one of those things that may be impossible to imagine if you haven't experienced it. Again, I think the only way to get close to imagining it is to find some animal like a dog or a cat and observe it and really try to imagine how it might think. So I guess my answer is that our souls exist only as an aspect of our brains. When we damage our brains enough it is possible to lose the essence of who we are. To permanently lose our souls.

I guess I have been somewhat luckier than some in that I did gain back (at least I think) much of my former personality after maybe the first year of recovery. But until that, and especially in the first few months I was a completely different person. Virtually all of my character traits were different for that period. Actually a few things seemed to be an improvement. For instance I lost a lot of my shyness and nervousness around people (social phobia). I guess since I wasn't able to feel most emotions very strongly (anhedonia?), I didn't feel much fear either.

I now regard a head injury as one of the absolute worst things that can happen to a person. Along with psychosis (to a lesser extent), it is about the only way a human being can actually lose their very identity. That is about as close to dying as a non-comatose human can get without actually being dead. Speaking of which if I had not recovered significantly in that first year I would definitely have finished the job by taking my own life. There was absolutely no point in living. I didn't enjoy anything anymore. I couldn't enjoy any of the things that I used to. Not movies or books (which I couldn't understand), not computer games (which no longer seemed fun), not food which I lost interest in. There was nothing that held the slightest interest to me anymore. I mean without my brain, without being able to think there is no point in anything anymore.

Of course there are other conditions that I wouldn't want to have like any sort of chronic pain or not being able to walk or being blind or deaf. Any of those things can be bad enough to make life not worth living. But nothing quite gets to the core like literally losing your own mind.