My PCP and neurologist haven't really criticized me for being anxious at all, or depressed. They both seem to understand how difficult this process is and has been for me.

My therapist has been a great help and support to me. She doesn't think I'm depressed at all. I realized last week that a part of me kept testing whether I could do stuff thereby overdoing it to prove to myself that I wasn't depressed and that depression wasn't affecting my cognitive functioning and healing process. Just having that realization has allowed me to stop doing that and I'm already feeling better cognitively.

I think you should NOT believe that you will be dealing with the issues you are dealing with now for the rest of your life.

I think you should give it at least two years after your injury just based on what Dr. Glen Johnson's wrote in his Traumatic Brain Injury Survival Guide.

I have recovered some significant leaps in my cognitive functioning and all of them happened well after a year from the date of the accident I was in. Every brain injury is different and everyone seems to heal from them differently.

As far as how I've dealt with what's going on with me, or how I've accepted it, I consciously think that I've been "in limbo" for lack of a better term, since the accident. Sometimes I get very depressed or very anxious and I try overcome or suppress those feelings and/or thoughts and replace them with ones I am in control of ASAP. I tend to think of it as a "this is what I'm dealing with right now" kind of thing.

It makes it harder for me to plan what I may or may not be able to do in the future, so my life has been on hold in a certain sense because I am still healing and recovering and I'm not sure what I will be able to do in the future.

I can say that right now is the closest I've felt to my "normal" that I've felt since the accident and last night I did not feel this well cognitively at all. This morning has been the BEST I've felt cognitively since the accident I was in and that was 19 months ago. I am very excited about this feeling! But two nights ago I was worrying about whether the deficits I was dealing with would be permanent and right now I'm not dealing with them to the same extent that I was then. That doesn't mean they won't come back to a small degree - because with my own recovery I've noticed a lot of two steps forward and one step back type of thing - but I do know that if I feel this well now that I can feel this well again and that also gives me hope that I will still recover even closer to my "normal".

So I really try to focus on and remember the temporariness of what has happened to me.

I do remember having a few "aha" types of moments, but they tended to depend more on my cognitive functioning and cognitive ability to have them myself more than to be told them and then have an emotional ability to accept them. I hope that makes sense.