[synonym_seeker]

Before my 5th and 6th concussions, I'm sure I would have been satisfied with a biological view of mTBIs and their effect on the brain.

Faced with the inescapable introspection of PCS, however, I've found that I need a little more nourishment. It's why I'm here, but it's also why I'm constantly abandoning or tweaking my mental schema. My mind is "collapsing", or it's "inaccessible, but still intact", or it's simply "empty".

It's all of these things because I have an ego, and because the demands of modern life make it so that I cannot choose to accept a more reasonable philosophy - that I am just one sad, malfunctioning human in a larger universe.

I still want to understand the medical situation, but I have to keep trying to share my interior experience. To give up on that is to admit that all the richness and complexity that teach us to hope (and to hope to be understood) are not worth my time.

I have a need to be understood, even and especially when I don't understand myself.

Maybe I'm just unraveling... but the most useful metaphor for me right now is that of a virus. My disease frequently goes into remission or lies dormant, but, more than anything, it consumes.

Can anyone else relate to that?