Excerpt: I found these entries scattered around a symptom journal that accompanied me to doctor’s visits, visits that were becoming increasingly discouraging as “We don’t know what to do, so let’s try…” became the constant refrain. I fairly despised having to keep the symptom journal because it felt like I was looking for things that were not going right, putting so much energy into trying to prove myself and explain myself.

Invisible injuries like TBIs are especially challenging to navigate. I do know that I wrote much about the challenge of looking fine on the outside and feeling that I must have been making it up because no one else could see that anything was wrong from the outside.

Yes. That was its own particular agony: trying and having to prove to others something that I didn’t want to be “true” in the first place.

When we have a broken arm, it’s easy for others to see that we are injured and there is a standardized, accepted course of treatment. There are specific things that the patient can do to actively recuperate. I am a star when it comes to recovering from those kinds of injuries and have even been referred to as a “Super-Healer” by several doctors.

But the brain injury recovery did not work that way.

It was invisible. And there wasn’t a standardized course of treatment.

And I was not a “Super-Healer.” In fact, my determination to recover often led me to being overactive in my “work to recover” and kept me from the deep rest I needed.