What does it mean to be a writer when my words have vanished?
What does it mean
to be a writer when my
words have vanished?
Opinion
Ms. Barnhill is the author of “The Ogress and the Orphans.” She experienced a traumatic brain injury in 2021.
I’ve been trying to write this essay for a very long time. Months, I think. Or maybe even longer, before I ever mentioned it to anyone, before I let anyone know that I was even capable of multiple sentences again. When all I could muster writing was a single sentence on a note card. My brain works differently now than it used to, and differently than I feel that it ought to. I told my speech therapist that I was frustrated that I haven’t been able to write fiction since experiencing a traumatic brain injury — which means that I am still, after nearly two years, unable to do my job.
He nodded with practiced care. “That must feel frustrating,” he said. “But maybe it’s important to focus on what you can do.”
Which is fair, I suppose. But I still wanted to clock him.
Healing from any injury is a process of rebuilding cells and tissues and structures — taking that which is broken and making it new again. Healing a brain injury is the process of rebuilding not only tissues and cells and the connections between those cells, but also memory, thoughts, imagination, the fundamentals of language and our very concept of ourselves.
I am rebuilding myself, you see. Right now. Sentence by sentence.
In December 2021, just a few months before the publication of two of my novels, “The Ogress and the Orphans” and “When Women Were Dragons,” I took a colossal spill down the stairs.
My husband heard me holler and found me in an unconscious heap. I remember none of this. It’s strange not remembering the moment that changed my life, that altered my work and vocation, that disrupted the me-ness of me. I think, though, that my body remembers it, even if I do not. A chaos of movement. A scramble through space. A short, sharp knock at the back of my head. And then a thunderous dark.
I’ve been, of late, obsessed with the topic of brains. Humans have brains that contain nearly a hundred billion individual neurons, which are delicately suspended and tangled inside a wad of goo floating in our skulls. It’s an astonishing number, but on top of that, each neuron may have connections extending to thousands of other neurons, which in turn may have their own thousands of connections, which then extend into an infinity of conversations, collaborations and well-worn grooves — along with another infinity of ways in which the entire business can go terribly, terribly wrong.
And boy, can they ever go wrong.
Over 1.5 million Americans experience a traumatic brain injury each year. Many more suffer neurological symptoms from other issues, including long Covid, and experience the same kinds of cognitive unraveling that I have learned to live with over the past two years.
The toll of traumatic brain injuries and the mystery of how the brain repairs itself, or doesn’t, is still perplexing and under-researched. Too many of us scramble through a maze of anecdotes and dubious studies, willing to try literally anything to help make us feel like ourselves again, rebuilding the neural routes to return to normal — as we try to remember what “normal” once felt like.
In the early days following this injury, I slept. I barely remember it. I went to Florida, apparently, and spent much of the time unconscious on the couch as my extended family rang in the New Year. This memory is gone. I struggled with double vision, vertigo, headaches, ear ringing. I lost words. Whole sentences. Reading out loud was a garbled mess. I forgot facts, tasks, instructions. Entire conversations vanished. My memories became as substantial as smoke. Driving was impossible for months. I couldn’t do basic math problems. I lost the ability to write in cursive. Emptying the dishwasher became a three-hour chore. Picking things up off the floor made my head spin. Anything from opening an envelope to making spaghetti sauce became a cumbersome task.
I experienced attacks of brain fog — an irritatingly nonspecific term for a highly specific and frankly terrifying experience. Here’s what it’s like:
I sat on the bed.
My socks were in my hand.
I didn’t know the word for socks.
I didn’t know what they were for.
I stared at the socks for a long time, running my fingers along the ridges at the top, the seam at the toes. The thin wool. The colors arranged in — what was the word? The colors were arranged somehow, and I stared and stared, trying to make the word appear in the vast emptiness where my thoughts should be.
“Stripes” was the word I was looking for. I searched for that word all day.
There is something particularly terrifying for a writer to lose words. In those early days, I did my best to follow conversations, but every time I tried even a minor contribution, a word or a notion or a whole sentence, it would vanish out of my mouth, leaving me gaping like a fish.
“When am I going to get better?” I asked my doctor, and then a different doctor. I asked my speech therapist, the nurse at the clinic, the neural ophthalmologist. They told me to take it easy. “Cognition requires rest,” my occupational therapist told me. “Some of us need more rest than others. But your brain is learning. It doesn’t know how to stop learning. Give yourself a break and let your brain do its job.”
What I didn’t ask, what I was afraid to ask, was what the implications of all this might be. What does it mean to be creative when the means by which we are creative have vanished? In my case: words, ideas, feelings, memories. Each of these become scrambled when a person experiences a neural injury. I am a person who thinks, speaks, feels and remembers. All of us are. But if I am a person who makes a living by transmuting these thoughts into plots and characters and pretty sentences, and if that ability to think is disrupted, am I still me?
More frighteningly, will I ever be me again?
I begged out of projects that I’d said yes to — that novel, that short story, that other short story. They were impossible now. I couldn’t look at a computer or a page. Even a notebook was too much for my eyes to track. I couldn’t follow a thought for more than a few minutes. If I wrote more than one sentence, they seemed to scramble and wind, like a spiral on the page.
Some days, that’s still all I can manage.
I’ve had four major concussions in my life — one in 2017, when I tripped and fell while out for a run with my sister and my dog, losing consciousness several times in succession; one in the very early morning in 2012, when I passed out after sneezing hard with a bad sinus infection and hitting my head on the bedroom furniture (not once, but twice) on my way to the ground, by far my most embarrassing concussion; and one in 2007, on yet another run in the wintertime, when I slipped on the ice and knocked the back of my head on the pavement. When I woke up, snowflakes clung to my eyelashes and my whole body was cold.
Each of my injuries was followed by a disruption to my creative life: After each incident, I couldn’t write fiction. For a good long time.
I have theories about this. The first one has to do with cognitive load. The healing from a neural injury is tremendously taxing — it’s why so many of us are tired all the time. Our brains are relearning how to do things — how to see, how to hear, how to retrieve bits of relevant memory, how to coordinate information, how to recognize what is worthy of attention and what is not.
As I heal, I’m only able to hold one thought at a time. Just one. It’s vexing, given that I was once the sort of person who was able to have a conversation on the phone while also cooking dinner, while also writing notes on the margins of a manuscript. Not so anymore.
There are benefits to this particular manifestation of my injury. For the first time, I’m free from a lifelong anxiety disorder. Anxiety, after all, is narrative — it requires the stacking of thought upon thought, worry upon worry, extrapolated projections upon irrational interpretations. One can’t stack thoughts if one can only hold one thought at a time.
But writing fiction also requires the ability to hold many thoughts, balancing them like spinning plates on each finger, each toe. Composing a novel requires all of these thoughts to be present all the time. It’s an exhausting job — I loved it, but I can’t do it right now. And maybe I never will.
“The Lord giveth,” I tell people, “and the Lord taketh away.” I joke. But secretly, my heart breaks when I say it. Every time.
My other theory has to do with memory. The function of memory and the function of imagination are linked. Our memories feed our imaginations. Our imaginations fill in the gaps for our memories. As a writer, I use sense memory — mine and the reader’s — to build each tableau, to make each moment astonishingly real, to pin the reader into the story’s space and time.
My memory is impaired, perhaps irreparably. I sat in an office with a psychometrist a few months ago — a patient young fellow. He would need to be. He read me a series of words. I was supposed to remember them. I couldn’t.
“Sorry, man,” I said. “I don’t know what to tell you. There’s a hole in the universe where those words should be.”
And yet. I was able to discuss with clarity things that I had read that morning, that week, earlier that year. I was able to recite Keats and Butler, rattle off tidbits from a college philosophy course and the news from the radio, just as I am able to recall our conversation that day with relative clarity. But I couldn’t remember the numbers in a series or the words on that list or how to put together the shape that he had just showed me. And this is important because our ability to sort through and easily access our memories is crucial for our understanding of the passage of time. People with memory loss become, to quote Vonnegut, unstuck in time.
A story exists within a particular framework of space and time. Maybe that’s my problem. Since my memories are disrupted and my memory-making is spotty, I have trouble grasping the concept of time, which means that my ability to create a story on my own is fundamentally altered.
Weeks later, my psychologist called me to go through some test results. I pulled up the report and read as she went through the major points. You are not you, the report seemed to be telling me. You will never be you again.
“So,” I said. “Given the time that’s passed since my fall — should I assume that this is it? That these are the tools I have and the deficits I have and nothing will improve?”
She was quiet for a moment.
She went on to explain that an injured brain can still learn and damaged neurons may not return to normal, but that the connections in the brain can reorganize and allow an individual to adapt and function.
There is grace, I think, in healing. And there is grace in uncertainty. I am healing uncertainly. I am uncertainly healing.
I’m in a funny place right now in my recovery — a cognitive space that’s close enough to average that I no longer require the active care I’ve had access to. But my injury has limited me. And the long-term effect on my creativity, and its impact on my work in the future, has yet to be seen.
Writing this essay, for example, has been a process of fatigue management, time limitations and task re-orientation. I had to invent a new process in order to tackle the project: ideas inscribed one at a time, thought by thought, sentence by sentence, on note cards, each composed over days, weeks, months. Eventually, I laid them out carefully on the floor, followed by a nap (on top of said index cards). The order kept changing. The number of cards kept increasing. Until I could see it. My story. It’s still unfinished. My energy, my mind, once unlimited, can now only operate within a specific number of breaths. This essay can be read as a series of sighs.
Recently, I woke up and realized I’d written something on the back of a grocery receipt during the night. “Where I am is in the shadow of where I will be. Where I will be is in the light of where I am. Just because things are in conflict doesn’t mean that they can’t be life-giving and true.” I have no memory of writing this.
Sometimes I feel like a character in a fairy tale.
There once was a woman who got lost in a deep, dark wood. She never returned.
Once there was a queen who fell under a spell, causing her to sink into a deep sleep for a long, long time. She never woke up.
I like to tell people that I used to be an author. It bothers my husband when I do this.
“You are still you,” he tells me.
“Am I?” I ask.
He assures me that he has checked and he knows for sure. Also, he says that it doesn’t matter if I wrote in the past or the future or the present, since it’s all the same. “You can’t un-ring a bell, and you can’t un-write your books. They still exist. And so do you.”
Maybe he’s right.
But lately, I’ve had dreams of writing. I wake up in tears. What story was I writing? No idea. But each neuron shoots forth messages into the dark. A small candle. A lighthouse at the edge of a stormy ocean. I exist. I saw this. Felt this. Know this. Am this. Meanwhile, my sentences have grown. I’ve taken to using larger index cards. Sometimes I go as far as a steno pad. A full sheet of paper is too much — my eyes can’t track it very well. I get lost. I need something small and contained, where I can fit pretty words into a pretty sentence and allow them to become more than themselves.
Recently, I wrote a story. Only six sentences long, but a story nonetheless. With a character, a place and the passage of time. An opening, a turn, a conclusion. Such a small thing, a tiny accomplishment. And yet. I stared at the card for a long time, utterly astonished.