Letter To A Dear Friend
The following is a draft of a recent letter I wrote to a friend of mine alongside a package of celebration. I scrapped it because trauma-dumping from across the country on graph paper isn’t a great idea–So here I am publishing it on the internet :) ahahaha
We’ve been friends for 8 years – since I was 12. // A year into our friendship I got my first concussion. About three years in, my symptoms never went away. She was the only person I wasn’t related to that I was willing to be around, wanted to be around. Yet I’ve never really brought up my concussions to her.
Hello dear friend,
…
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Anyway, I wanted to also write about my concussions…read on when you have the space to do so <3 [hey from future me–I totally just unload in the following so like do with this what you may]
There’s this book I came across on my trek to find concussion-community last December. It’s called Impact: Women Writing After Concussion and it’s an anthology of 21 writers’ essays and poems. Each chapter has spoken to me of course in whatever shape and form they arrived in. But one in particular got me thinking about us and what friendship really is.
So, in short, Claire Lacey states:
“Head injury is a lonely place of forgetting: forgetting how to connect, forgetting the people who care, feeling forgotten” (83).
With the triple whammy of not having a great social circle before and during my concussions, how the post-concussion symptoms persist, and the pandemic affected my view of/relationship to socialization – the lack of friendship/community with people my age or around my age is catching up to me.
Don’t get me wrong, I find that the way we catch up with one another how many times a year is very adult of us. Or at least it’s reminiscent of how my parents stay connected to their childhood/young adult friends.
It’s just–the epidemic of loneliness out here has been right in front of my eyes for much longer than I figured.
I didn’t know how much my concussions affected my mental health let alone my social abilities→retrospection is much easier to grapple with than seeing it in the present. It’s like I knew but I didn’t know, you know?
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A couple of weeks ago or however long ago (totally don’t know but it was recent) I was talking to my dad about Impact. I had previously declared to him: “This book has changed the way I think about everything in the last 6 years but I couldn’t even tell you how–it just has.” My gears were running and I had the realization: “Did any of the people I was friends with check on me when I was concussed?” And then my brain said, Who except for Mia and [letter addressee] ever asked you questions about yourself and meant their curiosity? I didn’t ask the second question out loud but the first did get a reaction out of my dad. A silent rage could be seen in my periphery until we continued our conversation.
Even as I ask myself those questions I see other perspectives of it (because my brain can’t not think about what feels like every f-ing perspective)…I was never vulnerable with my ‘friends’ so why should future-me have ever expected their compassion and curiosity? And I know that my lack of vulnerability is a very layered phenomenon: it being affected by years of interactions with certain people in addition to my concussions…but dayyyuum my dad and I were stunned when I made that realization. [I also note that the time surrounding initial hits has never actually existed in my memory catalog so I could be wrong about this.]
On account of that, I write to you to thank you for your friendship–your continued curiosity.
*Memory*: There was this sleepover we had at your house with [friend 1] and [friend 2] and omg I can’t– I don’t remember what exactly we were talking about but there were some hard-hitting questions and we were all crying (<3 girlhood). And at one point you asked me a question and I had the answer at the forefront of my mind but I didn’t have the courage to say it. And you recognized my hesitation and said it was alright for me not to answer and you all respectively went on with the conversation. And I hope that my remembering your sensitivity to me reflects how much that action meant to me. I didn’t know there were people out there who didn’t make things awkward or make fun of others for their… I don’t know what–just them being.
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Whether it be my brain protecting itself or the concussions, I don’t have a great memory of when things happened.
Jane Cawthorne writes how she remembers the “moments that had an emotional impact on me. These have become my markers. The usual markers of the passage of time, days, weeks and months, are meaningless to me,” (16). You see, I remember vague happenings in the eighth grade that led to my critique of being friends with the people we were friends with [microaggressions, Perks of Being a Wallflower, other shit with [a specific person], drama for no reason, etc.]. But the year I got my first on-record concussion / the actual year where I was like: “I need to get out of here”–freshman year–I think my concussion propelled my yearning for solitude, and soon, the manifestation of it.¹
For some reason, I have this urge to know everything in a year even though I don’t remember much from other years of high school. Maybe it’s because I know I don’t know/remember things from that year; maybe I just need to get out of my bubble [totally not maybes].²
Cawthorne continues about her “autobiographical” memory:
You look at me with shock when I ask about your sister. I’m confused. You remind me, “She died.” I’m so terribly sorry. I used to remember my own life and I remembered yours too…This forgetting leads to social faux pas that leave me reluctant to engage. I sometimes can’t bear the mistakes I make. (17)
For my readers out there, I became rather a hermit sophomore year of high school (sub-concussive hit + beginning of never-ending symptoms year).³ Even with letter-addressee, though she was one of my best friends, I was still so anxious to socialize in and out of school.⁴ And so I ask this next question with my tail between my legs and yet a surge of confidence: When is your birthday? I can’t figure it out between pictures and thinking your birthday was [friend 2’s] until I realized your birthday isn’t on my calendar–ugh! I wish you a very merry happy unbirthday today, tomorrow, and yesterday!!
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I’m not sure why I am telling you this. Maybe I’m just finally reaching my hand out and hoping someone holds it.
There’s so much more I could say on this topic yet I feel like I’m not fully encapsulating what it’s like in this post-concussed state…Maybe if I write enough about it I might get close to how it feels on paper, but I’ll save that for the blog.
Thanks for reading and intertwining our lives these past years.
I can’t wait to celebrate life and love with you next year.
Mother Web
Kinnie Starr details my general feeling(s) of freshman and sophomore year: “Something I now understand about having an injured brain is that rage is the underside. It bubbles up inside you and corrodes the other emotions that might be in the forefront of an otherwise good day. Rage would surface for me some days in a force so powerful it would fill me with nausea…I thought I was losing my mind, and aging very rapidly, like I was palliative. I didn’t know how to communicate any of this to anyone because I couldn’t remember to put words to it when I was around them…[I also] possessed an overall sense of dread. I was afraid in cars…I was afraid of people because they talked too fast and I couldn’t understand what they were saying and had trouble following subject matter. I was afraid while walking because the ground sometimes moved. I was afraid coming into stores to get groceries because the lights would be too much. This had the effect of making me feel disconnected from people, and because I am naturally introverted to begin with, it made socializing grueling” (102-103).
Whenever I see a picture from then, my anxiety rises like I’m back there. But then I remember that I’m not physically there and am just confused because I didn’t remember this happening or when it happened. All I really know is that I could look at you and know we were feeling/understanding the same things.
Again, in short, “Withdrawal and silence are easier, especially when so few people understand the symptoms or that they can remain ongoing problems” (Lacey 93).
The anxiety I was experiencing was different from what I had ever felt growing up (i.e. separation anxiety). Julia Nunes affirms that “The blank slate of a concussed brain is the most frightening interior experience I’ve lived through, so much more fraught than a mere flawed memory. It’s a stark and instantaneous reminder of the unreliability of my own mind” (226).