In this gripping essay, Judith Hannah Weiss recounts life before and after the traumatic brain injury she suffered after a drunk driver hit her parked car. Left with aphasia and amnesia—which instantly altered her life as a writer—she documents her long physical and cognitive recovery.
In my first life, I was a freelance writer. We ate my words at every meal and they paid the mortgage, too. Prolifically not myself, I wrote countless pieces of promotion for clients like New York, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, PBS, Disney, and Vogue. More a story seller than a storyteller, I was a tool like a broom or a mop. I wrote about places I didn’t go, and things I didn’t do, for legends I didn’t know.
Then a drunk driver stole a truck, jumped a curb, and compressed a parked car. I was in the car. The good news was I survived. The bad news was brain damage. It was an accident.
My first mind had furnishings. You know, nice chairs, a sofa, floor to ceiling shelves for beautiful things. It also had a foundation. My new mind tips in and out, devoid of furnishings. I was a mommy, I was a badass, then I was in pieces, invisible. An instantaneous dissolution of an entire culture, formerly between my ears. The brain that blew was mine.
Once I can use my hand, I start scratching any words I can find on any surface I can find – paper plates, paper cups, placemats, Popsicle sticks. Fragments not in alphabetical order, not in numerical order, not in chronological order, but out of order, like me.
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