Part III: Learning a Different Life

The Mary M. Marshall Collection

It was not the accident itself that revealed the full extent of my injury.

It was what came after—slowly, and then all at once.

At first, I believed I had survived and was returning. I had been in the hospital. I had been diagnosed. I had endured what could be named. That seemed, at the time, sufficient. Survival suggested a direction: forward, back into the life I had been living.

But there were interruptions I could not account for.

I began to lose my place in spaces I knew. I would reach for objects and miss them. I would start a sentence and feel it dissolve before it arrived. My eyes would not hold steady. My speech would not follow intention. There were moments when I could not tell if the problem was with my body or with my mind, only that something was no longer reliable.

At first, I thought this was temporary.

Then I understood: it was not.

It took time—years, in fact—to recognize that what I was experiencing was not a series of unrelated difficulties, but the unfolding reality of a brain injury. Not an event that had passed, but a condition that remained.

There is a particular kind of disorientation that comes with that realization. It is not panic. It is not even fear. It is a quiet recalibration of expectation.

The life I had been preparing for—structured, intellectual, dependent on clarity of thought and precision of speech—was no longer available to me in the same way. I could not will my way back to it. Effort alone did not restore what had been altered.

I had to learn differently.

There were moments of embarrassment—small, public exposures of what I could no longer conceal. Missteps. Missed cues. The subtle shift in how others responded when they sensed something was not quite aligned. I became aware, not only of my own limitations, but of how quickly they could be misread.

But there were also moments of decision.

At some point, I stopped measuring my progress against who I had been and began asking a different question: what is required now?

That question led me, eventually, to seek help for what had become one of the most persistent disruptions—my vision.

By then, I understood that what appeared to be separate issues were not separate at all. The difficulty reading. The loss of focus. The sense that my balance and my thinking were somehow connected. These were not isolated problems. They were expressions of a system that had been altered.

When I began vision therapy, I did not think of it as recovery. I thought of it as an experiment—an attempt to understand whether anything could be improved.

What I found was not a return, but an adjustment.

As my vision began, gradually, to stabilize, other things followed. Not immediately, and not completely. But there was a shift. A sense that certain functions—balance, concentration, orientation—were no longer working against one another.

It was not that I had regained what I had lost.

It was that I was beginning to understand how to live with what remained.

This required a different kind of discipline. Not the discipline of mastery, which I had known before, but the discipline of attention. Of noticing. Of working within limits that did not always announce themselves in advance.

I had survived the accident.

That was clear.

What was less clear, and took much longer to learn, was how to live in the life that followed—how to think, to speak, to move, and to continue, not as I had been, but as I was.

That learning did not happen all at once.

It is, in many ways, still ongoing.

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Note: This is Part III of a series reflecting on February 24, 1995 and its aftermath. Additional reflections are forthcoming. Parts I and II are available in the archive.

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