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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.