hello everyone!

Hi everyone!

I’m new here, well sort of. 

I’ve been coaching Ilana with writing for almost a year now and I’m very excited that she has asked me to write guest posts on her fantastic blog!

Here’s a little bit about me and why I’m here:

My name is Mimi Hayes and I am a comedian and author living in Brooklyn, New York. My “claim to fame” was my first book, “I’ll Be OK, It’s Just a Hole in My Head” which came out in 2018 and documented my recovery from a near-fatal brain hemorrhage in my early 20’s. 

That sounds like some pretty un-funny content, and parts of it definitely are, but I’ve managed to make a quasi-living as a comedian by joking about my trauma. While not everyone who reads my book has had a brain injury, many can relate to being scared for their future and frequently asking themselves if they will really be “OK” when times get hard. 

Fear is a very powerful element in our lives. It can make us do things we wouldn’t, and behave in strange ways. For me, fear made me laugh at things that weren’t funny, like my brain hemorrhaging and losing mobility in half my body. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to see that what I was doing was coping. And luckily for me, it resulted in a published book and a career in standup comedy that I wouldn’t have ever expected. 

Since my injury I’ve also learned about my community; brain-injured folks and people like me that have survived the unthinkable. Within a few years of using hashtags on social media, I found thousands of survivors on Instagram and Twitter. They were young, many of them millennials like me, who were trying to understand their own injuries and the life changes they’d endured because of them. 

It was in this community that I also allowed myself to explore my own mental health. I’d had depression and anxiety for as long as I could remember, and now I’d added a new layer to my broken brain: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

My “Brain Buddies” as I call them, understood this. Despite having recovered very well from my injury, they understood that there was more going on underneath the surface. Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) are often called “invisible disabilities” because we look perfectly fine on the outside, yet struggle with many things even after we recover. 

Sometime after the book came out, I received an influx of love and support from this community who felt seen by my story. It honestly never occurred to me that my funny book about almost dying would have any impact on anybody, except for maybe my mother, who I credit with saving my life. But here they were in my DMs and in the review section of my Amazon page telling me how grateful they were for my story of recovery and resilience. 

So, long story short, that’s why I’m here. 

I’m here to help anyone who has ever felt alone, scared, anxious, or uncertain about the crazy world we live in. Life can change so quickly, and we are often processing our traumas as we are still experiencing them. 

But if my brain has taught me anything, it’s that there is always something to laugh about.