life lessons learned from a young comedian that survived a brain stroke at age 22
We will be OK!!
March is my birthday and Brain Injury Awareness Month. This is a topic that touches me deeply.
Last year I decided to face my fear of writing in English and end my years of being selectively muted, for fear of making mistakes. As I said in one of my chronicles, after I spent a few years in the U.S. I felt I did not speak either English or Portuguese and my official language became “Portoenglish.” I can assure you that my new dialect was not well seen, or understood.
Mimi Hayes
Well, leaving my fears aside for a moment, I am back to my weekly meeting with comedian, author and brain injury survivor Mimi Hayes. I needed help learning to write so, as you all know as a creative mind, I could share so many ideas that were populating my brain.
My first lesson on Skype, Mimi gave me a writing prompt, which was “take us back to a moment in time that you have, in some part, never truly left.” Although I feel I have never left my childhood, after one hour or so I was only able to write one paragraph. That was it.
I felt so stupid, dumb, it was embarassing. How come I, a graduated journalist, became speechless just because I moved to a different country? I guess our brains have their own way of telling us where we should go.
And here I am again, feeling I am fullfilling the prophecy of the lazy, dumb child, who became the best cheater on the tests in order to survive at school. I developed strategies that could be credited to a genius. This is called desperation. As you know the ADD diagnosis did not exist by then. Oh brains, such unknown entities.
Mimi and I would meet once a week and it did not take long for me to learn about her journey surviving a stroke at age 22. Our conversations were inspiring and I shared with her my difficulties overcoming trauma. Despite our life differences, we were able to relate to each other on a very real level.
“Each of us carries bags filled with stories, folded up and sometimes forgotten until the opportune moment. Occasionally these traumas hurl themselves out of our hidden compartments and make a mess of our lives. Sometimes we wish they could be destroyed so that we didn’t have to carry such a heavy bag of heartbreak around like an overstuffed grocery sack. But we carry them anyway.”
This quote from Mimi’s book, “I’ll Be OK, It’s Just a Hole in My Head” came at the right time for me, and her unique sense of humor is reassurance that no matter what we are facing, our attitude has an impact on how things will turn out. Especially in hard times. I enjoyed every page and laughed at her adventures living in a hospital recovering from her brain hemorrhage.
Our brains can be very complex. I have suffered from depression and it can be very debilitating. Depression is an illness that starts in your brain and makes you believe that no matter how hard you try, things will never get better. It takes you away from the people and the things that you love. It can take you to dark places and present you with fragile crutches like alcoholism and avoidance. I think depression is somehow a brain injury that needs attention as it can become a fatal disease.
Mimi and I have talked a lot about her near-death encounter at such a young age and what this meant to her growth as a person. We all have battles to overcome, and how we choose to react makes all the difference.
As Mimi says, “I am forced to confront my scar everyday -and the pain and the love that accompany it. This is a good thing. Fear of pain is worse than the pain itself. That’s why our bodies and with effort our hearts, forget pain, or try. And after a while it gets easier to live with these blemishes. Scars become more like friendly souvenirs that say, “Please don’t do that again” or “You’re a goddamn idiot for trying to jump over that fence in a miniskirt.” They don’t wreck your life so much anymore if you put in the time to tend to them, which can be painful too.”
So let’s embrace our scars, feel our pain and overcome our fears. #YOLO. Yes, you only live once.
