I said I had a headache. Every day. A daily headache. The cadence was correct, but the rest wasn’t. “Headache” made me sound functional. Like someone you could offer Advil to.
The problem was language itself.
The original sin was the brain injury. But then the problem became language. My brain wasn’t working the same way, and the part that explains things was also damaged.
Language for pain has always failed. It’s a white whale. I had inadequacy stacked on inadequacy. So I made up a word: headpain. Not headache. Not trauma. Not static terms. Just: headpain. A hum, a throb, a shutdown. An endless, structureless dissonance.
It felt like being full of noise. Not sound—noise. Hissing, screeching neurons glitching out. Fridge motors triggered flinches like firecrackers. Sometimes I felt underwater. Other times, jagged sparks of sensation.
I used to live in language. English major. Linguistics grad school. Former CMO. I wrote thought leadership. I made things mean things. I was proud of that.
Then suddenly, everything meant nothing. I lost words mid-sentence. I couldn’t hold thoughts in my head. The worst part: I remembered what it used to be like.
I had watched my father, late in Alzheimer’s, struggle for words. I saw his frustration. I felt it later in myself.
Except I passed. I could still say “I’m fine.” I could still mask. I wore dark glasses indoors. No one expected much. There was grace. I gave myself none.
That’s the noise: not volume but distortion. Misfires. Glitches. Knowing what you want to say and losing it in transit. The panic of not being able to speak what you feel.
Pain language is useless: sharp, dull, throbbing, stabbing. None of it fit. I was trying to explain a full-body system crash with a box of crayons.
So I used stand-ins: “headache.” “tired.” “overstimulated.” They weren’t true. Just shapes.
People took me literally. Thought I meant what those words usually mean. They didn’t know I was walking around inside a howling, flickering error code. And I didn’t know how to tell them.
Because the words didn’t exist. And even if they had, I wasn’t sure anyone would believe me.
That’s the cruelty of brain injury: it messes not just with what you know, but with how you know. And how you say what you know.
The world saw me as competent. I could still string a sentence. I still sounded “fine.” I wasn’t. I was glitching.
So I wrote. Alone, in a dark office, with a desk lamp and a half bottle of Albariño. I started, not for clarity or for an audience, but to tell myself: I’m still here.
The noise didn’t stop. It hasn’t. But writing gave it shape. Shape is salvation. It has edges. It takes up space in the world.
I couldn’t silence the noise. But I could name it. And in naming it, I made space for others to hear the truth buried inside.#TraumaticBrainInjury #ChronicIllness
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