I was a 19 yo kid hanging on for dear life, exhibiting early Alzheimer symptoms as a result of too many concussions from being a college athlete. Some days, I would forget what classes I had, even though the semester was almost over. Other days, I might leave a store and the parking lot would appear completely new to me, confusing the heck out of me as to where I am. The worst was when I could not complete a sentence because I would just blanked out mid-sentence and lose my thought. It's frightening when one realizes that sentences are not that long. And so, I was living out Guy Pierce's character in the movie Memento. I would preface every introduction by announcing I have a memory problem, as there was a high chance I would not recall having met someone before if I were to run into them again. I spent a lot of time in these early days re-introducing myself to people and repeating the same stories because I don't recall sharing it the first time. Oh, and for the cherry on top, I was also working on an engineering degree and trying to solve high level math problems with Swiss cheese for a brain. Generally, if you have a physical injury like a sprained ankle, then doctors would tell you to stay off doing too much physical activity on that ankle so it could heal. One would think a brain would also need time to rest after an injury, but instead I was putting mine through the grinder because I had to take fun classes like Thermodynamics and Differential Equations. A brain injury is an invisible injury, so everyone essentially thought I was fine, except my suitemates, who ultimately called an intervention because they thankfully knew before I did that dealing with daily chronic migraines was in fact, not normal.
It was the era before CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) was discovered and people weren’t taking concussions all that seriously, myself included. I mean, they said I had a “mild” concussion, which didn’t sound so terrible. I would later learn that unless you’ve cracked your head open or have lost consciousness, then they generally call everything else “mild”, which is a misnomer because the symptoms could still be very severe.
The medical staff declared that the good news was my CAT scan showed I was not hemorrhaging in the brain, which was great because I was concussed a month ago and they're only scanning me now. They told me I suffered from short term memory loss and suddenly it all made sense as to why I was struggling with every aspect of life. They said the bad news was that they didn't know what's wrong with me. However, they then signed off for me to continue participating in the same activities that got me here in the first place, all without ordering further tests to figure anything out! Even though I was but a teenage punk without a fancy degree on my wall, I knew then that the medical staff was useless and did not have my best interest at heart. As a result, I discovered some agency in my back pocket and set forth on an adventure to figure out how to heal myself.
At this point, the Universe decided it's been cute that I've been playing a heathen this whole time, but it's time to burn what remains of my analytical STEM brain, which I've been desperately clinging on to, into the ground. It cranked the knob past 10 and revealed to me a level of weird I did not know was possible until I was crying uncle and tapped out. My fundamental belief system was completely flipped upside down. I started experiencing things I didn't know was possible and I was also suddenly able to do things I didn't know I, or any human beings for that matter, could do. "Okay, okay...maaaaybe there is more going on with the Universe than we've been taught," I thought.
I pursued the rabbit hole with the curiosity of an engineer learning a new system and the methodic discipline of a college athlete in season. I read about every subject under the sun—neurology, physics, quantum physics, neuroplasticity, psychology, meditation, sleep science, religion, etc—but to my own surprise, it was metaphysics that could best account for what I was experiencing without contradicting itself (well, it’s fraught with paradoxes, but it at least acknowledges them). At first, I thought maybe all this strangeness was happening to me because I've hit my head too many times, but then other people around me were starting to experience the same weird train that I rode in on. Well, I don't see how my traumatic brain injuries can account for their experiences so it can't be "all in my head". Then one day, I realized, "Oh hey, I haven't had a migraine in a while. I think my chronic headaches have stopped!" As it turned out, in figuring out how to heal myself, I seemed to have unlocked the ability to heal other people too. I have unknowingly stepped into the archetypal energy of the Wounded Healer. Next thing I know, there was a line of guinea pigs outside my door waiting for me to take them in.
(If you want to hear the full story, you should tell me to get going on writing that book.)