Sometimes I Need Help. Sometimes I Need You to Let Me Try

Brain injury changes what you can do. It can also change what everyone around you thinks you can do.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is something I don’t know if we talk about enough after brain injury. We talk a lot about needing help, and for good reason. There have been plenty of times over the last few years when I absolutely needed it. I needed people to drive me places, remember things for me, repeat themselves, slow down, help me keep track of appointments, or deal with things when my brain was just done for the day. There were times when I probably needed more help than I was willing to admit, especially early on when I was still pretty convinced I could outwork the whole damn thing.

But there’s another side of getting help that gets a bit complicated, especially in the early years. At some point you have to find out what you can do yourself.

That’s harder than it sounds because everybody around you has been adjusting too. Your spouse adjusts. Your kids adjust. Your friends adjust. People start doing things because it’s easier, faster or safer. They answer the question for you because they know you’re struggling to find the word. They remind you before you’ve had a chance to remember. They drive because driving wipes you out. They handle the plans because trying to keep six different pieces of something straight can turn into a mess pretty quickly. Most of the time they’re not trying to take anything away from you. They’re trying to make your life easier.

And sometimes they’re right. Sometimes I need the help.

The problem is that if somebody always steps in before I struggle with something, neither one of us ever finds out whether I could have done it.

I’ve noticed this in myself too. There are things I stopped doing because somewhere along the way I decided they belonged to the category of things my brain couldn’t handle anymore. Some of those decisions were probably smart. Some were based on experiences from two or three years ago when my brain was functioning very differently than it is now. But once you build your life around a limitation, you don’t necessarily keep testing it. You just live around it.

That’s the weird thing about “recovery.” You can improve without realizing that one of your old rules has expired. I think I’ve done that more than once.

For a long time, if something overwhelmed me, I treated that as evidence that I couldn’t do it. I’d tell my wife, “My math isn’t quite mathing right.” Now I’m realizing that sometimes it only meant I couldn’t do it then, or I couldn’t do it for that long, or in that environment, or without some kind of accommodation. Those are very different things, but when you’re exhausted and confused and just trying to get through the day, they all feel like the same answer: I can’t do this anymore.

That’s a pretty powerful sentence to start carrying around, and after a while it becomes surprisingly easy to stop checking whether it’s still true.

I’ve had to relearn that with work. I can work. I can build things. I can write. I can sit down with technology and disappear into a problem the same way I always have. In some ways I’m doing more interesting work now than I was before my accident. But I can’t pretend the rules are the same. There are days when I can get four solid hours out of my brain and I’m amazed at what I accomplish. There are other days when two hours feels like somebody pulled the plug out of the wall. If I judge the second day by the first one, I can make myself crazy.

For a while I saw that inconsistency as evidence that something was wrong with my recovery. Now I think the inconsistency is part of the recovery. The trick is figuring out when to push a little and when pushing is just stupid.

I’m still learning that one.

There is a difference between challenging myself and pretending I don’t have a brain injury. I spent a lot of time doing the second and calling it the first.

Sometimes trying means doing something myself and seeing what happens. Sometimes it means asking somebody to come with me but letting me handle the parts I think I can handle. Sometimes it means doing something for twenty minutes instead of two hours. Sometimes it means trying something I haven’t attempted in a year and realizing, Holy shit, I can do this now.

And sometimes I try something and discover that, nope, my brain still hates this.

That’s useful information too.

I don’t think independence after brain injury necessarily means going back to doing everything by yourself. I’m not even sure that’s a particularly useful goal. Before my accident I relied on people all the time; I just didn’t think of it as an accommodation. We divide roles and responsibilities in marriages. We ask somebody for directions. We hire people to do things we’re terrible at. We use calendars, GPS, alarms and notes. Nobody calls that disability. It’s just life.

Brain injury made me much more conscious of needing those things, and for a while that bothered me. Now I’m less interested in whether I did something exactly the way I used to do it and more interested in whether I was able to do the thing I wanted to do.

That’s a pretty big difference.

Maybe I need headphones. Maybe I need a quiet table. Maybe I need to photograph something because there’s no chance I’m remembering it later. Maybe I need AI to hold onto a thought while I go chase another one. Maybe I need somebody else to drive. Maybe I need to leave early. Maybe I need to sleep for two hours afterward.

Fine.

Did I do the thing? Hell yes I did.

That’s becoming a much more useful way for me to look at it.

And I think there’s something here for the people who love somebody with a brain injury too. Helping us matters. God knows we need it sometimes. But there may also be moments when the best kind of help is waiting an extra ten seconds before answering for us. Letting us struggle with the package. Letting us figure out the directions. Letting us try something differently than you would do it.

And being there if it goes sideways.

Because it might.

But it also might not.

There are things I can do today that I genuinely could not have done a year or two ago. I’m only discovering some of them because I’ve started trying again. Not recklessly, and not because I’ve suddenly decided limitations aren’t real. They’re very real. I’m just becoming a little less willing to assume that yesterday’s limitation automatically belongs to today.

Maybe that’s another part of recovery nobody really explains to you. First you have to learn your limitations. Then, every once in a while, you have to have the nerve to test them again.

Let me try.

If I can’t do it, we’ll figure that out.

But give me the chance to surprise both of us.