From TBI Survivor to Neuroscientist: Making Sense of Brain Injury

At 18 years old, Daniel Avesar survived a severe traumatic brain injury that left him unable to think, reason, or experience the world in ways he recognized. Doctors could explain his double vision, but they couldn't explain why his mind no longer felt like his own.

Determined to understand what had happened, Daniel spent decades rebuilding his cognition and eventually earned a PhD in neuroscience to study the very organ that had been ruptured.

In this deeply thoughtful conversation, Daniel and Wendy explore identity, grief, cognition, accommodation, and the invisible realities of brain injury. Together, they ask what becomes possible when we stop asking people to return to who they were before and begin listening to who they are now.

Because sometimes making sense of rupture begins with acknowledging that it changed us.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I had about three years where I don't know how many doctors and therapists, maybe 11 or 12, where only two really helped. So there was nobody to talk to, and no one had a clue what I was dealing with. I just became internally obsessed with fixing what was wrong with me. Yeah. And pretending I was normal. And that progression is you can actually get better. It's just a really hard process.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

At 18, Daniel survived a severe traumatic brain injury and spent years trying to understand changes that nobody could adequately explain. That search eventually led him to earn a PhD in neuroscience and devote his work to helping others make sense of the invisible realities of brain injury. He also hosts several wonderful podcasts, highly recommend, and was gracious enough to have me as a guest a few weeks ago. Welcome to Rupture Daniel.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Thank you. I'm working on our discussion now for my podcast. Soon soon to be put out. Yeah, thanks for introducing me. And thanks for framing things that way. Because for me, sometimes I try to like not hide the brain injury part, but it is a huge undertaking, and I think about it every day. And I also deal with it. So yeah, thanks.

unknown 1:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Nice to be.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Let's start with. I know this I know this happened to you when you were 18, but that was the rupture, the the TBI. Who were you before the rupture? Who were you before the accident?

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Huh, good question. I was kind of like a punk kid that had I was like a really good student, but also kind of a crazy teenager.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Yeah. I was both of those things for sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

So then what happened? Tell us about the accident.

SPEAKER_00 2:00

I was going to the first Coachella concert. I had just started college, and my friend was driving. Anyway, long story short, his car flipped and the the back of the car landed above my head, and I was, you know, I had a subdro hematoma. I was airlifted to Cedar Sinai. This is like outside Los Angeles. And yeah, I had a severe brain injury, and my brain had been like my skull had been fractured, my brain had been smooshed. But I it just was a began a long recovery, a long, you know, experience from that. So yeah, that's what the actual accident event was.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Okay, so now the aftermath. So what happened after? What were you knocked out? Well, you know, what tell us what happened, the symptoms, the treatments, what you went through after.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

Right. So there there was like four months or so, the time towards the end of the hospital is when technically my memory started, but I don't have a memory memory. I just had like bits and pieces, and it was kind of like I was floating through the world. And then I think there was a few months where I was at home and I was told that I had worked with a therapist, and my mom says I was like a toddler. I didn't really understand what had happened to me. I had the double vision, so I'd always walk at this angle to make the world less double y. And messing with the double vision was weird, and it just began this long process. You know, I had about three years where I don't know how many doctors and therapists, maybe 11 or 12, where only two really helped. And that began my thinking about my cognition and what was injured in me. And that was a long thing. It was only four months, but it was a long process in terms of trying to add, trying to do very basic, like we reduced it down to what's the most simple thinking that I could do, and then repeating that became the exercise, and it was very, very hard to do to add numbers over time in my head. The goal was for me, what had happened, like my mind was not my mind, reality wasn't reality anymore. And you're just like, what has happened? And that's why I like your podcast also because I feel like that shock is still there, and sure, uh it's just this long process where dull vision led to a therapy that was experimental, but it started working, so I became really focused on that, and then thinking became my obsession. I couldn't think, I couldn't reason. I'd say in the first year, I spent the first year trying to figure out what was wrong with me, and I have like a list of symptoms that I don't want to go through all of them. I've mentioned so.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

Let's talk about a few of them though, because this is it it it I I know that I learn from every guest how sort of how broad the spectrum of symptoms is.

SPEAKER_00 4:43

Yes, absolutely. So the double vision double vision and yeah, the double vision was weird because if I could focus my eyes, somebody left eye was stuck in. And if I could focus, or no, my right eye was stuck in, yeah. And if I could focus my left eye this way in the streamline of the eye that was stuck, the world wasn't as double y, but as soon as I turn from that, it becomes more double-y. Right. And if I go the other way, eventually it would lead to this like overwhelm that I couldn't deal with. So I was like playing with that, and then realizing I couldn't think, the biggest one or the weirdest one was that my mind was not my mind. So I call it I think I injured inner voice and injured inner self and injured inner me on a personal and a thinking level, and also I injured thinking, like the external world view of my thinking. My mom tells me about that, and then as soon as I realized that, it became like, what can I do? So I can only do addition and little numbers, and as you continue that, so I became like thinking about, for example, like my routine became brushing my teeth because I couldn't do the reasoning of brushing my teeth. Not that I couldn't do the motion, and then planning to get dressed, and then just doing all these little things in life. And my brother, I interviewed some of my family to try to talk to them about this because I don't remember that time. My brother said I was very angry, and I think I was because I remember feeling like I just went to college. I just got out of the house, I was gonna have fun, I was gonna live my life, and I'm stuck back at home and I'm like this.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

I was gonna ask you actually, because a lot of people talk about sort of the emotional dysregulation that comes after a brain injury.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

I think the dysregulation was huge on the first day when I left the hospital, which is really the only thing I remembered. And then the hyperacousis was very aggravating, hearing sensitivity, and then I couldn't sleep. That one was because I had a flip circadian rhythm. I still deal with that to this day. And also the noise sensitivity made everything like weird, and I and then a few other things like hot and cold sensitivity and other like bodily stuff, but the combination of those things, I became focused on my mind and on my mind and my cognition and hiding, like almost like testing what I was dealing with with reality because I could see that no one understood what I was dealing with except the double vision.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

Was that because it was the worst symptom, or it was the one that everybody could grab onto?

SPEAKER_00 7:12

Yeah, they couldn't make sense of the other things, and it led me to walk in a slow, strange way. Like the skinny guy kind of lurching, and I don't know. I don't know how I walked. I know how I experienced it, because I was always trying to line up the world to be equally like a symmetrical double vision because that was less annoying. And then when they gave me the prism glasses, I didn't like that.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

I hated the prism glasses, by the way. I put them on and it made everything worse.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

Yeah, and it made it also like a different unreal. Yes. Because it was unreal anyway, and there's all the other issues, you know. So in the hospital began there's like discussions like about sleep and about certain things, and like in that time I learned to think about my sleep. I couldn't I I couldn't turn off at night. I was wide awake at night, and they're like, use mindfulness to sleep. So I end up using mindfulness, but I couldn't use it to sleep because I was so awake. I used it towards my cognition, like I couldn't think, I couldn't you know, like the beginning of a thought. Like I try to I keep explaining it, but I never explain it well. The beginning of a thought, it's like I want to get a glass of water. So you have to you need a cup, and then you need to get the cup, and you need to move to the cup, and you need to pull water. Each of those, when I describe it, and I've heard other people describe it, each of those things requires the thought, the gear of the thought to happen, and then the movement has to happen. And I lived a life like that that I started drilling like three times in the morning, three times in the middle of the day, three times in the evening, anything. And it was really, really weird. But I used my life and then I improved, but it took a long, long, long time. And Teresa, the therapist that helped me, gave me that framework of this baby stare progression, and she told me not to hit the fatigue. I still did. It took me about four years to learn to live a life where, like, you know, the battery, what's that analogy?

SPEAKER_01 9:09

The energizer bunny.

SPEAKER_00 9:11

Oh, sorry. But that is one, but I was thinking about the spoon theory.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

Oh, the spoon theory that you have a certain number of spoons?

SPEAKER_00 9:17

Yeah. So you do have a certain number of spoons, but let's say everyone has seven or eight, and you used to have seven or eight, and now you have two. I couldn't even do an algebra problem, like a basic algebra problem, the gears of thought. It's almost like you turn on the ignition to have the thought happen, and my mind explodes into this fatigue. So I could get, because of the baby stepping of the addition over time, I could get the gear of the algebra thought to work and like one to happen, and then then I would crash.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

That that makes sense. I because I've described it with mine, which was not as severe as yours, but obviously still persistent. As it felt like parts of my brain, it still does, are are just frozen. Okay, yeah. It just feels like they're not doing the jobs that they need to do, and that it's almost like you can feel it working. Like you talked about the gears. That's that's what it feels like.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

I would have to push it to work, but then someone told me later that at least your gears were in line, at least there was a still ability to think. And so then you start to talk to other brands or people and you realize, like, okay, yeah, like what you said, like they give you some tool, some framework, and I was like, oh, I didn't I didn't know that I could lose that. Nothing generalized for about four years. Generalized is a term that they use. If you work on this enough, it'll apply to other things. Nothing like that happened for about four years. I can't think too hard because then I'll put myself in that fatigue. And usually it happened with the schoolwork because I became so focused on getting my mind back, and I was like a good student, and I'd just gone to college. So my mom was taking me these community class, community college classes, and I was just like working on the thinking, and just being in the lecture, for example, was hard enough. And then I got things to work enough, and then I went back to college. And people didn't think my mom, the therapists, there was only Teresa at that time because no one else had worked, everyone else was uh not worthwhile. The the attempt to talk to them, they didn't understand what you're dealing with, and it was doing more harm than good. Also, the vision therapy helped.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

Well, uh, can we stay there for a second? Because I wanted to sort of understand like what kinds of treatments and therapies you tried. So you did speech therapy and vision?

SPEAKER_00 11:26

Vision. I didn't do anything else because we didn't know about anything else. And like I went to talk to one of the doctors that I had seen in the hospital, and I remember leaving that meeting like with this feeling like, holy shit, they have no clue what I'm talking about, and I'm on my own with this. My mom says the doctor thought that she was interested. You know, it's it's a de-personalization.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

If the doctor knew maybe they could get me to the right therapy or treatment or discussion. You know, now I have this discussion with people, and I say very clearly, the brain has systems that create reality, and you can injure that. That's how I this is how I think about it. And it makes the most sense to me. I didn't have an injury to my movement the way I had injury to my thinking. Not at all. But it was still very hard to do and still very slow. I think with a lot of things like that, the people told me my focus was very good. So I didn't injure attention, but it was still hard to do. But to do the attention, to do the schoolwork or do any of it, I was hellbent on getting back to what I had, and I wouldn't let this I couldn't it bothered me so much that I was like, I can't let this bother me. So I just became living this life. You lose hope or decide not to try to explain it once nobody ever understands what you're saying. Now, when I give people advice that I had, which is basically learning to baby step your problems and avoid the fatigue, it's just this weird progression to improve. For seven years, I had eight leveling up experiences, and I could describe each one, but I was gonna say what is what could tell us what you mean by a leveling up experience. I remember after the algebra attempts, I had the ability to do the gears of thought, although it was still hard to do. And then I had my mom says my reasoning came back, and so I wasn't like a toddler. So those are two like I don't know what came back, but it's almost like something.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

What caused the reasoning to come back? How did the reasoning come back?

SPEAKER_00 13:23

I was in the hospital when I left the hospital and my cousin visited me. I asked him, like, how did I get to the hospital? And they said, actually, a helicopter flew you in. And my mom says that I said to my cousin, Oh, so then you also flew in with a helicopter. Like, so I didn't understand. I don't know, it just I wasn't there. And then and then one day, about three or four months into the work, she said it just like clicked back on. The fourth year, when I stopped pushing myself to the fatigue, I was working on rebuilding the thinking, rebuilding the learning. Relearning is not learning, and I was learn, I was learning how to rebuild my stuff through my undergrad, and I just kept using my work towards that end. And it over seven years, it like really, really improved. Then I thought I'm like, okay, I'm normal. I was very ashamed of my inability to think, so I didn't talk to anyone about it, and I didn't want other people to know that. And then when I got into neuroscience, neuroscience, I remember it was like this textbook and this memory class. So it got me thinking, this is what I need to make sense of because I had already been making sense of what my problems were to work on the problems, but then in a neuroscience perspective, I was making sense of the whole thing to like figure out your mind is injured, your inner self is injured. Nothing, it broke reality, and nothing that anyone was talking about made sense to explain it.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

So what you know, one of the things we we talk about on this podcast is that when you've had a rupture, it exposes failures in the system, right? Um the system's failures become really like they're put into stark relief when you have a rupture. And systems that you just assumed you would be there when you needed them turn out not to be at all ready for you, and they're broken and all of that. And for a lot of people, that's the healthcare system. Like when I ask people who got through this, healthcare comes up a lot, or the insurance system. Sometimes it's work, sometimes it's family, often it's identity. Did which systems were you aware? I'm trying to understand. Like, did you go into neuroscience because you felt like the doctors were not able to explain what was going on and you needed to figure it out?

SPEAKER_00 15:34

I have no idea. Like the good doctors, Cedar Sinai, they said we have we don't know. We don't know what you're that was the best answer because the other ones would try to say something like, you don't it's in it's like an in your head, or it's emotional, or it's anxiety, or you're gonna have there was no discussion with anyone about anything that I was dealing with, except some small interactions with some there was like one girl who I guess also had a brain jury, and we met in the lobby of the vision therapy, and there was like a two-minute interaction there, and that was it. And then so there was nobody to talk to, and no one had a clue what I was dealing with. The science is a gateway to make sense of what just happened to me, and nobody has a clue. My dad was an attorney, and we had pretty good insurance, and they said there something happened then where everything for like the OT, the PT, and everything that I didn't really need, they put into the speech therapy. So the insurance was actually really helpful, but it wasn't like actually, actually helpful. Like the therapy was good, and it almost like gave me the ropes to think about what is wrong with me and how to deal with this. And I remember the therapist being so proud when I finished her goals, and I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? I'm not in a good place at all. And she was happy that we met all the goals, and it's like, well, that's the end of the therapy. And so I was left with the impression that I'm on my own. I wasn't on my own as in I had that safety, but everything else I was on my own, and I had to figure it out and work and work and work to improve it. And so there wasn't, I forget the word you use, but there wasn't a world that understood, but there was like things you could hop to to kind of help you, like disability services, understood that I needed extra time. I have this thirst with my thinking where I when I think too much, it builds a pressure in my head and water relieves it. So I had to like get a note to be able to drink water. Then I have to be able to get a note to be able to pee. So you can't go to the accommodations. Yeah, so there's all these, but they don't understand why. So you have to go to the doctor to get a note for it to explain it. It's just really weird.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

That that that is like the those are the fissures that the rupture reveals too, right? Is that these accommodations that all of a sudden you need these accommodations and you have to explain them and document them, right? Yeah. And prove that you need them as opposed to just having them available because there's a need for them. And that's a real problem. I mean, in my fictional country, the very first ministry was the ministry of accommodation, because we live in a world where we do have to negotiate every accommodation. And wouldn't it be amazing if we lived in a world that actually anticipated those accommodations?

SPEAKER_00 18:12

So, with regard to anticipation, there has to be a level like the first guy that had a wheelchair that needed to go into a building. They need to understand why you need a ramp, and they need to accept that that person has injured the nervous system that allows them to move in that fashion. Right.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

So that discussion is easier in a visible injury than an invisible injury.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

Right. And that's the discussion that I was trying to have from an early stage, but I couldn't, I'm not I'm still not good at describing it, or I've been working on it for a long time. My podcast idea was branch or person, what are you dealing with, and discuss, like only focus on the I stay in the lane of the invisible problems and then how it's experienced, how it interacts with the outside world. And so I've been thinking about that for so long. So I'm trying to only focus on that because each branch of person has a bunch of those problems. So after figuring mine out and improving, I was like doing that to other people, kind of like subconsciously, but more, you know, it's like we analyze people, and if they're explaining me their branching problem, my mind was always how to fix it, how to improve it, make sense of it in order to do something. So that's the advice I started giving people. And then I don't some people are like, who the hell are you to give me that advice? But the people who I know, we end up having really good discussions. You know how they talk about the tension trauma release? Have you ever heard that one?

SPEAKER_01 19:33

No, talk, talk about that.

SPEAKER_00 19:35

I guess it's kind of consistent with the body keeps the score literature stuff where the trauma gets stored in the body, and it leads to a tremoring. And to let it out of the body, it has to have this like emoting. Like I went to this tension trauma release course. Everyone had these experiences where they're tremoring and their bodies released, and I was like, I don't know what you guys are talking about. I'm not having any of those. And cut to like two years later when I learned about lexithymia, and I had spoken to some other researchers, and I had this framework. I I would have to like let myself feel the feelings, and it led to this overwhelm, and I couldn't get past it, or I don't know, maybe I was like working on getting past it. But when I did acupuncture, my body started like really tremoring. Then I could feel my heart, and I began to feel I guess there's feelings in your body. I had never had that before. Um but I have this, you know, so it became trying to find people to interview who had similar experiences, and then find the experts that are studying this.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

So, what do you now understand about how the brain works, how your brain works, what the injury did that you couldn't have learned from the doctors and the other providers?

SPEAKER_00 20:49

The new world thinks about the brain, or there's a new they used to think about the brain as regions, but now there's this interconnectivity that they think about. And that interconnectivity is showing up in networks with the brain imaging, like fMRI and pet. And they have like these regions are all interconnected. So it's this whole assembly of neuronal projections and systems, and some of them are really clear, like with memory. It's like this medial temporal lobes in this hippocampus, but you know, so the structure is getting well known and the interconnectivity is getting super well known, but really everything feeds into the hippocampus. So if you injure other parts of your brain or your other stages in the memory, the regaining process, memory can get injured as well, and your hippocampus is completely intact. I think it's because all the other things are feed into the hippocampus, and that's like 26 networks, maybe or brain systems that we know about. So it becomes this whole organ view. So I'm saying a lot, but the the uh regions of the brain have specific systems and functions, and some are very clear, like cognition. Vision and some are not so clear like emotions or self or reality, but they can all get injured, damaged physically, which makes the the the argument that I've been getting into lately with the clinicians, because I think of it you can injure yourself because the brain regions that are in you that create you can get injured and then you don't feel like yourself, or you can injure the brain regions that create aspects of self. The other one is that you know people talk about like the white matter shifts or the DTI. So I I think um the white matter has white matter privilege, I call it. I think you like that term because that one gets picked up in the scans, but the other parts don't really get picked up in the scans. They can get injured in all, you know, the physical, like the brain's softer than butter and warm butter. You know, it doesn't make sense that the other parts will get injured as well. Synapses, the dendrites, all these other parts that create create the organ that creates all these mental things. I just think that the imaging doesn't show that that gets injured, but also it must. And so the rebuilding and the relearning, it takes it's so long and it's so slow and it's so tedious. So thinking about how the brain works and the systems of learning work gave me understanding of the systems of relearning.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

Instead of thinking about the brain in regions, right, you're talking about the interconnectivity of all the parts, right?

SPEAKER_00 23:27

Yeah, and the interconnectivity does have a physicality to it. Like if the regions were like this region, this region, the interconnectivity has fibers, has inputs, has neurons that create the activity. So you can injure this part of it or injure this part of it, it's gonna change. That's the other thing that I I guess I keep going on this tangent, but brain injury leads to a mental injury, and that's not discussed in the outside world in any way that I've ever seen or that I think is sufficient.

SPEAKER_01 23:56

So yeah, do you think if it were, do you think if it were discussed the way you're talking about it, it might open the door or at least a crack in the door to treatments?

SPEAKER_00 24:06

Yes, it would open the door because I think if you have a whiteboard, I call a magic wand. If I could wave a magic wand, I'd be like this group of this team that's supposed to be helping understands or listens to me and doesn't question it. And every it would have to be like every step of the way, they would just have to ask a question. But I think as long as they were curious and understood that, then the doors open because these are the things that I need over time to not hit the fatigue, to work on what I'm trying to work on to then improve, and then just it wouldn't be a miserable life. You know, it would be less miserable.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

Less miserable. Well, I think we would all take less miserable. So your magic wand is the same as my magic whiteboard, right? Which is what system would you fix?

SPEAKER_00 24:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:50

So is the system that you would fix to get everybody to actually just listen and think this through step by step with you?

SPEAKER_00 24:57

Right. I think that that's the quickest way to a solution that would apply across everyone. With my mom, we would argue about it and argue about it and argue about it. And I was just like, to shut up and listen, and you know, I didn't say in a rude way, but I was like, I need you to be quiet and listen. And then once she listened enough, she's like, she said to me something like, So you're like a prince in a different land, and you wake up in this, well, I'm like, what are you talking about? No, I'm me.

SPEAKER_01 25:25

And I don't know, she was like creating like as if it's a fantasy, because it was just Well, she was trying to do something that's incredibly difficult, right? Which is to understand something that is almost that that you really can't understand unless you've had unless you're going through it. You cannot understand it. Cannot understand it. Yeah. Uniquely unrelatable. But she was trying.

SPEAKER_00 25:48

Yes, and it took a long time to get her to try, and I appreciate that she did make that move. And since then, our discussion, our relationship shifted. She says that when I got home from the hospital, I was like a stranger and she didn't know how to talk to me about it. And I had the same thought, but with everybody, and so then I never but it wasn't like we could have that discussion. You know, it was like you're trying to get back to your normal life and nothing works, and she had ruptured many, many, many levels. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:17

Well, and that that's part of the difficulty of this, right? Is that everyone who goes through this desperately wants to get back to who they were before. You can't get back to who you were before. And comparing yourself to that prior version of you, it's a trap. You you'll you will never be that we cannot be those people again.

SPEAKER_00 26:35

And it's a hard, it's a loss. It's a huge and you grieve for the loss. I haven't had I I have learned to feel my sorrow and my pain, and I haven't had what I call a grief experience. But my friend Nancy, who's brand new since a young age, she says that what I'm experiencing is grief. It's just not I don't know. I'm still like working towards that emotion. But yeah, 100%. So could I ask you then? You've had that grief, or you've been able to deal with it?

SPEAKER_01 27:07

Like m mine has come in waves, like I think everybody's has. So like my phase one of this experience was I just kept trying. Mine, my injury was not as severe as yours. Mine was the mile, right? The 80% of TBIs that are uh that are mild, that are concussions. But my first year was trying to pretend it didn't happen and just do every treatment I could and just one foot in front of the other. My next phase of it was just dark and sad because it was I I couldn't become the I could no longer be the person I was before. All of my confidence was built around the person I was before. So all my confidence got stripped from me like the bark off of a tree. And you don't know who you're becoming, but you know you're no longer the person you were before. And it took a few years. And the the thing that got me out of it was I I started writing about a year into it, but the writing itself didn't really get me there. I had to actually, you know, it's interesting that you talk about like your your uh your mom saying like you were like a prince in a different land. I had to create an entire fictional country for people like us. That was the only thing that got me out of the darkness.

SPEAKER_00 28:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:14

Because I also recognized at a certain point that nothing's gonna make this better.

SPEAKER_00 28:17

I just became internally obsessed with fixing what was wrong with me and pretending I was normal around that. And so that was just how I lived. And so the seven year the people I have met who have improved, it's like three years, four years, two years of this, these things being worked on, and then once those are improved, and I maybe they don't call it a leveling up.

SPEAKER_01 28:39

Yeah, I think that language of leveling up is actually very useful.

SPEAKER_00 28:42

Good, good. That's good. Some people say to me, all of a sudden I realized, but for me, I was so in my head. People talk about a what's that word? Like a hyper focused or yeah, you know, you're you're hyper-sensitive. I was like that towards my inner self to work on it and make sense of it and then improve it. And then as it leveled up, if I wasn't being so observing it, then I would have said, all of a sudden, but I was observing it. So it was all of a sudden, and I was like, okay, now I'm at this level. And yeah, it was just I didn't have the feelings until that 17-year mark later, and then a depth of emotion, and I wasn't like suicidal, but I was thinking, like, what if I hadn't lived? Like that would have been easier. It was just a lot of pain, a lot of sadness, sadness, pain, rage, sadness, pain, right. There's like spear of it, and yeah, to learn how to feel, I learn how to tolerate other people's feelings. Empathy came with that, which I wasn't expecting. And I don't think I it's not that I didn't have empathy, but I didn't feel it. I had like I can sympathize, but it's different than empathy.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Sympathize, yeah, sympathy and empathy aren't the same.

SPEAKER_00 29:50

Yeah, and that shifted in me, and I was like, oh, like I didn't expect that. Yeah, so it's just the journey continues, and I have improved a lot. And I what I would like to do with the magic wand slash whiteboard also in the future is build a service. The service would be to help people, but the help starts with what are you dealing with? How can we baby step and learn not to hit the limit? What can you add to this person's life? And then to document the changes over like three to five years.

SPEAKER_01 30:20

Quite a journey. Let me ask you, well, I I you already we already talked about your ministry, and you are the you do have the ministry of making sense of it, which I think is really perfect for you.

SPEAKER_00 30:31

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 30:31

Just to wrap up, if if if you were to meet someone today, now that you know everything you know, who is dealing with a brain injury, uh new a new one, what would you say to them? What advice would you give them?

SPEAKER_00 30:46

I would advise that 50% rule lifestyle and also the making sense of what is injured in you. And and I've I've like had too many discussions with people where I'm afraid to assume that they have a similar like these problems are injured in them, so I don't talk about it. But now I I would say, like, you know, what are you dealing with? What's the internal problems? And trying to find a way to make sense of it, it's towards not making it worse, and it's towards finding help, and it's towards getting the people around you to understand a little bit, and also learning how to not hit that fatigue point is a very hard thing to do because when you're so behind in life because you're brain injured, you want to do it. If you have energy, you're gonna use it. And you also have to do, we have to live our lives. You will change, you will improve. I think I have met people who haven't, but most people do, and that progression is you can actually get better. Yeah, it's just a really hard process. It is I want to talk to the unbrained injured people around the brain of your people to build the help. That's why I think about this too. But yeah, that's the advice I would give to both brain and unbrain injured people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:53

That's great. Last question: where can people find your work?

SPEAKER_00 31:57

I have a podcast. It's on Apple and Spotify and maybe iHeartRadio, but the podcast is called Experiencing My Brain, and Experiencing My Brain is discussion of that inner perspective through other people want to talk to me about it. It's really cool. And then the Building Brain Awareness to Help Brain Injured Recovery is BBA or Building Brain Awareness for Short is a YouTube channel. And that's good too, because the clinicians, researchers, outside word present, but the audience are brain injured, so the discussion that ends up happening is the discussion I think needs to happen.

SPEAKER_01 32:28

It's work that needs to be done. And on behalf of the brain injured community, we appreciate your work.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 32:34

Well, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me today, Daniel. This has been really, really great. And I think our listeners and our viewers will learn a lot from your journey and all the work that you've done. So thank you so much.