I Would Like A Word

Judith Hannah Weiss

My job was words. The right words at the right time.

I started on staff at Time, then became a freelancer, and later, a part-time ghost.  My clients produced Oprah and Elmo and Martha and Elle, plus Vogue, The New Yorker, and Kermit the Frog.  Then a drunk lady stole a truck and compressed a parked car. I was in the car. The good news was I survived. The bad news was brain damage. 

My new job was rolling Play-Doh balls, pounding plastic pegs in boards plus learning how to walk and talk. I was parked at a table in Outpatient Rehab locked in a life no one would choose -- with a brain no one would pick. I lost a few million neurons and sometimes it shows on my face.  It happens when I have to say something I can’t say or do something I can’t do. Every day was bursting with objects and events and actions and creatures and features I couldn’t say. Like “walk” or “run” or “push” or “pull.” That is called aphasia. 

I also had anomia. That meant I couldn’t name things. It might be a rock, a rose, a dress. A clock, a box, a house, a mouse, a mess. For lunch, I had nothing. For dinner, I had nothing. Or nothing I could name. Then there were things I used to know like my address. And things I used to do but couldn’t do anymore, like place my hands on a keyboard. That is called amnesia. When a tester asked me something simple, my breathing got faster, my heart rate got faster, I started to sweat. I had “frontotemporal lobar degeneration,” “frequent phonetic breakdowns,” plus “articulatory groping and phonetic disintegration.”  

Sometimes I’d get a white-knuckle grip on a word. Other times, I would say “shoe” when I meant “shirt,” and “door” when I meant “car” and “top” when I meant “bottom” or “lots” when I meant “lost” – which I was, all the time. Lost, I mean. It’s hard to navigate when you can't decipher anything and can’t tell anyone you can’t. I was between the lost and the not-yet lost, the found and the not-yet found, the things that can and can’t be said.  A doctor might call this a 13% reduction in the frontal lobe, a 6% reduction in the parietal lobe, 9% inthe occipital lobe, and a 4% reduction in some other lobe. I would say I lost my life. The life I had before. 

There were other problems, too. Sometimes my vision cut out and that part of the screen was  missing or that part of the curb or that part of a page or that part of my day or my life. People think of the brain as one big computer, albeit confined to a very small space. It’s really more like millions of little computers. But nothing backs up human brains. “Pages” are lost, “chapters” are lost, whole books and lives are lost.   

Just before the accident, I’d begun to ghost a book for a name-brand doctor. The corporate client was told I “hurt my back” and they were willing to wait. After three months, not so much. I couldn’t say I’m no longer able to read.  I couldn’t say I’m no longer able to write.  I couldn’t say I no longer knew who they were, what they booked, or what I ever did for them. Leave alone, how I did it. I never got another paycheck, never did another job.

Maps are an attempt to locate yourself in an external and internal way. Oh, the places you went. They’re gone and so are you. Your personal map is not your map anymore. Instead, you have upside-down maps, backward maps, maps drawn by kids, maps drawn from lack of memory, maps of the heart. Also a map of your great-grandmother’s gloves. A map of your great-grandpa’s hand, a map of your great grandparents, whose lives ended before yours began. You come to a country called “the presence of absence,” then to a country called “the absence of presence.” You don’t speak the language. Street signs are muddled or missing, plus “north” is south, “south” is north, days don’t have numbers, months don’t have names. Every town is called “blank.”  Every state is called “big blank.”

If you could really map my brain, my first brain would be divided into territories called:

*somewhat smart 

and 

*pretty smart 

and my next brain would be divided into territories called:

*somewhat smart

*not smart at all 

and 

*you’ve got to be kidding, right?

Brain rehab took place in a room I couldn’t find five days a week for a year. I didn’t know who was there because they fell off the wagon or slid off a scaffold or tripped an IED in Iraq.  Perhaps we served our country or pizza, pitched ball, patched roads. Perhaps we were bakers or builders or preachers or teachers or sat on a wall and had a great fall. Someone new arrived often, wordless and with blank smiles. We were there to build new lives with leftover parts from yesterday’s brain. That’s a big job in itself.  

There were two Brain Training programs – one for survivors of brain injury and one for caregivers. Caregivers were told to separate their “new” daughter/son/father/mother/husband/ wife/friend from “the one before the accident.” I was the only “survivor” in Outpatient Rehab who was a “caregiver,” too.  To stay in the program, you had to be just the right amount of screwed up. If you were too screwed up, you were ejected. If you weren’t screwed up enough, you were ejected. Also if you weren’t rich/ran out of insurance, you were ejected. Or all the above. I was ejected.

This explains why I learned how to read with the caring attention of no one at all. Or, put more succinctly, I relearned to read at age 56 in a “program” I devised. I’m glad I learned to read again.  If I hadn’t, I would have missed 33,600,000 remedies to fix my brain. They include biofeedback, Sudoku, Prevagen, protein shakes, acupuncture, breath work, sound baths, celery juice, kombucha, keto foods, cold water plunging, powerhouse mushrooms, leafy greens, gratitude, hallucinogens, plus getting out of town.  

As you get older, you are supposed to have time for yourself. If you’re brain injured, you skip a few steps. You don’t have time and you don’t have yourself.  Experts in the field of brain damage, have, of course, never suffered brain damage. While we who have suffered brain damage, and will deal with it forever, will never be experts in anything. 

I’m an antique. When I began in media, magazine covers were painted on caves. We used paper, pen and news judgment. Then we had IBM Selectrics and Kodachrome days. Women were paid 57 cents on the dollar compared to men doing the same jobs. All men were not created equal and women were created even less equal. Back then we didn’t have bytes or megabytes, which is a million bytes; or gigabytes, which is a billion bytes; or terabytes, which is a million megabytes; or petabytes, which is a million gigabytes. We didn’t download anything or upload into clouds. Nothing made waves on anyone’s feeds. We had phone booths, subway tokens, and most of the Great Salt Lake. When we made a mistake, we did not hit the “delete” button. It had not yet been devised. Of course, some things don’t change much while other things don’t change at all. Women are now paid 67 cents on the dollar compared to men in the same jobs. A mere five decades to earn an extra dime.

In my first life, I made headlines. It was part of my job. You can’t make headlines if you say “pregnant” when you mean “poignant. Or “python” when you mean “president.” Or “brandished” when you mean “famished.” You can’t get back your former job. I took endless batteries of tests not to measure what was lost, but to measure what remained. What would take the “first me” five minutes took “the new me” hours instead, so “we” learned to start preparing “me” long ahead of time. I could look for someone to store me, supervise me, feed me, clothe me – or I could do the job myself. Which is mostly what I do.

Nineteen years post-truck, I still can’t find words like I used to, can’t line them up and connect them, can’t make them do what I need them to do. Is it a clock, a bed, a house? A belt, a boat, a barnacle? Magic, tragic, comical? I still ricochet between industrial-strength brain damage and the barely see-able kind, and still try to hide my mind, or at least the damaged parts. Hiding is a job, too, and I’m pretty good at it.  

Once I read Wuthering Heights. I don’t remember it. I read Anna Karenina, but it, too, has been erased, with War and Peace, Tao of Pooh and You Can’t Go Home Again. Shelves of books I had loved might as well be shelves of books I’d never seen. I don’t know if I’ve read them or not. Ditto films I’ve seen, or not. Life becomes an index of absence. I won’t ever have a client again, won’t ever have a paycheck again, won’t ever live in our home again, won’t ever read as me again, won’t ever write as me again, won’t ever walk as me again, won’t ever recall my most treasured times as a mom -- and with my mom. My child said her mom disappeared, then “adopted” a few “moms” whose brains were just fine.  

Brain damage is deconstruction. The gift basket first missing wine, then missing cheese, then missing the bow, then missing your best-ever gift and your best-ever job, which was being a mom. If I regain agents and publish a book, it will be -- somewhat like this piece -- a fusion of funny, flinching, and near fatal. As opposed to “unflinching” as seems to be said about everything else. Before I was brain damaged, I taught writing once in a while.  After that I couldn’t teach writing.  I couldn’t teach anything. Everyone wants to hire the best person they can find and I wasn’t it. 

How do I separate the new me from the old me? How can I help the new me? What allowances should I make? Where should I draw a line? Also, how can I draw a line? I’m the one with the injury. No, correction. I’m the one taking care of the one with the injury. That is my job now. I am a version of the person whose job was writing words.

Judith freelanced for Time Warner, Conde Nast, Disney, and PBS. Then was hit by a drunk with a truck, which put a few things on hold. She now lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she makes art for humans and homes for birds.

Post-truck work has appeared on NBC News, The Washington Post, Iowa Review, The Rumpus, Creative Nonfiction, Intima, The Narrative Medicine Journal of Columbia University, Bellevue Literary Review, Salmagundi, Oldster and is upcoming this fall in Pulse. In addition, she has received these and other commendations: finalist for The Iowa Review’s Nonfiction Book Prize, winner of the 44th and 45th New Millennium Writing Awards. www.judithhannahweiss.com https://judithhannahweiss.substack.com/