I've had five head trauma injuries. ##I want to let that sit for a second before I continue. Five. Separate. Incidents. Enough that doctors have had to sit me down more than once and use phrases like "cumulative damage" and "long-term risk." Enough that certain decisions in my life have been made with the quiet understanding that my brain is not something I can afford to take for granted. And yet, for a long time, I treated it like I had nothing to lose. --- I'm not going to list every incident in detail. Some of them are embarrassing in the very specific way that only freak accidents can be. Some of them are sports-related, which at least sounds respectable. Some of them just happened the way things happen when you move through the world with a little too much confidence and not quite enough spatial awareness. What I will tell you is that each one changed something. Not always visibly. Not always dramatically. But something shifted, every time. The attention span that used to feel effortless started to require more intentional effort to maintain. The anxiety that I had always carried with me became louder after each incident, more persistent, quicker to arrive. The patience for sitting with slow, deep thought, the kind of thinking I genuinely love, started to feel less like a default and more like a resource I had to consciously protect and replenish. And somewhere along the way, I found myself reaching for the fastest, easiest dopamine I could find instead. --- ##Doomscrolling is a funny word for something that isn't funny at all. I once sat down to write something important at 8am in the dark of my front room in Toronto. I had given myself the morning. I had the intention. I had the cup of coffee. And I spent the next two hours watching Kelly Clarkson covers on YouTube and Magic: The Gathering pack-opening videos on Facebook before I finally opened a blank document. ##I am aware of how this sounds. I also know I am not alone in it. The brain, after repeated trauma, craves stimulation in ways that feel genuinely involuntary. The dopamine receptors are a little fried, as I once wrote to myself during one of those 8am spirals. The patience for quiet, for slow things, for the discomfort of building something from nothing, gets eroded. And in its place, you get a very compelling argument for just one more scroll, just one more video, just one more small hit of something that requires absolutely nothing from you. I checked Instagram twice while writing that paragraph in my notes. Twice. After specifically writing about the problem. I'm aware of the irony. I'm also aware that awareness and change are not the same thing, and that the gap between them is where most of the actual work lives. --- ##Here's what the injuries also gave me, though. And this is the part I don't talk about enough. They gave me the understanding that nothing about the brain is guaranteed. Not your memory. Not your clarity. Not your ability to hold a thought long enough to do something meaningful with it. And that urgency, the specific knowledge that the sharpness I have today is something I earned and need to actively maintain, has made me more intentional about what I spend it on. When you've had your brain rattled enough times to understand that it has limits, you stop treating it like it's infinite. --- I started learning freestyle wrestling recently. Yes, at this stage of my life. Yes, with this particular medical history. I know. Part of what drew me to combat sports in general, and to wrestling specifically, is something I noticed the first time I watched a fight and actually paid attention to it: there is no hiding in a fight. There is no overthinking your way to a better position once someone is actively trying to put you on the mat. You have to be present. Fully, completely present. Or you end up on the ground. I think about that constantly in the context of everything else I'm building. The product work. The creative studio helping combat athletes tell their stories. The AI platform for small businesses. The writing I put off for two hours before I finally sit down and start. Presence is the skill. Not intelligence, not strategy, not the perfectly formed plan. Presence. The ability to be here, in this moment, with what you actually have, without waiting for the version of yourself that has it all figured out. Five head injuries will teach you that the person who has it all figured out is not coming. There is only the person you are right now, with the brain you have right now, deciding what to do with the time you know for certain you have. --- I'm not telling this story to be dramatic about the injuries. I'm telling it because for a long time I used them as an excuse in both directions. Either they were the reason I couldn't focus, couldn't be consistent, couldn't follow through. Or I ignored them entirely and pretended everything was fine, which is its own kind of damage. The more honest version is somewhere in the middle. The injuries are real. The impact is real. And my responsibility to work with the brain I actually have, not the one I wish I had, is also real. That urgency, it turns out, is the most useful thing I have ever been hit with. ##The rest is just showing up.
Lifestyle
five times I lost my mind (literally)
15 April 2026