A writer describes her traumatic brain injury, and what it has meant to relearn her craft.
 | By Alexandra Sifferlin Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
About two years ago, the fantasy and science fiction novelist Kelly Barnhill experienced a traumatic brain injury. Although she has been recovering ever since, her ability to write — fiction, especially — has been difficult to fully regain. Barnhill, who was once easily able to spin up new worlds, found herself struggling with stories that required significant use of memory, attention and imagination. |
She wrote an essay about this experience in a guest essay for Times Opinion. |
While traumatic brain injuries are fairly common, our understanding of them remains relatively limited. One reason is that recovery can look very different depending on the individual. In Barnhill's case, her brain injury made it initially difficult for her to do anything, even small tasks like unloading the dishwasher — but she was especially pained over her loss of storytelling. |
"I am a person who thinks, speaks, feels and remembers. All of us are," Barnhill writes in her essay. "But if I am a person who makes a living by transmuting these thoughts into plots and characters and pretty sentences, and if that ability to think is disrupted, am I still me?" |
When I first spoke to Barnhill about writing a guest essay, she made it clear that she needed a significant amount of time to do it. Her writing process had changed with her injury: It now largely consisted of putting together a single sentence or thought on a note card or Post-it, and eventually amassing enough of them for a piece. Filling a small space with words, and doing so repeatedly, helped her feel more accomplished. That's largely how she wrote her extraordinary essay, as she explains in the piece: |
"I had to invent a new process in order to tackle the project: ideas inscribed one at a time, thought by thought, sentence by sentence, on note cards, each composed over days, weeks, months. Eventually, I laid them out carefully on the floor, followed by a nap (on top of said index cards). The order kept changing. The number of cards kept increasing. Until I could see it. My story. It's still unfinished." |
I was so moved when I received Barnhill's draft. Not only is the writing masterful, it's also educational and funny. Barnhill saved the notecards she used as aids to put the essay together, and while going through them I was struck that project is a testament to the resilience of Barnhill's spirit and of the human brain in general. |
Barnhill has made immense progress over time, and she shows that through her essay. There are many people who will share in her experience of being profoundly changed, temporarily or permanently, by injury. But even those who haven't may still relate to the experience of navigating a new normal after significant change, and the challenge of figuring out who you are that follows. |
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