The Dialogue
The Magdalena
A4 oil pastel and watercolour pencil on paper
Covid19 sketches 2021
The Making of Me
I was on my way home from work at the beginning of December 2007, when my life was flipped into orbit in a road traffic collision, when riders of stolen mopeds having a race, and me turning right, on my bicycle, intercepted.
Now all of you can Yah, Boo, Hiss because not only was I an irritation on the road as far as many people are concerned – bloody cyclists – but I wasn’t wearing a helmet. Now, before you start jeering like they do at PMQ in the Houses of Parliament (ordure! ordure!) let me tell you Irony Number One: I was saving up for one as a Christmas present to myself and, Irony Number Two: my brain injury was caused by whiplash, as my head was sent rocking to and fro in the sudden propulsion from nought to fifty mph in the space of seconds, sufficiently to cause a couple of bone spurs in my neck to dislodge, and causing the frontal lobes of my brain to bash repeatedly against the bony inside surface of my skull. Had I been wearing a helmet, I would have come out with exactly the same injuries, and it is still debatable whether any jaw bone or eye socket fractures really took place, as they (my mother) said, early on, “If you had been wearing a helmet, your eye socket and jaw bone wouldn’t have fractured.”
I have since referred to the discharge notes from the hospital at that time and “multiple injuries” is very vague and general and, frankly, most of what happened in the first two years after the accident is like a weird dream to me now, as it was at the time. I think I cycled to an Ophthalmology appointment at St. George’s Hospital in early 2008 and was told that I had “post-concussive vision” which was why, for several months, I saw as if there were gauze over my eyes, in that Impressionist, Pointillist style so admired in Early 20th Century art; but this could as well be a dream. No-one stopped me from cycling, which was as well because public transport gave me travel sickness – I suffer nausea as a bus or car passenger ever since the injury – and I was only really advised not to drive for 6 months after the accident. When, after that time, I hadn’t developed epilepsy, my right to drive was simply reinstated – if it had ever been revoked in the first place. Sixteen years on, one wonders about this sort of thing.
I have always, it seemed, looked “fine”. The public persona is very useful tool indeed. I was amazing, in fact, on my bicycle in the first year after the Injury, as I utilised the lack of ability to measure fatigue as a great opportunity to make serious gains. Alongside my calorie-deficit diet (you don’t get over an eating disorder, you negotiate terms) I was built like a racing snake and twice as fast, which enabled me to feel some self-esteem.
My ex, another brain injury survivor, remembered the first time I appeared at the Headway support group in Elephant and Castle – “you came in through a side door, wheeling your bicycle, made some sort of surprised remark, and B (the group’s facilitator) and I exchanged a smile”. Someone I had known before the injury remarked that, afterwards, I was more like a caricature of myself in the ways that I behaved, and I can see that: bawdier, more brash, outspoken, disinhibited – as is commensurate with damage to the Frontal Lobes of the brain – possibly why people might have thought I was really ‘well’, perhaps putting on an act. The same person had said to someone, “I can’t stand her attitude to her brain injury” as though it was no more than a mere bagatelle, and certainly not to be dwelled on; I know a lot of people withdrew from me as though I were attention-seeking. What they couldn’t see was the mess inside my mind: I brazened living out because I struggled to cope, and regretted having survived the accident for a long time.
“The ways of God are mysterious, but if you live it out, just live it out, you see that it always works out” Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
The injury was a profound point of punctuation in my life; though perhaps I looked similar in appearance to the pre-injury person, she was Gone. Looking out from the inside, a new entity saw through the gaps and felt the spaces behind people’s words. The trouble was that I couldn’t describe it. I couldn’t describe a damn thing.
Suddenly, an inability to describe how everything felt placed a sheet of cellulose acetate between me and the whole of existence. I was no longer an Earthling, and the barrier felt unbreakable at first; now it varies in thickness depending on my mood, but is a preserver of my personal space from behind which I simply have no fear of people any more.
Over time, the old roles pinched and didn’t fit; the void of unfamiliarity between my family and myself grew strangely over time; we just had less and less in common now and, although they addressed me as though the roles remained in place, I no longer recognised or felt like the person they addressed. I didn’t feel any sense of self at the time, and wondered if this was it now: a blurred canvas, struggling to cope on the inside, who looked fit and healthy and ‘well’ enough on the surface. Forever to be misunderstood. It hadn’t bothered me as much before, but over years I saw that this was due to masking, which I had done for most of my life as a matter of course because my mother had treated me as though there was something very wrong with me, and this in addition to being “the mistake” she had always said I was.
I also felt that no-one saw the ‘real’ me, yet this was something inarticulable for a long time. The first thing I noticed was that I couldn’t seem to make art; I didn’t know quite what had happened, but my sketch books showed me an ease and fluency which I couldn’t now locate. A sensed an absence of something, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I just knew that something – everything – had changed.
Capital Punishment 