A Very Modern Set of Challenges?

I’ll tell you what’s bugging me: I am ready to begin to talk about the Brain Injury, which shut me down for years. When it happened, I simply did not know how to process it, and I tried to carry on as the normal that my parents told me I had had. But, suddenly, an imperceptible new feature was etched in to my mind, and I lost all sense of self. When, months later, I started to spend time back in the flat that I had been living in for several years, it was unfamiliar, like looking at the trappings of someone else’s life: someone I did not recognise.

The first inkling that I had that something serious had happened was when two Police officers brought my bike back. This once extremely hefty war horse of a thing was fractured, dented in places. Riding a bicycle with a fractured frameset, cyclists will tell you, isn’t remotely safe. In any case, the once strong metal stirrups which had arched over the pedals had separated and ripped; jagged now, irrevocably damaged.

I did not quite like the bicycle anymore. It had once represented freedom, fitness, adventure – it had carried me to work and back in several places and had proven itself to be a highly trusty steed, though heavy to carry over the platform bridges at train stations. But something told me it was different now; the magic gone. It wasn’t coming back from this, and I left it leaned against the wall outside my block of flats, hoping that someone would take it away.

There was a sense of taboo from the start. It had to do with things that I heard myself saying, and then, thankfully, forgetting. I would open my mouth in an AA meeting, or someone would make a joke, and I would hear a ferocious swearing response from myself.