There was a prevalent belief when it came to the long-term effects of childhood head injuries that was established in the 1930s and persisted well into the mid-1990s: the inherent neuroplasticity of children's brains would naturally overcompensate any damage sustained.
Today, of course, this has been disproven. When you see children out riding bicycles or skating, you will see helmets on their heads in a way that you simply didn't in the 1980s.
This is because it took the scientific community quite a while to figure out the reality that came to define my life from the time I was five years old: A 2016 study released by the University of Oxford revealed how brain injuries sustained in childhood "are associated with an increased risk of subsequent mental illness, poor school attainment and premature death."
But when I entered puberty and proceeded to positively implode, no one knew this. They all just thought I had gone crazy, become overtaken by a demon, or had just woken up one morning shortly after I turned 13 and decided to be impossibly, unimaginably bad.
The tantrums and hypersensitivities I experienced after the injury in my youth became intense mood swings and violent outbursts when I became a teen. If something pleased me, I would whirl into euphoria. If some sensory stimulation triggered me, I would come apart in rage. At this time, I also developed a deep need for structure and routine and if this was upset, I would go from placid to screaming, swearing, breaking things.
I had no control over any of these states. Furthermore, all at once, I suddenly wasn't even anyone that I even recognized anymore. I lost the very little desire I'd ever possessed to interact socially. I couldn't bear to look people in the eye. And the boisterous crowdedness of high school overwhelmed me to the point that I completely shut down, unable to perform academically. Grades in middle school that were A's and B's plummeted to D's and F's.
I curled in on myself in the hallways, walking with my head down. I cringed down into my desk in classrooms, staring at the floor. And when I got home, I'd turn all the lights out in my room and crawl into bed, crying for hours in darkness, terrified at how I felt so out of control and having no ability to understand why. I began to struggle with suicidal ideations and soon after, to self-harm, because being alive was entirely too confusing for me to contend with.
Again, I want you to consider, if you can even imagine a world such as the one in which I grew up at all, a world so thankfully different today: I was in one of the most remote, isolated places in the country, before the internet would provide connection to the world outside of the hills that hemmed me in.
The impact of my damaged brain wasn't even something any doctor would take into consideration to conceive of what was happening to me. Mental illness was a shameful secret no one openly discussed. There were no IEP's; special education services were for the severely developmentally disabled alone.
Not only did I not understand myself, there was no one around me who could understand me. I was lost in a dark abyss into which I was plummeting deeper every day without any idea why it was I'd fallen in and no way to know how to get out.
Things were bad. And they were only going to get worse.
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