Scene 33 -- I am Lethan

****************Scene 33 - I am Lethan*******************

My mother tells me about one time when she and I were having a conversation,
soon after I had returned from the hospital.

And she remembers this because the fights were just starting to become more frequent, and it was hard to have just a serious conversation,
but we were having one then,

and she asked me if I ever felt like I was a different person after the accident,
with everything that had changed,

and I looked at her,
and I said
I am Lethan.

So there you have it.

 Who am I again?

I am Lethan.

****************Commentary***************************

This story starts with the question — a question that commonly puzzles survivors of traumatic brain injury — Who am I, again?

I remember questioning, “In an instant — an impact — so much changed.  My abilities are different — my thoughts are different — people say my personality is different.  If everything is different, can I be the same person?”

The story ends with an answer — “I am Lethan.” — and that is my answer.


Your answer should be something different, because —

— I am I and You are You —

For this storytelling work, a name is used to symbolize personal identity, but in truth a name is as meaningless as any characteristic — one’s name, talents, body form, gender — all are decorations, while the self is what remains after all else has been striped away.

But what is this “self”?  What is this essence of what a person is? 

One’ s story.


Over the past 42 blog entries in nearly 3 years, I have had the privilege of sharing my story and discovering parts of my thought process.  I began this project with the goal of looking at my storytelling about my experience with brain injury from a new maturity and to discover what I could learn from this self-story examination.  The results of this work have been rewarding, and has helped me to form a hypothesis about the benefits of storytelling as a tool of rehabilitation after brain injury — as follows:

First, I begin with the belief that it is a person’s story that defines personal identity — a variation on the psychological-continuity views of personal identity.  My view states — a person derives personal identity because he or she can understand a story that accounts for who he or she was in the past, who is now, and who is expected to be in the future.  Furthermore, there needs to be an understood cause and effect relationship between the events in the story so that the individual can accept changes in behavior and/or characteristics.


When severe traumatic brain injury happens, there is often a significant change in the physical and mental abilities of a survivor accompanied by a marked difference in behaviors.  The majority of people can account for gradual changes in ability and behavior by following a personal storyline — but for survivors of brain injury, it can seem as if they just woke up and suddenly things were different — there is no clear cause for the current state, and this disruption of one’s cause/effect story can create personal identity confusion for a survivor.  This confusion may be amplified by other people — family, friends, co-workers, etc… —  supplying opinions about what the survivor “used to be like” or expressing confusion at changes in said survivor.  Again, these “changes” do not have a cause/effect relationship that is understood by the survivor, and therefore can deepen the identity confusion.  I remember feeling such confusion in my recovery experience — at times wondering if I had been “reborn” as a different person — and I have learned of similar experiences through research and personal encounters with fellow survivors.

Returning to my hypothesis — the process of recovery is a flurry of emotional extremes and half understood processes so that the survivor has great difficulty comprehending what is occurring as it is happening — and this can be even more confusing when looking back on the events of the injury and recovery.  Again, in my experience — divorced form my storytelling — I remember explosions of jubilation and anger and discovery and loss and sadness and fear going off in rapid succession like a finale of fireworks launched with no explanation, and this collage of emotions covers everything about the memories early recovery and early rehabilitation.  The grandiosity and incompleteness of the physical and emotional images accompanying each memory quickly becomes overwhelming, causing further confusion.

I propose that storytelling can help with this confusion. 

To clarify this — by “storytelling”, I mean a single person narrative piece that is intended to be performed for an audience.  For this purpose, the “storyteller” is also a survivor of traumatic brain injury.

Furthermore — by “performance”, I mean a time when the storyteller shares a prepared story about the recovery process with any audience — this could be on stage with a public audience, a private audience of friends and family, or even an audience of one close confidant.  The important piece is that the piece is understood by someone other than the storyteller.

When creating a storytelling piece, the storyteller — person who composes and performs the piece— is required to form a narrative that can be understood and appreciated by an audience.  For this storytelling piece to be fully comprehensible, there should be a cause and effect relationship between the events.  In order to reach this requirement, the storyteller/survivor must research his or her injury and/or create a narrative that explains what has occurred and is occurring — create a cause for the changes that are happening (the effect).  In other words, by forming a storytelling piece that can be comprehended by an audience, the survivor is forced to — in some way — sort out the jumble of emotions and confusions that exist in the head and arrange them in a comprehensible manner.  I suggest that by doing this, a survivor is able to better understand his or her personal recovery process and comprehend the changes and events that are part of recovery.  This better understanding allows a survivor to fill in the cause and effect gaps in one’s personal story, thus helping to deal with personal identity confusion.

That’s a lot to take in, so once more, real quick — in hyper-abbreviated form:

1. Personal identity comes form the one’s personal story.

2. Brain injury causes confusion in one’s personal storyline.

3. When a survivor shares his or her story of recovery as a storytelling, the survivor is forced to externalize the story and organize it in a way that is comprehensible by an audience.

4. Organizing a story in this manner helps a survivor to better understand his or her process of personality change, thus helping temper personal identity confusion.

It may be asked if the same effect can come from writing one’s story instead of speaking it in a performance setting.  My instinct — granted, it is a storyteller’s instinct — suggests that writing one’s story will not be as helpful because when words are placed upon a page, they can more easily be divorced from the author’s experience.  This is not to diminish the skills of any author or to suggest that many authors do not carry their words constantly, but to suggest that — for a lesser trained author — the words may leave the mind through the hand as they are written or typed upon a page, thus diminishing the effect of living with an understanding of one’s story.  By speaking the story, especially repeatedly, the storyteller allows the words to pass through his or her consciousness with every speaking.  For this reason, while I have no doubt that writing one’s story can have many benefits, I believe speaking the story as a storytelling — even if this is reading a composed piece out-loud — will have a greater rehabilitative effect

I came to the above hypothesis by looking at my personal experience with storytelling about my trauma and then exploring how this path might assist other survivors.

As we get into that, it is important to recognize that recovery from brain injury is never ending, and while the “optimal recovery time” is generally considered to be the first two years post injury, the healing will continue for all of a survivor’s life. 

That stated, I began working with the story 9 years after my injury — so I was well outside of this “optimal recovery time” — but by working with the stories and studying brain injury, I was able to better understand just what had happened to me.  This learning came in three ways:

By doing academic reading and research, I was able to learn about the patterns of behavior after brain injury and something about what what is known and unknown in modern medicine.  While my reading was in no way comprehensive — nor was my understanding of what I did read — this allowed me to recognize the complexity of recovery from brain injury and appreciate the wonder of the brain’s ability to heal.


Through interviews with fellow survivors, I was intimately introduced to the wide variety of ways brain injury can affect a person, as well as the many attitudes people can choose when adapting to the new way of life after brain injury.  Also as part of this, I discovered that — despite the wide variety of circumstances and attitudes — similar themes embedded in the stories of survivors, and how these themes were also present in my story of recovery.


When interviewing family and friends, I learned how brain injury affects everyone around the survivor — that brain injury is not just the survivor’s story, but every caregiver also has his or her personal story that about that recovery.

I do not claim that this learning provided any physical benefits to my extended rehabilitation, but by gaining a fuller understanding of the recovery I have able to anticipate social conflicts or personal tics that are a part of my post-injury life.  I also gained a new appreciation for those who have been a part of my recovery and a greater acceptance of my current abilities.  As I’ve mentioned in previous entries, there are still moments in my life when I wonder — “What if this brain injury never happened?” — but I am now quickly able to quiet such thoughts with an acceptance of what I have been privileged to experience.

Storytelling will not do magic — I cannot storytell all the problems of brain injury away — but storytelling is a tool that can help survivors continue to emotionally heal from their trauma.  There is still much to be learned about this, and I intend to continue to study and explore this topic.  These writings are an early step in this study, but I hope they inspire you to explore this topic with me.  Keep checking the blog, following on Facebook, sending a message — I’m excited to begin on the next step of this project, so keep in touch to find out just what that will be!

Thank you for reading and we’ll chat soon. 

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