Feel The Fear But Do It Anyway - 11/30/20

This is what an invisible injury looks like. My accident happened two years, eight months and nineteen days ago. Sure, I can talk about it casually. But I still can’t REALLY talk about it without crying. The term “traumatic brain injury” wasn’t something I ever thought too much about pre-accident. It was something that happened to people in stories in the news, it was something that happened to people in the movies. It never occurred that it was something that could happen to me. And then it did.

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Fear

One of the ways my brain was injured impacted my nervous system. The fight or flight response was stuck on. For months I couldn’t sleep. For months I was constantly amped up. I would be so exhausted and NEED sleep, but instead I would go ride my exercise bike (very slowly) because I just couldn’t fall asleep…if I was lucky, it would take the edge off, and I could doze off for a few hours.

Throughout my healing journey, the fight or flight response is something I’ve studied and have talked about extensively with people (who are much smarter than me). That part of the brain is incredible. Its job is to constantly be assessing situations and decide whether or not there’s a threat and if we need to take action to get us out of harm’s way. When that part of the brain is activated, it shuts down the “thinking” and “reasoning” part of the brain and it responds with fear.

If that part of the brain has experienced trauma, its ability to recognize the difference between a threat versus non-threat is impaired. For me, it interprets most things as threats. (Which, by the way, is not great…I would give it 1 out of 10 stars.) As I’m progressing on my healing journey, this is something I’ve thought about a lot. I’ve learned that I can retrain my brain. I can strengthen damaged pathways, I can build new pathways, and I can relearn to interpret danger and fear appropriately.

I don’t know if you know this or not, but fear doesn’t only happen to people with brain injuries. 😉 Fear comes in all different shapes and sizes. Fear limits us. Fear keeps us from taking chances. Fear influences our decisions. Fear keeps us in bad situations. Fear keeps us from amazing opportunities. Fear keeps us from growing. Fear keeps our defensive walls up. Fear keeps us from being vulnerable. Fear keeps us from truly living. Retraining my brain to recognize the difference between a threat and a non-threat, to experience fear or to not experience fear has been incredibly difficult. It’s a choice every single time that I have to make. And most times I’d much rather ignore it, turn a blind eye, pretend it’s fine just how it is. But I can’t do that. I made a decision three months after the accident when the doctor told me that this injury was something I wouldn’t heal from, I decided right then that I would do WHATEVER it took to heal. So here I am, retraining my brain to appropriately recognize threats and relearn a healthy fear response. And it’s pretty incredible. Not only am I able to retrain the fight or flight response, but it’s also brought awareness to how I respond to fear in other parts of my life. I’ve realized this is an opportunity to reshape who I am. I get to choose if I’m going to let fear put up defensive walls. I get to choose whether or not to let fear stop me from taking chances. I get to choose whether or not to let fear stop me from being vulnerable. I get to choose whether or not fear is going to influence my decisions. A wise person once said, “feel the fear, but do it anyway”…that’s what I choose.

-L