The Last Part of the First Year

Each day things began to improve. My headaches would cluster together for a few days and then I would go a few days without them. The time between clusters began to increase. I continued going to therapy. My therapist suggested I asked my husband to point out nuances he noticed in my personality. Making me aware of certain changes made me able to work on fine tuning things that I could change and bring an acceptance to the things I could not. My husband and I celebrated each and every milestone. At night when we lay in bed I would ask him how I was doing... "Am I almost back to normal?" I felt like a little child needing approval. "You're getting there." He would say. There were times when I could almost physically feel my brain beginning to fuse together. That's the only way I can explain it. I knew healing was taking place, it was just a very slow process. At the beginning of December I had my last appointment with my therapist. She was moving out of the state but thought I had come far enough along that I did not need to transfer my care to someone else. She warned me that sometimes the anniversary date of an incident can cause an onslaught of emotional distress. Like usual, I sloughed that off because I was doing so much better. A couple of weeks later anxiety swooped over me like a hawk over prey. To add to the anxiety, the social isolation had taken a toll on my long term friendships and I felt the world come crashing down on me. The last 2-3 weeks of 2010 were as bad as it gets. I had come so far, only to fall into a pit of despair... One I wasn't sure I would be able to pull myself out of. I felt like a total failure and I felt like I had let those who loved me down. I can't say I wasn't warned, but I will have to admit that it still caught me off guard and totally unprepared. I had spent months trying to put the pieces of my life back together without being a constant burden to those around me. I didn't want to come across as self-consumed, so I shied away. Little did I know that my efforts to not be a burden had done nothing but put distance and suspicions between me and my friends and co-workers. I found myself trying to mend wounds I didn't know existed and rebuild bridges I didn't know had been burned. It was one of the lowest points of 2010. I was miserable at Christmas. I was saddened by the direction my relationships had taken and I was anxious about the future. I  told my husband that I was afraid I would have to build all new relationships from scratch, get new friends. "What would I do if no one liked the new me?" I was afraid that there would be no one left from the friends that knew me before the injury. Try as they may, they didn't understand what I was going through, and in reality I was too emotionally drained to defend myself or explain the process. It was a very bleak period and for a short time, I saw no hope in the eyes of the person staring back at me in the mirror. Thankfully that was about to end. A would come when I would see light at the end of the tunnel and although it was rocky, my friends have stayed true (confused but true).