In my early-twenties, on a trek into the Annapurna region in Nepal, I first read author-naturalist Peter Mathiesson’s The Snow Leopard, his account of his gruelling expedition into the remote Himalayas. For me, it holds a special place. I read the book as I walked along the footsteps of Matthiessen, which he described in the early parts of The Snow Leopard; and the readers quickly learn this is not your average travelogue. At the time he wrote the book, Matthiessen was an evolving newbie Zen Buddhist, and mountains are a central metaphor in Buddhist cosmology.
The Snow Leopard won the National Book award, the highest literary achievement in America. In fact, Matthiessen is the only writer who has won the award for both a non-fiction and a fiction book. More than any other book, The Snow Leopard has sent tens of thousands trekkers into the Himalayas. I bet a lot of them are looking for some insight into themselves along with a backdrop of the Annapurnas; in my youth, it was called hippy-trails.
Matthiessen is a superb writer, and sometimes to his detriment, he is brutally honest about his feelings. God knows, if I were a good writer, I would write about my stroke in the same vein as Matthiessen – a philosophical travelogue into the terrain of my brain injury. To be fair, a traumatic brain injury is beyond description. And worse, you often look like your normal self, except your brain is AWOL: Absent Without Leaving.
I see everything through that lens. I have memories that would have meant little if I hadn’t experienced a cognitive traumatic event. For example, decades ago I read a memoir by Bill Ehrhart, a young American Marine, who wrote about his time in the Vietnam War. It was well-crafted but quickly forgotten. But last month, I read an interview with Ehrhart in the New York Times and I saw that interview through very different lens as the first time I read the book, when my mother was alive.
My mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in her early sixties. She was widely-read and intuitive, so she noticed the misuse of military metaphors in cancer-speak, for example, war on cancer, attack and invasion of enemy cancer rogue cells. My mother made me attuned to that sort of metaphoric language, and so I too noticed that military metaphors abound when people are speaking about a traumatic brain injury – the same people who have never experienced it. People with a brain injury are under a lot of pressure to be brave, a fighter, a warrior etc.
I cannot transplant myself into the head of a soldier in a war. I can certainly imagine myself in the Himalayas, where I have been; or even standing outside the Chrysler Building on Lexington Avenue in New York, where I have not been; but not in a jungle in the Vietnam War fighting the Viet Cong and giant centipedes. But I do have a ringside seat of a brain injury. Perhaps I should make a slideshow from my CD of my Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) the day following my stroke: There is where I started this journey, and it’s the same place I ended up after my journey.
A long-known friend told me, when he was in his twenties, that he had a fixed belief about family dynamics: If raised in a dysfunctional family – or even worse, being in a dysfunctional family whilst having a sudden trauma – the trajectory of the child of that family will be entirely altered. And not in good way. I passionately disagreed. For me it meant that some people are destined to fail. Now I know he was right. Substitute a dysfunctional family with a damaged brain, and the result is the same. You cannot escape from a dysfunctional family; you also cannot escape from a traumatic brain injury. If you think otherwise, you are destined to always search for an escape.
This is what I remembered when I read Ehrhart’s interview: When I got to Vietnam, I really expected to be welcomed with open arms by the people of Vietnam, like the Americans rolling through villages in France being showered with wine, flowers and kisses as a liberator. As I wrote in the last blog, optimism bias underestimates recovery from any trauma, whether it is surviving a jungle guerrilla war or after a traumatic brain injury. Recovery is presumed to follow a linear trend – upwards. That is what I believed: my stroke would clear itself within a few months, perhaps a year, at worst a few years. I was wrong as wrong could be. Having been a lawyer, I thought last year, there must be a Statue of Limitations for a brain trauma. People feel the same about being a child in a dysfunctional family.
Ehrart said, I realized that things were not quite what I expected. Within days, I realized that what has happening was nuts and I wanted to get the fuck out. The day after I came home from rehab, I walked to my nearby favourite café. At rehab, I held “that hopeful moment” in my mind. It was a beacon. And in fact, I was welcomed with open arms. When the coffee arrived – given as a free coffee and a newspaper from the café owner to celebrate my return – it was not what I expected. I could not decipher even one word in the headline of the first page of the newspaper. I knew I was in big trouble. The owner thought the same when she saw me crying and had to console me. I realized that what was happening was nuts and I wanted to get the fuck out.
I can see that is what I was looking for – a sense of a unified self from the old self and the new self. Which also was what Peter Matthiessen wanted from his adventure into the Himalayas. From his new Zen perspective, the individual self is an illusion. But he could not reconcile his new self with his old self from his upbringing in a wealthy family in New York, and degrees at the Sorbonne and Yale – which shows in his harsh self-judgment.
In that way, I too am in the footsteps of The Snow Leopard. I cannot reconcile my new self with my old self.