Alive Again

At rare times when fear, furiousness, and frustration ebb as the dominant emotions that I associate with episodic altered consciousness, curiosity rises to fill the void. Moments of clarity bring not only a rush of sensation and cognitive potential, but also a stream of questions concerning my identity and what my precarious situation implies about it. Clearly, at this moment, ‘I’ refers to me, the one who can read a chapter of a book and remember it for longer than three seconds. Surely, it refers to the man who can taste his food, and smell it toו. And it refers to the guy who can play a modest amount of music, has respectable mathematical abilities, and craves independence.

So who the hell is the guy that has been dating my girlfriend for the last seven months, and the better part of the last two years? Obviously, he was I. But he clearly was not all that I entails. And he did not have access to all of my abilities, or all of my memories. And he lived in his parent's house and watched infuriating amounts of television, which you would never catch me doing. The question at hand is that of the relationship between the whole and its parts. In this case, the subject is a fractured consciousness.

According to my neurologist, the right half of my brain, typically my dominant hemisphere, took a beating, along with my working memory, while the left hemisphere continued to function on a very high level. As concerns the memory, it strikes me as intuitive that a person could remain the same person in most ways that seem important despite varying levels of working memory. However, the difference between functioning strongly in both hemispheres and functioning strongly in only one fundamentally alters the way one can think. Granted, any change you make to one’s brain chemistry, on any level can be considered to produce a different person. But at what point is the change substantial enough that it is reasonable to conceive of the changed individual as a completely distinct person, a unique soul, not the conscious being we originally associated with its body?

At the all too rare times, when I begin a spontaneous and rapid recovery – although I sincerely hope that this time is permanent and, consequently, the last – my first thought, while lying in bed, overwhelmed by my newly discovered powers of cognition, typically, is “Where the $%^& have I been?” The relationship of this “I” to the “I” that only weeks ago screamed “What the $%^& did I do to deserve this?” is incomprehensible, even to the “I” composing this composition.

I would like to ignore these issues of identity and simply shut up and live. But my newly restive mind will not allow me to put these questions to sleep. What right do I, at present, have to provide an account of the experiences from which I, in my present state, only weeks removed from complete incoherence, feel distant? To what extent can I simply resume my life, the one created by someone with far greater cognitive powers than I, and maintained for the last two years by a pitiable schlub?

We all grow, fade, and in many other ways change. But usually this change is continuous and slow enough as to be unnoticeable in the short run. Eventually this change catches up with people in the long run in the form of midlife crises and crises of faith. Sudden moments manifest a change that has long brewed under the surface in the way that earthquakes release tension built over years. But only rarely do neurological events result in unpredictable seismic shifts of both personality and ability. And even less rarely are such events reversible or cyclical. However, for the time being, this is my reality.

Usually the illusion of a stable identity is maintained by the slowness with which any neurological changes take place. In my case, for the time being, any such illusion is out of reach. While the philosophical consequences of my current identity crisis are complicated, the practical implication is straightforward. I wake up each morning, take a minute to find out who I am, and plan my day accordingly. As for my right to take ownership of a past for which only half of me is accountable, I seem to have little choice in the matter. It is the only past I have and however foreign it seems to me, it is more connected to me than to anyone else.