Living with a traumatic brain injury (TBI) is like a riding a roller coaster. It’s full of ups and downs, days full of hope and one where you can’t find any, days you know your purpose and ones where it’s nowhere in sight, days of victory and victorious days and ones where you feel completely defeated. I was well aware of this when I decided that I was going to tell people my TBI story but I made a vow to myself and to all you that I’d to completely honest about everything I was going through. I wouldn't just share with you the highs but would let you in on the lows as well. My hope was that by telling my story in such a way that you might be encouraged and emboldened to do the same when telling your own personal stories. But I have to apologize because I haven't been doing what I vowed to do. You see, over the last couple months, my TBI has taken me down but I wasn't coming back up, and instead of doing what I said I'd do, I chose to keep this all to myself and kept trying "unsuccessfully" to get back up on my own.
But when I was recently reading the new book, Soul Rest, written by my good friend Curtis Zackery, I came across the following quote from Danish philosopher and theologian, Søren Kierkegaard.
"It is absolutely unethical when one is so busy communicating that he forgets to be what he teaches."
When I read those words, it was like looking into a mirror. I felt like I was the person Kierkegaard was talking about. I was "the unethical one who was forgetting to be what he was teaching." But the beautiful and amazing thing is this realization didn’t discourage me. Seeing myself in that mirror and realizing that I wasn’t being who I said I was going to encouraged me to start telling my story in the way I vowed to tell it in the first place.
