This month on the Band, we’re sending letters to our younger selves – it’s important and it’s freeing. So please, go ahead and submit your own! (you can even do it anonymously)

We are ALSO looking for stories of brain injuries and other problems with the brain, by request, so please, let us know if you’d like to share.

Dear Younger Me,

I can see you so clearly in my memory. Snuggling up with him in a bean bag chair, watching Duck Tales. Making Chewbacca noises at each other, louder and softer, higher and lower, but always laughing about it. Chocolate pudding to get him to take his medicine. Stroking his hair while he seized, and he seized a lot.

I can see it change you. It made you resilient. It made you strong. It made you selfish and afraid. It made you paralyzed damn near thirty years later when your own daughter had a seizure. Even after helping through thousands of them, you panicked. It’s okay, you told yourself, and you meant it. It’s still okay, with hindsight. I would still panic now. You never wanted children because of him. You were afraid of what you would have to do if they were like him. But his wasn’t a genetic condition. It was the result of a brain injury either shortly before or after birth. Maybe it was a stroke before he was even born. Or the high fever after one of his vaccinations. All theories welcome, because we’ll never actually have the answer.

You lived in anticipation of the next Big Bad, and while you had many good things happen, you can’t shake that feeling. Waiting for the next thing to happen. It’s okay. They will, you know, they will happen. And you will meet them all as they do.

Loved you then, love you now, love you always (even when we forget for a minute).

Me.