Dusty Wentworth

  When Brain Injury Takes Away Your Emotions People often assume the hardest part of a brain injury is the physical damage. The speech difficulties. The wheelchair. The things other people can see. For me, it’s none of those things. The hardest part is that I no longer experience emotion. I understand emotions intellectually, but I can no longer feel them in the way I once did. For a long time, I thought my greatest challenge was memory loss. Following a ruptured brain aneurysm in April 2024, I lost more than 14 years of my life. When I first woke after surgery, I told my wife, “It’s all right. I’ll just make new memories.” It sounded logical. What I didn’t understand was that memories aren’t simply facts stored inside our heads. They help construct our identity. Our experiences, relationships, successes, failures, joys and losses gradually shape the person we become. Without those memories, and without the emotional threads connecting me to those that remain, waking up felt like b...

  Why Disability Pride Month Isn't for Me July marks Disability Pride Month. For many disabled people, it is a time to celebrate identity, community and acceptance. I genuinely respect that. Everyone has the right to decide what disability means to them. Personally, however, it is not something I identify with. If I could wake up tomorrow free from Functional Neurological Disorder, Fibromyalgia, PTSD, the lasting effects of a ruptured brain aneurysm, and the limitations that made me a full-time wheelchair user, I would do so without hesitation. I do not feel pride in becoming disabled. I feel pride in adapting to it. There is an important difference. My disability has changed how I live my life, but it has never changed who I am. I am a husband, a father, a writer, a veteran and a friend. I happen to be disabled. It is part of my life, not the definition of my identity. That is why Disability Pride Month has never resonated with me. None of this is a criticism of those who find mea...

  The Silence of Assumption We are taught that a man's strength is measured by the space he commands and the weight he can lift. But what happens when the body stops cooperating? There is a particular kind of silence that follows disability. It is not the silence of sympathy, but the silence of assumption: the immediate belief that because a man can no longer run, fight, climb, or carry, he has somehow become less of a man. This idea is deeply rooted in our culture. Historically, strength has been measured in purely physical terms: broad shoulders, hard manual labour, endurance, and fierce self-reliance. From childhood, many boys are taught that their worth is directly tethered to what their bodies can achieve. Then one day, for some of us, the body changes. Whether through a spinal injury, a neurological condition, chronic illness, an accident, a stroke, or an aneurysm, the measures we once used suddenly no longer apply. The world notices. People speak more slowly. They offer pity...

  Redefining the Man in the Mirror I spent most of my adult life in environments most people would cross the street to avoid. The Army first, then private military contracting, then close protection. War zones. High risk operations. Situations where the wrong decision carried permanent consequences. I was fit, strong and trained to operate under pressure. My confidence was not bravado. It was earned, tested repeatedly in places that stripped away pretence very quickly. What I discovered after being medically discharged with PTSD was that civilian life was harder for me than any operational theatre. The ordinary rhythms of day to day existence unsettled me in ways combat never had. High risk environments made sense. Instinct had value there. The version of myself I understood was still useful. Then my body began to fail. Fibromyalgia came first. Doctors linked it to PTSD. I carried on as trained, pushing through, minimising symptoms, treating pain as background noise. Until Oc...

The New Year is quietly under way. It is Saturday 3 January 2026, and as I write this, snow is falling steadily outside my window. It is one of those calm, unmistakably beautiful moments that winter sometimes offers. I am thankful that I have nowhere I need to be today. Snow and wheelchairs do not mix well, and what appears peaceful from indoors can very quickly become dangerous outside. This stillness feels symbolic. With the turning of the year has come a change in how I view my life. This is not because circumstances have suddenly become easy, but because something fundamental has shifted. For the first time in a long while, I am not simply surviving. I am beginning to look forward. That shift has been slow, hard-won, and costly. From collapse to survival My journey over the past few years began in October 2023 when I collapsed at home. What followed was not a single event but an extended fight to stay alive. I spent eleven months moving between hospital wards and a spec...

Surviving the rupture changed everything — now I live in a body I barely recognise, searching for meaning in the wreckage. The doctors didn’t expect me to survive my subarachnoid haemorrhage. Some days, I wish I hadn’t. At 36, I was a fit, strong infantry soldier. At 50, I woke blind in one eye, unable to walk, with more than 14 years of my life erased. Survival didn’t mean carrying on with life as it was. It meant waking into a stranger’s body, holding memories that don’t feel like mine, and living with pain that never lets up. The Hole in My Timeline I don’t remember getting married. I don’t remember my children being born. These are the moments most fathers carry as treasures — and for me, they are emptiness. I look at wedding photos and see a stranger in my place. I hear stories of my children’s milestones and can’t recall a second of them. For me, those memories don’t exist. People pressured me: “Do you remember this? Do you remember that?” as if badgering me could som...