When Brain Injury Takes Away Your Emotions
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...