Annie Liontas’ new book Sex with a Brain Injury arrived coincidentally on January 20. You can listen to her on January 9 episode of NPR’s Fresh Air. Some quotes so far…
-“A head injury will take a lot from you. Loud music, perfume, storms, sprinting, pride, but what it takes from your partner is unbearable.”
-“During this time, I hide a lot from my wife, much of my pain.”
-“Back then I must have been especially hard to come home to. Most days she would walk through the door and I’d be in bed, the blue scarf wrapped around my head to keep out the light. No TV, no drinks at a bar, no strolls through the city holding hands. I was too weak for any of that. It was years like this, me in sickness, her in doubt. I remember a fight over a tea bag. I remember days of being jealous of the sick cat. After a decade and a half, we had never really had the opportunity to truly disappoint one another. Now my head injuries had turned us into strangers, me wondering who had roamed into the house, she thinking the house empty until she turned on the lights. It baffled her, why I was not getting better. There was nothing I could say to erase that look on her face. We had become suspect to one another, opposites of who we were when we fell in love, my strength turned into weakness, her kindness into quiet.”
-“Pain, language- the things that make us most human are too often what alienate us, keep us apart.”
-“There is having to explain the failures of your body to those closest to you over and over again, even when you know they won’t understand.”
-“Disability, whatever our gross assumptions and beliefs about it, carries legitimacy, whereas chronic illness, especially when it cannot be seen, raises flags.”
-“Somebody in my family says, ‘Jeez, you act like such an old person now.’ ”
-“Doubt hangs perpetually in the space between belief and disbelief.”
-“Are you sure this isn’t in your head?”
-“My love … I want to be understood.”
-“I begin to doubt all connections, as one does in periods of isolation. I doubt the point of my work, my place in the world- how necessary it is- my own resilience.”
-“The injured self, wanting to be heard, emerges in all kinds of ways. Sometimes temper tantrum, sometimes dirge, sometimes raw memoir, noise from a window, lyricism.”
-“The single gift of these voices in your head- doctor, family, wife- all saying the same thing, is that a little light goes on. You’ve never trusted yourself before, but now, stranded in the interstitial, you’re the one you listen to.”
-“In their living room.. I watched Parker fuss over his new baby… But for the moment I was inside unintelligible, muffled words, somehow both close and far off… I struggled to find any words at all. I fought to hang on to her story of the birth, to appear normal.. My body was vibrating of weakness.. I kept my coat on to hide how much I was sweating… In those days, lying was the binding that kept me from falling apart.. Even now, I do not wonder at the need to lie to these kind friends, good people who would have happily let me rest in a quiet, dark room.”
Thank you, Annie, for putting yourself out there.
