Dear readers,

I started this trying to find hope in the fog.

For a long time I believed that if I just kept walking, if I kept reaching, something would appear. A thin ray of light. A shape in the distance. A reason. I told myself that the fog was temporary, that grief has seasons, that even the darkest nights eventually give way to morning. I searched for meaning in small things—the sound of rain, the way light falls through a window, the memory of a shared laugh. I tried to hold on to the idea that loss could somehow be redeemed, that the pain was carving space for something new.

There is a familiar shorthand in Catholic circles for people who show up only when they believe the calendar demands it: “Christmas-and-Easter Catholics”. They appear for the big feasts, fulfill the minimum of those, and then disappear again until the next obligatory day. The rest of the year even obligatory weekly Masses they refuse to attend as being worth their time and effort. The ordinary time, the daily Masses, the quiet consistency—is certainly optional for them.

I should have accepted it sooner.

Some people simply do not value me the way I value them. They want a relationship that costs them almost nothing: a smile at the holiday table a couple of times a year, an obligatory check-in every few months, the familiar script of “How’s life?” “Good.” “You?” “Good.” “Talk soon.” And then silence until the next scheduled gathering

There is grief that comes from wanting a real relationship with people who will tolerate you in their lives but will not choose closeness reciprocally. Not strangers. Not acquaintances. Family. People you once shared real history with, people who used to be close, people who, by their own words, simply decided that family does not matter to them the way friends do. And so they stopped. They chose not to want a close relationship anymore.

It started small. Almost nothing.

I walked into the room and heard, “Really? 2000 words?”

Contempt. Disgust. Rejection of a message without even considering what it said.

One sister has made limited contact in the last couple of weeks and apologized. The silence from the other remains deliberate—no ordinary answers, no questions, no unforced sharing about her life. Even when she is physically nearby, basic human acknowledgement does not come. The contrast is sharp: warmth offered easily to a neighbor or stranger, nothing offered to her brother.

Some days the headache is a dull, constant pressure, like someone is slowly tightening a vice behind my eyes. Other times it flares sharp and electric, making even soft voices feel too loud and ordinary light feel aggressive. The brain injury didn’t just rearrange whatever this is in my head—it left everything scattered. And still, the people I love need me.

There is a particular kind of quiet that follows an apology. Not the peaceful kind. The suspended kind. The kind that stretches across days and weeks and leaves you waiting for a verdict that may never arrive.

I told her my frustration had nothing to do with her.

That was a lie.

It does.

There is a particular kind of goodbye that never needs to be spoken. It arrives in the unanswered invitations, the empty doorways, the steady absence of people who once felt permanent. After the brain injury, the silence became impossible to ignore. People I had known nearly my entire life—people I had shown up for without question—simply stopped appearing. No explanation. No final conversation. Just quiet withdrawal, even when they were still physically near.

Before the injury, work was just… work. Some days were long, some were demanding, but I could push through. A tough meeting, a tight deadline, a full inbox—I’d power past them and still have energy left for the rest of life.

After the brain injury, work became something else entirely.

One of my sisters told me she could not be in my life because of the letters I wrote her. She said I painted her in a poor light. She admitted she did not even finish reading them. In her words, they were like a sandwich: I would praise her and apologize, then say something that showed her in a negative way, then return to apologizing and trying to lift her up again. That middle layer was enough for her to step away.

I try. Every day I try.

I try to stay calm when the kids are melting down and my head is already pounding. I try to listen when my wife needs to talk, even when the words swim and my vision blurs at the edges. I try to take things off her plate—dinner, the tractor, the small repairs—because I know how much she already carries. I try to be the man she married, the one who could troubleshoot problems, stay present, and shoulder the hard days without becoming one of them.

But the injury does not care how hard I try.

After a brain injury, it is common to leave conversations or interactions with a lingering sense that something went wrong—yet have no clear memory of what you said or did. Faces tighten, people pull away, or someone tells you that you hurt them, and you are left confused and guilty. You didn’t mean to. You often cannot even reconstruct the moment.

Today I was talking with my sister about her potential career path as a speech-language pathologist. The conversation was light at first—just the different settings where SLPs can work. When you’re limited in how much you can ask a loved one, conversations move slowly. The risk of saying the wrong thing and losing her again feels high, especially now that I’m not in Texas anymore. I messed it up and I still don't know how. We hadn’t even gotten to the training, the kinds of people she might help, or the satisfaction of watching someone regain skills. While I waited for the next day, the talk pulled me straight back into old notes from my own visit with an SLP.

As I recover from this brain injury, my memory is returning in pieces—uneven and stubborn. I sit with notebooks and recorded fragments—things I wrote down when the fog was thicker, or that others kept for me—and I read them the way a person might open a history book about a stranger who happens to share my name. The facts are there. The dates, the conversations, the decisions. Yet the lived texture is still patchy. I am learning the outline of my own existence the way a student learns the outline of a war that ended before they were born

Living with a brain injury means carrying symptoms that never fully clock out. The sensory overload, the sudden fog, the fatigue that arrives without warning, the way ordinary noise or bright light can turn a simple errand into an ordeal—these things reshape daily life in ways most people never see. Even something as routine as a dental visit can feel heavy before you walk through the door.

I have a brain injury. Not the dramatic kind people imagine from movies—no coma, no obvious scar, no wheelchair that makes the struggle visible. Mine is quieter and more relentless. Cognitive fatigue that hits like a wall. Words that vanish mid-sentence. Lights and noise that feel like assaults. Days where simple tasks cost more energy than I have to spend. The kind of injury that leaves you looking “fine” while your nervous system is still trying to rebuild itself in the background.

It had been one of those days that doesn’t end so much as collapse. It ends in tears, defeat, and the hope of never having to live through another one like it.

Everything that could go wrong had taken its turn. Work was difficult. The meeting that ran long and went nowhere. The email with the subject line no one wants to see. The small, sharp failures that stacked until even ordinary tasks felt heavier than they should. Trying to navigate an ethical decision while my eyes refused to focus on the facts in front of me. Basic math escaping me. By the time I headed home, the light had already left the windows.

Some days after the brain injury I look at the people I once loved—who they have chosen to become, the way they now treat others—and I have no words. The choices land heavy: the coldness, the self-destruction, the casual cruelty handed out to anyone still standing close enough to feel it. I watch the person I used to know dissolve into someone unrecognizable, and the silence that follows is thick. There is nothing useful to say when the evidence is right there in how they move through the world.