Packing Up

I used to think the hardest part of camping was choosing the right spot or keeping the fire going. I was wrong.

The hardest part was the packing list.

Five days. Seven people. Every meal, every task, every “what if” that could possibly go wrong. And I was supposed to remember all of it with a brain that now treats details like sand slipping through my fingers.

I sat at the kitchen island the days before we left, surrounded by empty bins and crumpled sheets of paper. My wife had gently suggested I start early. She knew. She always knows.

I started with breakfast.

Day 1: Eggs and Bacon

But wait—do we have a pan that fits on the camp stove? Spatula? Plates? Forks? Salt? Pepper? Butter? What if the eggs break in the cooler? Do we need a backup carton? What about the kids—do they still like scrambled or did that change last month? In second thought let's do cereal and bagels.

By the time I got to lunch on Day 2, my chest was tight. I couldn’t remember if I’d already written “paper towels” or if I only thought I had. I kept going back to the top of the list, convinced I’d missed something critical. The first-aid kit. My allergy medicine. The backup flashlight batteries. The backup for the backup.

My brain kept trying to hold the entire trip in its hands at once, and it was failing. Loudly.

That’s when the panic hit.

Not the dramatic kind you see in movies. The quiet, spiraling kind. The one where your thoughts start looping: What if I forget something and my family is cold? Or hungry? Or scared in the middle of the night? What if I can’t provide what they need out there?

I must have looked frantic, because my wife came and sat across from me. She didn’t sigh. She didn’t take the pen from my hand. She just looked at me with those eyes that still make my heart do something stupid even after all these years.

“Hey,” she said softly. “You’re trying to pack our entire life into bins. We have nothing we have to be there for right now, we can go later”

She didn’t mean we’d leave the next day. She meant we’d plan one step at a time. One meal at a time. One task at a time. She helped me break it down the way my injured brain needed it broken: tiny, concrete, sequential steps. She even made it feel like we were on the same team, because we are.

That’s the thing about her. She’s beautiful in the obvious ways—yes—but the kind of beautiful that matters most is how she moves through my hardest moments without ever making me feel small. She lets me try. She steps in without taking over. She reminds me that needing help doesn’t cancel out the fact that I’m still the one who wanted to give our family this trip in the first place.

We got everything packed. It took three sessions and a lot of deep breaths. And when we finally pulled into the campsite, I felt something I hadn’t expected: pride. Not because I did it perfectly, but because I did it at all.

Here’s what I’ve been turning over since we got here:

Packing for camping with a brain injury is a perfect, miniature version of recovery itself.

At home, I have systems. I have routines. I have my wife as my living, breathing backup hard drive. Everything has a place. I know where the napkins live. I know which drawer holds the measuring cups. My brain can coast on autopilot for a lot of the day.

But the second we step outside that familiar structure—whether it’s a campsite or just a Tuesday that doesn’t go according to plan—every single thing has to be rebuilt from scratch. You have to anticipate needs you used to handle without thinking. You have to remember things your brain used to file away automatically. You have to ask for help without feeling like you’re failing at being a husband, a father, a provider.

And sometimes you panic anyway.

The beautiful, painful truth is that recovery isn’t about getting back to the version of you who could pack in twenty minutes without a list. It’s about learning to pack anyway—with the lists, with the extra time, with the person who loves you enough to sit across the table and say, “Let’s just do tomorrow.”

It’s about accepting that providing for your family sometimes looks like letting your wife help you make the list. It’s about trusting that your presence, your effort, and your love still count even when your executive function is on strike. I’m still learning that the real provision isn’t having every single thing memorized. It’s showing up with the people who make the forgetting feel survivable.

If you’re navigating brain injury recovery—whether you’re the one injured or the one loving someone who is—please hear this: the fact that you’re even trying to pack the bag means you’re already doing the hard part. The lists, the breakdowns, the grace you receive and the grace you give… that’s the real adventure.

And it’s one worth taking, together.