Beauty in the Broken Days
Some people come into your life (even after they’ve left it) and quietly rearrange how you see everything. For me, one of those people is Claire Wineland.
Claire lived with cystic fibrosis—a serious, progressive lung and digestive disease—from birth. She spent huge chunks of her short life in hospitals, hooked up to machines, fighting infections, and facing the very real possibility that each day might be one of her last. She died at 21 in 2018, just days after a double lung transplant. Yet she left behind a voice that still echoes powerfully: sick people are not broken. They are not to be pitied. And their lives can be incredibly full, meaningful, and even beautiful—because of the pain, not in spite of it.
Pounding Headache, Fading Words
I sat down today with the best of intentions. Laptop open, a glass of lemonade, notes scattered across the table like I actually had a plan. The goal? Write a blog post about life with traumatic brain injury (TBI) recovery. Something honest, maybe a little hopeful, definitely real.
Instead, I got... this.
About fifteen minutes in, the familiar pressure started building behind my eyes. Not the dramatic Hollywood migraine with flashing lights and vomiting—just a slow, stubborn fog that turns simple thoughts into tangled knots. I’d type a sentence, then stare at it wondering if it even made sense. Delete. Rewrite. Delete again. The words that felt clear in my head came out jumbled on the screen, like someone had rearranged the letters while I wasn’t looking.
This is TBI recovery in a nutshell for me right now: the intention is there, the effort is there, but the brain hardware is still rebooting. And when a headache joins the party, even basic thoughts get confusing.
www.creedthoughts.gov.wwwcreedthoughts
Some stories are worth telling even if they only ever end up in a word document no one else sees. Your story matters. You are not alone. Perhaps like mine, your story right now has just been written in a word document, or not written at all yet. Maybe you have been able to share it in a support group, or writing it down, or perhaps - just telling a family member or friend. Or maybe like many with brain injury you have found you don’t have those people to tell anymore and like Creed it is just a story being written for you right now. It’s your story. Author the best day you can today.