Don’t turn away. Keep looking at the bandaged place.

That’s where the light enters you.

—Rumi

 
 
My wife and I gazed at each other across the tree and tinsel, and we said, This is our last Christmas together, isn’t it? 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 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 that would 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 to weakness, her kindness receding into quiet. No wonder they make you put it in the vows. Not “till death do us part”—the “in sickness and in health.” The warning is right there on the label.

Like most people, I didn’t read the warnings.

 

* *

 

Doubt, like a river, has two banks: that which separates cannot easily be crossed.

 

* *

 

Thomas, in front of the other apostles, said I don’t believe you. Jesus walked right up to him, pointed to the juicy place where the spear had entered, and replied, Go ahead, stick your hand in there. Stop doubting, believe. This was the only thing that convinced Thomas that his friend Jesus was what he said he was: this proof of blood. Touching it with his fingers, seeing red, laying hands on the warm, wet rib.

 

* *

 

Each year, three million people are admitted to the emergency room for brain injuries. Most of those do not show up on a CT scan or MRI. There is no bandage, no blood, no cast. The wound is invisible. Poor judgment, memory loss, emotional volatility, ringing in the ears—laid out like this, of course, these seem less like signs of brain trauma, more like hysteria.

 

* *

 

My wife loves anything with a beating heart. Once, walking through Newark to work, we had a tiff because she “didn’t like walking by the chicken factory when they were delivering the chickens.” When we play the game of Who Would You Have Been in a Past Lifetime, some people with egos—ahem, me—say “emperor.” S says “Happy turtle in a little pond.” When we play the game of Who Would You Have Been in 1600s America, I say “Fire Tender,” S says “The lesbian who lives at the top of the hill and ends up burned at the stake for a witch.” She is unaware of her power over others, but you can hear the awe in the voices of friends and colleagues when they talk about her. S, an architect, takes me on tours of her construction sites in Philly, showing me the bright new playgrounds with the spraygrounds, pointing out the spinning thing the kids are crazy for, and I understand how lucky we all are to know her.

We met in college. Dancing was what got S to notice me back then—me in black pleather pants, her in a black pleather skirt. Sometimes, when we aren’t sure what to say to one another, we let the rhythm take over. Our bodies loosening, oh yeah, I remember you. We’ve moved twelve times in nineteen years, helped each other through graduate degrees, slept in a single hospital bed when we both got food poisoning, scraped together to buy a house of our own. Our friends call us soul mates and roll their eyes about it. Sometimes I run into S on the street without expecting to, for a split second don’t recognize her, think: “She’s hot.” I look at her face and see changing weather patterns, storm clouds, sun breaking through. I watch her hang back at parties until there is a predictable silence, and then she throws a zinger that people reference months later. The last time we played Bananagrams, she let me go for twenty minutes piecing together my three-syllable words before announcing she’d won: every one of her words invented, hysterectomy spelled as “hiztorktmee.” S teaches me to take myself less seriously. She, the funniest person in the room, laughs at my jokes. This is how we stay in love.

S insists that she will go before me—and I’ll be left here alone, boring myself to death. If we are to make it, it will be through laughter, which for us can be as potent as sex.

But I don’t know if we are going to make it.

 
 

* *

 
 

My third year into recovery, I take a free yoga class open only to people with head injuries. The teachers help us work through dizziness, balance. The lights stay dim. We do a lot on our backs. We wear sunglasses and lean on walls. One man, a fireman, is on leave, the butt of his department’s jokes. One is a college kid who, half weeping, thanks his buddy Sam for coming with him today. One is a woman who has been fired from the job she loved, having used up her sick time. Her mother joins her for every class, an older woman from the Caribbean who on the first day tried out some stretches, pushing her body into unfamiliar shapes. Every day after, the mother sits in a metal folding chair and watches. She speaks blessings over us: How they suffer God, give them their peace.

I am stunned by this woman’s act of love, so whole. This generosity from a complete stranger, with tears in her eyes, who sees not only her daughter’s pain, but the pain of strangers.

 

* *

 

In her groundbreaking work The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry writes, “For the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that ‘having pain’ may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to ‘have certainty,’ while for the other person it is so elusive that ‘hearing about pain’ may exist as the primary model of what it is ‘to have doubt.’ Thus pain comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed.” Pain, language—the things that make us most human are too often what alienate us, keep us apart.

 

* *

 

Have you heard this one? asks Dr. Ann Marie McLaughlin. A professor is lecturing a group of neurology students on brain injury. Stopping at slide one, she says, Patient A shows signs of anxiety and depression. Slide two, Patient B, complains of chronic migraine. At the third slide, the professor notes, This one has trouble concentrating, headaches, and fatigue. The professor asks, What do they all have in common?

A student at the front tentatively raises his hand. He answers: They’re all making it up.

 

* *

 

In 1916, 1918, 1919, 1922, 1923, and 1925, Virginia Woolf was confined to her bed with influenza. Afterward, she was in such pain that only extreme intervention—tooth extraction—brought relief. Dr. Fergusson, her practitioner, worried about her nervous system and her heart. Woolf often expressed emotional tumult as physical symptom: “Such ‘sensations’ spread over my spine & head . . . the horror—physically like a painful wave about the heart.” Do we dare doubt her?

 

* *

 

Five: the magic number in head injury, which doctors often refuse to speak aloud. Most people will recover from a head injury in a few weeks or months, but for many others, it can take five years or far, far longer until you’re wholly or even partly back in the world. Part of the sentence is not knowing how long the sentence is. In the meantime, there are pharmaceuticals, ice, boiled ginger, frankincense, quiet rooms, body work, acupuncture. There are the fits of anxiety and anger, the irrational fear of bed bugs, the constant vigilance—paranoia—that the next head injury is just around the corner. 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.

I ask S to join me at the yoga class, to prove that I, too, have someone at home who would sit for an hour on a metal chair, or join in the poses like the friend Sam. But I must not ask her in the right way—never quite express what it would mean to have her in that room with me, the leap of faith she would take simply by skipping out on work and crossing the threshold of the South Philly studio—and she never comes. Instead we go to an appointment that is supposed to save us but is nearly the end of us. There are throw pillows, dimmed lights, a couch that feels as if it has no bones in it, an unlit candle that smells of spoiling fruit, and yet all I feel is the hardness of the room. I look from my wife to the couples’ therapist, back to my wife. They doubt me, every word. Their eyes as un- blinking and fixed as the rule of law. When I speak, they look right past me to the blank wall, as if what I’m sharing is shadow puppetry.

 

* *

 

Disability, whatever our gross assumptions and beliefs about it, carries legitimacy, whereas chronic illness, especially when it cannot be seen, raises flags. My condition is unbelievable until I put on sunglasses in- doors; then people clock me—even if they don’t want to. I trade symptoms with others like me—Do you ever get the feeling that an airbag went off in your head? Do you feel like your brain is a block of melting ice?—each of us desperate for reconciliation. Even then, I feel us eyeing each other, working out what is real, what is fiction.

In Notes from Sick Rooms, Virginia Woolf ’s mother Julia Stephen, a nurse, takes the “stance of radical unknowingness” and tells us that illness and injury should have “the leveling power of death.” She notes that “the smell of the snuffed candle, the too-hot towel after the bath, the too salty beef tea, the under-filled water cushion, the absence of ‘gentle hush’ in the sick room are examples of the physical torments that cause the patient to suffer.” When she talks about “invalid’s fancies”—those absurd, sometimes raving complaints about physical discomfort—she urges us not to dismiss them, for we cannot say for sure what the unwell are dealing with. Language, a simulacrum, fails us in sickness, as it fails us in nearly all things.

Even so, when I can read again, I go to books, because that is where I have always gone. The medical texts say, Have we told you the one about the guy with the iron pole in his head? What an injury! Then I go to the survival stories, but the survivors say, Have we told you how they said we’d never walk again? Look at us now, racing across mountains and rivers to win bronze medals! But where is everybody else, the ones who aren’t outliers, the people like me who, even before all this, couldn’t much hack a lazy river? Where are the drunk college kids who made a bad decision on a balcony and the mediocre drivers who got rear-ended and the construction worker thinking about his sandwich who accidentally got brained, and what type of person gets hit by a potted plant, anyway, and where is Lady Gaga? Where is George Clooney in all of this? If every one of us wrote our own book, maybe then they’d finally believe us.

Somebody in my family says, “Jeez, you act like such an old person now.”

 

* *

 

One windy day, two years into recovery, a bit of bark flies off a tree and hits me in the head. It sends me to bed for hours. My wife picks it up off the counter, examines it. This? she asks. Are you sure it was this? Truthfully, I am as confounded as she is. It weighs nothing. Surely, it is nothing.

Dr. M, my general practitioner, is as tidy as a dinner napkin and wears a look of genuine concern anytime I enter the exam room. We text often. Dr. M is one of the good ones. Yet even Dr. M cannot bring himself to agree with me about my pain. On our call after the bit of bark, he says, Are you sure this isn’t just anxiety?

Doubt hangs perpetually in the space between belief and disbelief. It is usually employed anagogically—we doubt God most of all, even as we feel the ache of our own private god-shaped hole, a knowing sensed mostly through absence. In premodern Western theology, doubt emerges as “the voice of an uncertain conscience.” Doubt, in the Age of Enlightenment, is the tool of the evolving mind. There can be no new knowledge without the space that doubt—sometimes cruelly—excavates.

Descartes, in his Meditations, shows us that doubt can be unsettling, corrosive, even annihilating, yet it is the only path to truth. No peace without contrition, no contrition without examination, no examination without doubt. To illustrate his point, he gives an example of a basket full of apples. If we suspect some are rotten, don’t we have to dump the whole basket? Inspect every apple for brown spots? Make sure the disease doesn’t reach the whole bushel? We have no choice, Descartes tells us, but “to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations,” for a single falsehood “threatens to spread falsehood.” When I return to Descartes, I cannot help but remember that doubt binds us to one another. To doubt is to hesitate, to hesitate is to think, to think is to reason, to reason is to bring ourselves in communion with the uncertainties of others, and what could be more human?

When Dr. M announces he’s moving out of the country, I give him a signed copy of my first book. He is jubilant. Oh, you’re a real writer, he says. I didn’t realize!

When things between us are at their worst, my wife says, Are you sure this isn’t in your head?

Even the word “doubt,” with its impossible “u” and silent “b,” makes us balk.

If there is a heaven—if it opens itself to us—it must be the place where we are as undeniable as the smell of bread.

 

* *

 

On display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston: Handsome Hyacinth, dying because of a game gone wrong, a wild windy day. Apollo, bent over him, mourning his lover. But this was no accident, it is the west wind god, also in love with Hyacinth, who killed him. Zephyros used the wind to strike Hyacinth, perhaps because his words failed him, he did not know how to say, Come to me, be with me.

My love, I do not want your pale sorry. I want to be understood.

 

* *

 

“Somatization disorder” is defined as a form of mental illness that manifests in the body, often as pain. Somatoform disorders, depending on who is doing the defining, include hypochondriasis, conversion disorder, pain disorder, Lyme disease. The classification has been used by insurance companies in court cases, specifically in regard to TBI, to suggest that the plaintiff is not actually experiencing what she is experiencing. The injury is not the problem. Rather, catastrophizing presents as greater vulnerability to pain. What the plaintiff is complaining about, the lawyer says, is actually anxiety, or depression, or stress—obviously preexisting—projected into physical symptoms. This is overestimation, overblown imagination, expectation as etiology. Somatization disorder, a synonym for what was once called hysteria, is psychogenetic: it’s all in your head.

I do not know what somatization is—have to look it up—when it is used on me.

 

* *

 

But how can we blame our loved ones when they have been made to doubt?

The systemic codification of doubt started long ago, before average households had electrical light or indoor plumbing, years before the car was invented, before the world wars, in the time that people still dreamed of flight and the best we could achieve was a glider pulled by a horse on a beach. It was the advent of the train in the 1800s—that icon of modernity that might in fact be the first real modern clock, “compressing travel length and distance,” to obliterate any definition of time known to the mind and body—that birthed the very concept of trauma. Then, for the next two hundred years, we fell all over ourselves denying trauma even exists.

It will be of little surprise when I tell you that American insurance companies, those insidious enterprises that made their money insuring slave ships and their captains, are most responsible for our skepticism of other people’s pain. The railway insurance companies and their stakeholders are the ones, according to trauma researcher Roger Luckhurst, who convinced us that hurt people are not actually hurt, that we honest taxpayers are being duped by fakers and rogues trying to scam the system. Insurance companies taught us to be suspicious of people who are in pain.

Even after clocks were standardized to railway timetables, traveling by train was dangerous and chaotic. During westward expansion, as Robert C. Reed explains in Train Wrecks, the federal government encouraged flimsy, cheap railroad construction through the land grant policy, giving rail companies property and funding so long as the lines were complete. There were no standard gauges, which meant that trains sometimes ran on tracks anywhere from four to six feet wide, and often in both directions on single rails. In 1875, 1,201 train accidents were reported. In 1880, just five years later, that number increased to 8,216, a jump of 584 percent. Many people died, but also, for the first time in history, hundreds were walking away from horrific accidents without a scratch only to later contend with “disordered memory . . . melancholia . . . the sudden loss of business sense.” We were suddenly grappling with the collective experience of trauma, defined by Luckhurst as the confrontation between the general public and industrialization.

Widespread trauma had been experienced by nineteenth-century factory workers, much of it kept from the public, but never on this scale, nor had it impacted so many people across classes and industries. A theory arose that “traveling at speed might have concussive effect on the nervous system, whilst the violent jarring of the body in an accident might induce permanent but invisible damage.” They named the condition “railway spine”—what Charles Dickens suffered in 1865 after a bridge derailment, when all train cars but his own fell into a ravine. (Dickens: “I am not quite right within, but believe it to be an effect of the railway shaking.”)

Railroad tycoons began to lose “millions [of dollars] in law cases where they suspected juries were already biased to favor individual victims over large railroad corporations in an era of anti-trust agitation.” Groups like the National Association of Railway Surgeons, funded by the railways and insurance outfits, arose to contest the claims of victims. They equated the condition with hysteria (“a form of disease imitation neuromimesis, or malingering”) and accused victims of faking it for payouts. They did not call it somatization then, but “factitious PTSD.”

From this point, it was easy for the medical industry to dismiss the work of trauma researchers such as Hermann Oppenheim who, in 1886, delivered a lecture entitled “The meaning of fright for the diseases of the nervous system.” Following World War I, traumatic neurosis—experienced in staggering numbers by soldiers coming home with “shell shock,” the combat version of railway spine—were largely excluded from medico-legal assessments. Conversely, in 1961, “accident neurosis” became defined as a syndrome that was largely “motivated by hopes of financial and other rewards, and which shows considerable improvement following the settlement of compensation.” While “post-trauma concussion state” was coined in 1939, and “post-concussion syndrome” was in use by 1941, with PTSD entering into official diagnosis in 1980—no universally accepted definition of post-concussive disorder exists.

Many people—and courts—still think it is made up.

 

* *

 

I have doubts, too. I don’t think our marriage is going to survive. One day—my birthday—I start crying, the croissant going to pieces in my hands. I think it’s just mine, this secret of our undoing. But such knowledge, even unspoken, invades any relationship. S feels the growing distance between us—and looks away.

Every night, I pack a bag, and every morning I unpack it. The leaving happens over and over again, but only in my mind, because I do not have the resolve or physical endurance for self-preservation. If you had checked into a hotel, if you had gone to your sister’s. How easy it would be to save yourself, if only you were up for it. The leaving is a form of the conditional to which I return—if, if, if—even—especially—once I start to get better.

It’s not just my marriage—I begin to question all my 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. There are good days and bad days, and maybe that is the problem: the good ones erase credibility, the doubt spreads. I am enveloped in such a great fog. I go to a brain trauma support meeting and, because of the looks I get, the horror stories I hear, start edging toward the door. I’m not really hurt, not like these people, I think. I should not be asking about free yoga. The guest speaker—a woman injured so severely on a bike ride that doctors didn’t think she’d walk again, and who announces herself as Executor of the Mind Your Brain Foundation—turns to me, says, We’re all on the same ship.

You have to understand, a friend admits to me over the phone—I’ve heard all about your brain injury, and I still have no idea what a brain injury is. Even if I get my own brain injury, I’ll still have no clue.

My friend adds, Only the doctors refuse to admit they don’t know.

Kevin Pearce, former snowboarder, agrees: “A brain injury is to doctors like the ocean floor is to oceanographers. The mysteries of both, they remain so vast and so unknown.”

 

* *

 

Haven’t we learned yet? The blank space is never empty. There are a million conversations taking place in the silence, naked to the eye.

Between any two neurons, there exists a tiny, tiny gap. This is called a synapse, and it is where the talking happens. This might be best imagined as two asterisks separated by white space. See * *.

In the brain, a single neuron can have thousands of these gaps into which it constantly sends messages. One type of neuron, the Purkinje cell, deep in the cerebellum, has 100,000 synapses. What is there to say? This is pain, this is touch, this is movement, this is what we have learned, this is where we are going, look up, this is where I am * * where are you. A neuron sends out its signal in an act of chemical synapse, initiating an electrical response, exciting or inhibiting the other neuron.

My * throws out a flare to your *, hoping for a response.

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. We write the whole body, the symptom, claustrophobia. The injured self is the integrated self, and will not be confined.

In a single human being, there are more than 125 trillion synapses in the cerebral cortex alone, about the number of stars in fifteen hundred Milky Way galaxies. What this means is that we are not just lying in wait for others, but that in our very selves, we live most often in the in-between.

* *

* *

* *

It is okay to be between. Where else is there to go?

 

* *

 

Twelve-year-old Araminta Ross, called “Minty” but perhaps best known to us as Harriet Tubman, is sent to the dry goods store on errands. Another enslaved person is discovered to have left the property without permission, and the overseer demands young Harriet help restrain him. She refuses. The overseer throws an object, missing the man, hitting her—a two-pound lead scale counterweight to the head. It is a vicious blow. The brain injury changes everything.

No medicine, no time for rest. Forced back to work, hauling muskrat traps shoeless through frozen swamps, Harriet Tubman is overcome by seizures, headaches—even migraines, a diagnosis not yet named in the 1800s though the symptoms appear as far back as some 3,000 BCE Mesopotamian poems. The untreated head trauma yields periods of cataplexy, hypersomnia, possibly even narcolepsy. The slave master is brutal, and while many layers of clothes can absorb the brunt of his violence, there is nothing to protect from further blows to the head. Biographer Sarah Hopkins Bradford notes, “The day’s work must be accomplished, whether the head was racked with pain, and the frame was consumed by fever, or not; but the day came at length when poor Harriet could work no more.” Harriet Tubman flees north at twenty-seven, walking the ninety miles to freedom and Philadelphia on foot.

Harriet Tubman begins to see visions. She will be out one minute— not even realizing she had fallen asleep—and the next, she is listening to God. She has vivid dreams of flying over water that seem to be missives from her Maker. The visions tell her how to keep her and others safe, especially when she begins her nightly rounds on the Underground Railroad. Thirteen trips, seventy enslaved men and women and children. Do these people believe she is communing with God? They believe in her—in the pistol she packs, the paregoric she administers to babies to keep them quiet, and when she knocks out her own infected tooth when it risks a mission. They believe she is a man when she dresses up as one, that she is a free, middle-class woman when she dons a silk dress. She sets out to free her countrymen on Saturdays (“Wanted” posters aren’t printed until Monday, and this gives her a head start), sends out her signal—* *. They respond * *—and in a single night, Harriet Tubman has converted another doubter.

Frederick Douglass, in one of his letters to Harriet Tubman, writes: “I have wrought in the day—you in the night The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom.” In 1859, in an early act of the Civil War, she sparks an armed revolt of enslaved people, helping abolitionist John Brown plan the raid on Harpers Ferry (though the night it happens, she is home ill). In 1863, General Tubman leads three hundred black soldiers in the Combahee River Raid, the first woman-led armed expedition of the war, liberating more than seven hundred of her people in South Carolina.

Yet the nightly devotions come at great sacrifice: thirteen years after the injury, writes biographer Sarah Hopkins Bradford, Harriet Tubman is still in agony. In the 1890s, at Massachusetts General Hospital, she undergoes brain surgery for migraines, but the pain never stops. Neither does she. Tubman opens a restaurant-laundry, runs businesses out of her own home, trains entrepreneuring black women. She works alongside Susan B. Anthony for women’s suffrage, largely uncredited. She opens a nursing home on her own property in Auburn, New York, taking care of others until it is her time to go. There is no room for doubt, only action.

It is the very condition of Harriet Tubman’s vulnerabilities—her enslavement, her injuries, her blackness in America, her fragile humanity—which make her brave, and which ultimately call her to reach out to those weaker, less protected than she. It is those perceived weaknesses, not their denial, that make her superhuman. Doubt need not be annihilation, Harriet Tubman teaches us. All we have to do is turn it into belief.

 

* *

 

When we think of Thomas the Apostle, we think of someone miraculously cured of doubt. Jesus, by showing himself to his friend, grants him undeniable proof. Belief is the opposite of faith, unmade without doubt. Still, I wonder if it’s so simple for the man we now deem a saint. I wonder if, even in that moment of divine illumination, a darker shadow overcame him. If in touching the very wounds of the Son of God, Thomas was overwhelmed by a new, cataclysmic doubt to overcome—within himself.

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.

 

* *

 

I used to say my wife was a saint. I don’t say that anymore. No one should have to live with that hanging over them.

Some years into recovery, I have a bad weekend. Lightning strikes in the same spot in my head, over and over. My trigeminal nerve acting up. My wife says, I’ve never seen you in pain like this. I think, that’s because I didn’t let you, you didn’t want to, we sat on our opposite river-banks and stared at each other across the tide that kept rising. And then I really start looking at us and realize: my doubt in S far predates her. I’ve told myself I could be married so long as I still depended mostly on myself. I’ve spent most of my adult years with S, am deeply devoted to her, and had no idea that the reason so much of that was possible was because of how much I’ve held back. It begins to dawn on me, the lack of faith implicit in such an arrangement.

Most marriages exist not between doubt and belief but in certain denial—in mutual, even convenient disbelief. That is, until reality comes crashing in. Too often, we mistake stasis for stability when, really, it is in risk where we truly learn to know one another. We are the distance between * *.

It is not only me who stays. She does, too, going through her own madness, trying to make sense of us in this gibberish. The supreme act is not the falling in love, it is checking for it day after day, like a letter in the mail or a sign from above. Without meaning to, we find each other’s rawest vulnerabilities: after being together for over a decade, our relationship finally begins. Years pass, we learn that somehow you can emerge from devastation and estrangement far less willing to contort yourself into a false shape, even for love, which after all is love.

Four years into recovery, I land an interview for a position with healthcare, in a city that is hours away. I turn to my wife, blurt out, I really need this job. She puts down her book, looks at me, and says, I will always take care of you.

 

* *

 

“When you are in doubt,” Carl Jung writes, “you have the greatest opportunity to unite the dark and light sides of life.” He contends, “Doubt is creative if it is answered by deeds.”

On a particularly bad night, standing up to brush my teeth is too much. My wife holds me up on the toilet, her fingers interlaced around my head so I don’t pass out and hit it on the porcelain. She and my best friend wheel me into the living room in the office chair because I can’t make it the fifteen feet. After my friend leaves, I realize I have to pee. It’s my wife’s idea, this act of empathic imagination: she holds the orange pot under me, the one we use to cook spaghetti. When I’m done, she cleans it.

We lie in bed together, blue scarf on my head, her leg curled around me, waiting it out.

 

* *

 

On our last day at the yoga class, our teacher tells us she has had twelve concussions. Twelve! I think in disbelief—what can twelve possibly feel like? The teacher says, My twelve might not feel as bad as your three—and this is the first incredible act of faith I witness that day. The second happens when the woman on the metal folding chair stands up. She clears her throat, looks at her daughter with such tenderness, and says, Before I came here and listened to all of you, I thought she was faking it. For over a year, this loving mother, who has shown up to our class week after week, did not believe in her daughter’s pain. What has brought her here is not proof, but devotion.

And then, moments later, the third revelation, clear as the word of God: I understand my wife’s doubt does not belong only to her, but to everybody—my family, my doctor, my country—to me, too. Because who is to say I would have believed her, believed any of you, before all this.

So go ahead, doubt, my love.

 

* *

 

Kierkegaard says for one to truly love God, one must doubt God. But Kierkegaard also tells us that there is not enough evidence in the world to convince us that God, or even love, is real. “Faith involves making the commitment anyway,” he says. To doubt means to earn our belief when it finally arrives. To leap is to have the courage to doubt.

 
 
 

Excerpted from Sex With A Brain Injury by Annie Liontas. Copyright © 2024 by Annie Liontas. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, LLC.