I Survived a Traumatic Brain Injury. Now I Can’t Stop Doubting Myself.

Welcome to Tough Love. We’re answering your questions about dating, breakups, and everything in between. Our advice giver is Blair Braverman, dogsled racer and author of Small Game and Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube. Have a question of your own? Write to us at toughlove@outsideinc.com.

I know you normally answer questions about relationships, but I have a question about my relationship with my own brain. 

Long story short, about a decade ago I had a severe traumatic brain injury while wakeboarding that I’ve mostly recovered from, but it’s left me with some recurring chronic fatigue issues. 

I’ve somehow managed to still do a lot of backcountry ski touring, but having to be so aware of my energy levels and my body has resulted in a really nasty but noisy part of my brain that spends the whole journey up, and sometimes the days and hours before, telling me I’ll never make it, that I’m too tired or that I’m doing myself permanent damage. It’s like every step up requires making the effort twice over: I have to convince myself that the voice is wrong and that I can do it, and then I have to fight the voice and make my body actually do it. 

Despite this, I’ve managed to do a ton of touring and bagged some peaks, including a few across Japan. I’ve got skills and training and, depending on the month, decent fitness, but it feels like it takes me twice as much effort to do it as anyone else, and I already started the journey exhausted. Is this at all normal? Any advice on how to tell myself to shut the hell up? 

What you’re going through both is and isn’t normal, which is an incredibly frustrating answer, I know. It’s not normal because you’ve (mostly) recovered from a severe traumatic brain injury, which means you’ve been through a heck of a lot—physically, mentally, the whole shebang. You’ve faced challenges that most people can’t even imagine. That’s exceptional, in the true meaning of the word: your experience makes you an exception from the norm. It speaks to your toughness, your patience, your grit.

Now you have to put in a lot more effort to do things you love. I relate to your story because about a decade ago, I contracted Lyme and anaplasmosis from a tick bite, and my energy was severely limited for about two years, although at the time I feared it would last forever. I went from once hiking 70 miles in a day, when I put in maximum effort, to suddenly needing to put in that same maximum effort to make lunch. And when you drag yourself to the kitchen and make a sandwich, there’s no one congratulating you. No one’s proud. No one tells you to take the rest of the day off. You can’t mention it casually years later, like I just did with the 70-mile hike, to get people to understand that you really, really know how to push yourself. It’s thankless and frustrating and sad.

One of the biggest things I learned from that experience was that exhaustion and pain are, unfortunately, extremely normal. There are a ton of people for whom so-called “simple” things are difficult. People with fatigue, and chronic pain, and mental health challenges, and all of the above. People with any number of visible and invisible struggles.. They’re around you every day, although they might not talk about it, because they don’t have the time or the energy or they don’t expect to be believed. Some of those people are beside you on the mountain, but most of them aren’t. The things you do, and the things you’ve faced in order to do them, are remarkable.

You never know, when you see other people on the trail (or in the grocery line, or at daycare pickup), how much effort they’ve put into getting there. There are folks for whom things are relatively easy athletically, but are hard mentally or socially or financially. Someone might have the means to buy the fanciest equipment, but struggle physically, and need to put in way more training than most others to reach the same level of endurance. Someone else might dream of traveling but face debilitating anxiety every time they leave the house.

I don’t mean this in a pat, count-your-blessings way, and I’m certainly not telling you to be grateful because other people have it worse. I just want to tell you that, even when it feels like it, you’re not completely alone.

I think the biggest question isn’t about whether climbing or ski touring is harder for you than it is for other people. It is and it isn’t. The question is, do you enjoy it? What parts do you enjoy? What parts don’t you? What would make it more fun? What would make it hurt less? Would it help to go more slowly? To build in rest days? To choose flatter routes? Accommodations don’t mean you’re not tough. In fact, they’re a sign of mental toughness, because you’re both recognizing your changing needs and getting over your hangups in order to adjust to them. Maybe what would help most is taking on the same challenges you’re already doing, but with the context and self-compassion to recognize your own achievements, even the ones that other people can’t see.

Now, about this voice. This nagging, nasty voice. I brought your question to my friend, Sarah Marshall, of the podcast You’re Wrong About. Not because she’s extraordinarily nonjudgmental—although she is—but because she has a little technique called the Anxiety Prosecutor that she’s deployed on a few of my own mental demons. When she read your question, she sent this audio clip in response. I’ll leave you with her voice—and with my best wishes and respect.

Audio transcript:

OK, well, I love this question, I struggle with it all the time. Anxiety Prosecutor is something where you imagine that your inner voice of self doubt and self hatred is like a corrupt prosecutor in some kind of horrible stacked case that, if you were reading about it in the news, you’d be like, “That’s terrible and unfair!” And you create a defense lawyer for yourself. You can envision this as Ben Matlock, as one of the legal aide lawyers from Law and Order, as Shambala Green (I know there’s no reason for me to say that, you can’t put that in, but I just love her). You personify a character in your head who’s like, “Objection! My client has climbed two of the seven summits,” or whatever. “My client made polenta last night and they’d never made it before and it came out great!” or whatever. Creating a character within yourself that objects on your behalf. I’m sure this is some kind of bastardization of Family Systems Theory as overheard and applied to a lawyer TV show framework, but that has worked well for me in the past. And what I do more lately is imagining the voice of anxiety as a voice that is trying to keep me safe for whatever reason. It’s trying to keep me safe from tall poppy syndrome, or from the patterns that have resulted in me receiving someone else’s abusive behavior in the past, trying to save me through pattern recognition and trying to keep me from trying new things because technically it is safest to stay paralyzed and not do anything. It’s just that you’ll wither and die if you do that. So I like to just talk to that voice in a more motherly way, and not argue with it, and not give fuel to it by doing that, but just accept it as a part of myself that is focused on self-preservation. And just be like, “Hey, I know that you’re saying all these things because you’re trying to help me, but it’s okay and you don’t have to and this isn’t the way to do it. We can just relax and not think about this for a while.” And that doesn’t work instantaneously; you have to do it every five seconds sometimes. But it’s a habit, and it feels like a way of creating new patterns in your brain. Take that for what it’s worth, because I don’t have great success with any of this, but it helps me a lot.