It’s strange, this paradigm shift. It’s hard for me to get used to the idea that this culture I’ve been steeped in of “listening to your body” and “self-care” has its limits. That’s not to say that it’s unimportant to learn how to do these things if you’re someone who doesn’t do them at all. But over the years I’ve been told, by pretty much every medical professional, every yoga instructor, every meditation teacher, to listen to my body more without anyone ever asking me how much I was listening already. When I listened to my body through my malfunctioning, concussed brain and it told me it couldn’t do things, I confirmed its limits. It heard, “You’re right. You can’t do those things.” I listened to my body. But my body listened to me, too.

When I first met him, Dr. Collins had said: “When you have a concussion, you don’t have good instincts about what will make you better. You want to lie in a dark room. You don’t want to be social. You want to drop out of your life. That bad instinct, coupled with bad advice, makes you much, much sicker than you need to be.”