Life after brain injury chains bad news with worsening health, brief moments of feeling better, lost opportunities, increasing psychic pain, and despair ascending when medicine fails to heal, families blame us, and friends leave. Yet messaging bombards us to feel grateful, look at the bright side, and think of others. The messaging is like flinging mud at our brain injury grief, grief from having died while remaining physically alive, grief from loss upon loss upon loss. The worst is when we’re told to feel joy, as if it's the same as happiness.

The operative myth is “feel.”

How can we feel when brain injury has killed off our affect?

How can we feel happy when reality teaches that whatever we imagine, it’ll be worse?

How can we experience the emotion of joy when despair clings like gloppy mud?

We can’t.

But joy can drive our lives.

As long as we don’t expect to feel joy.

“Joy is not about feeling happy; it’s about seeing beauty and the good, taking the next step in healing in the midst of raw pain and despair.” From Brain Injury, Trauma, and Grief.

For Christians, the “joy of the Lord” is an adage. When drowning in raw brain injury grief, that adage feels like stones hurled at our heads. Whether we’re a devout follower of Jesus or an atheist, we experience the same struggle with despair and psychic pain that fills our being with such intense grief that we cannot even think. This is why I........

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