Healing After a Head Injury: Bipolar II, Creativity, and the Support That Helped Me Recover

Editor’s Note: This blog contains mentions of self harm and injury. Please read with care.

I was diagnosed with bipolar II a year after college. From childhood, however, I knew I had a noisy brain. Stressors of the day, like critical teachers or mocking friends, filled my ears. They rattled my mind. To escape, I sought solitary, self-soothing habits. Video games were big in high school, movies in college. But two habits that surfaced around age twelve had the greatest impact. One: I became a dedicated fiction writer. Two: I frequently bashed my head with my palm as hard as I could.

Composing fiction is a silent activity that grounds my manic mind. Since I started therapy, psychologists have encouraged this creative career as a peaceful self-esteem booster. Now I write for three hours a day. Skipping a day’s work generates a dread the gym rat feels when they miss a workout.

The reasons for bashing my head are less clear. It was a vague reflex that came when I disappointed myself. I palmed my forehead, perhaps, for the same reason one hits a broken television: hoping to spur it into working order, but also to punish it for not working.  

Self-harm wasn’t a foreign concept. High school health class presented little movies about cutting. But since my habit, I thought, wasn’t as bad as slashes to the wrist, I assumed it wasn’t really self-harm, or at least not the harmful kind.

Shortly after college graduation, 2018, I began therapy. For four years, psychologists asked, “Do you want to hurt yourself?” All that time I said, “No,” believing myself one hundred percent honest.

A Turning Point

Then in 2022, three years after the bipolar diagnosis, two things happened that changed my life forever. One: I started writing my first novel. Two: I suffered a terrible blow to the head.

On the day of the accident, summer 2022, I had been a novelist for a couple months, and that afternoon was in the thralls of enthusiastic hypomania. Confidence that I could finish the piece made me confident about everything else.  

I was at a store with a friend and discovered an empty dressing room stall locked from the inside. Annoyed by tiny obstacles, I thought it would be “cool” if I “penguin slid” under and opened it. In practice, though, things went more ram than penguin. At full speed I confidently drove my crown into the hardwood. Over the years I’ve forgiven my friend, both for laughing and for assuring that, since I didn’t lose consciousness, I was probably OK. Most people have a cartoon’s understanding of brain trauma. 

My head shook like a jackhammer for several minutes, ears muffled sound several minutes longer. Soon I developed a slight but persistent headache (stinging behind the eyes, heat on the crown, tightness around the temples) that worsened every time I read, wrote, or looked at a screen. Internet research called it a concussion, which didn’t seem like a big deal, and promised improvements within ten days. I was certain the discomfort would dissipate soon. In fact, I was confident it would. 

When Rest Isn’t an Option

After a week of pain, I went to urgent care, trusting that, since I was young and healthy, some easy medical advice would settle the issue. Maybe I just needed new glasses. 

“I work remote, alone, from my studio apartment as an editor,” I described my lifestyle to the physician’s assistant. “In the evenings I read and write.” 

“That’s why you have a headache,” she said. “You must rest your brain until you feel better.” 

“If I can’t write I’ll die,” I whispered. 

She had no response to that.  

“Still,” the PA said, “it’s rare for someone your age to recover so slowly. Do you have a history of brain damage?” 

“No,” I replied, believing myself one hundred percent honest. Then I thought for a moment. “Wait.” 

It’s called post concussive encephalopathy (PCE), common among boxers and football players, less common with writers. Bash your head too many times, even if it’s a bunch of minor jabs, and the brain gets worse at healing itself. 

For months I waited for improvements, paranoid to the point of tears that I would never heal. Things may have been different if I limited mental work; however, I doggedly refused to address the problem, which seems bizarre in hindsight but made perfect sense at the time. I had my panicked reasons. 

One: Due to the Kafkaesque nightmare trying to get a doctor’s FMLA signature, I continued fulltime work as an editor, which meant screen-watching, migraine-inducing labor nine to five. Convalescence only off the clock felt like a ridiculous, asinine half-measure. 

Two: Writing and reading were central to my mental health and self-image. Although the work generated extra pain, it was better than the mental nosedive, I assumed, would come from a break. 

It was a twist worthy of The Twilight Zone. Creative work meant to quiet my noisy mind now made it ache. I couldn’t accept, couldn’t fathom, that “harmless” self-harm sabotaged my craft. Rather than rest, I told myself PCE was a sort of muse and expanded a subplot in my novel involving the protagonist’s migraines. The pain was worth it, I thought, if it became art. Some call this rationalization. Writers call it “spin.” 

I healed six months after the incident, far later than doctors predicted. There’s nothing instructive about my approach to rehabilitation, not that time. But the thing about PCE, like writing, is one can always return to it with a new perspective. 

A Second Injury, A Different Response

Last December I bashed my head. Not on purpose; I abandoned that trick after Goodwill. I was in a Foxtrot, writing, when I leaned back in my chair and, miscalculating the distance from the wall, hit hardwood. Symptoms returned immediately. 

All I can say is thank God for girlfriends. A beautiful, amazing woman, with whom I had begun a relationship only a couple months before, when I told her the day’s injury, demanded respite. “I’ll do it with you,” she promised. 

I was unemployed, which helped. This was a lesser hit than the Goodwill incident, which also helped. More than anything, though, I benefited from my girlfriend’s company. Abandoning notebooks and computers for a few weeks, she and I did a lot of coloring, walking, and meditation.  

And it took only that: a few weeks. Miraculously, I got better. 

Rethinking Self-Reliance

Survival story fans cheer when the hero cauterizes their own wound or splints their own arm because those sequences satisfy the suspicion that people faced with catastrophe, alone, will do anything necessary to save themselves. That I abandoned the self-help instinct post-injury not because my circumstances were especially dire, but because they were inconvenient, suggests I would crumble in a solo survival situation. Which is sad, in a way, but also helpfully revealing.

The phrase "self-care" conjures images of midday naps, baths, and other "care" activities one administers to the "self." But in practice, for me anyway, and I think this is true of most people with Bipolar, care is impossible alone. When I described my lifestyle to the PA–editing in an apartment alone, writing in an apartment alone—she should've been as concerned about the loneliness as she was the mental strain. At the time I needed communion, a support system to hand-hold me toward healthier habits. Misled by friends, dismissed by doctors, in hindsight I understand the 2022 panic, and why 2026 was such an improvement.

Perhaps the saintly girlfriend saving the restless young artist is a familiar cliche, and nobody, least of all writers, wants to be a cliche. But things become familiar because they are true. And it was true in 2026, as it was in 2022, that care is unimaginable without the support of others. Only when I surrendered to the common comforts of communion did my body heal as it should.