Brain Injury Personality Change: TBI Survivor Can Be Better

Brain Injury Personality Change: Craig Part Twenty Three 

Craig embellishes on his brain injury personality change from who he was before his brain injury personality changes to who he is now.  What he did after. How his brain injury personality change drove him to different avenues such as starting and being a leader in the survivor group, and being a writer.

So what did you do when you left?

Well at that point I just needed a little break. I started writing a little bit and I’m not going to get to into that; that’s another life.  But, I started writing.  I wrote a couple of books which I’ll probably never publish, one called Show Me The Money.  I’m going to tell you where that ones from. It is my journey in the brain injury leadership world to save the non‑brain injury leadership and it’s a work in progress I can tell you.  It’s, it’s a long book.

How TBI Survivors Brain Injury Personality Change Can Be Better

What’s it about?

When I got into the brain injury industry, they didn’t want a survivor, oh my God, a survivor running a group?  It was unheard of in our state and now our state’s 90 percent run (by survivors).  I mean, we have a thousand times the people involved and 90 percent of them  are survivors.  We’ve started a movement in and around the world and nobody knows what we’re going through unless you meet that first other person. And that’s empowering.

I’m not saying we don’t need doctors, we don’t, we need lawyers, we need doctors but at a certain point the medical model is out the door.  It’s a social thing, either it’s within ourselves or within others and I hated the guilt that I felt and I hated that I was always trying to be who I was.

I’m never going to be who I was but you’re never going to be who you were ten years ago either.  We all change a little bit.  Granted my (change) was drastic and I want to be proud of who I am and what I’m doing and not be looking back, God, I miss who I was. All the people in it, that’s their main thing – the regret, the remorse that, God I can’t do what I did or I’m not who I was. So what?  Be better.  So, our focus is that we’re as good, we can be better if we choose..

So you worked on a couple of books?

Yeah, the previous one was called Lost Self.  It was about my suicidal tendencies.

Did that get, is that completed?

Yeah, it’ll probably never published, I’d kill my movement.

So, tell me about all the things that are in that book that you don’t want anybody to hear. Tell me about your brain injury personality changes.  

Just talked about my suicidal tendencies.

Like I say, I wrote a little.

I wrote a little music, which got me by through the hard time.  I made a little money but the music was morbid.  It’s about a hard time and it was kind of amazing that people wanted to hear that.  I think that’s what amazed me the most.  I started off with Christian music, ended up being just, went from the Pastor Craig Band to Insane from Pain.

So that was an interesting time but I wrote my first song on Christmas Eve.  I was going to put a bullet through my brain.  I had the gun cocked at my head and I wrote a song instead. That’s was the first song.  It came, just out, that night and that was the first song I performed:  I Think I Need A Savior.

Would that have been what, a year and a half after your injury? 2006? After you experienced brain injury personality change?

2006. See my wife was gone and I felt pretty hopeless because I couldn’t be who I was.

Next in Part Twenty Four – Survivor Based Brain Injury Support Groups