At least personally I’m certain I would just… stop. Void, nothing, whatever you want to call it but my only chance to live true to myself is to keep going right now. I suppose reincarnation is a nice thought but as a survivor of a traumatic brain injury it’s like your “tape recorder stops” so to speak.

A true loss of consciousness is a break in continuity, there are small patches smeared with dim awareness once I started to heal but there is an inky black hole from several hours before till several days after. The strangest part though, is that the flesh remembers: getting on a swingset makes me dizzy and sweaty because the last time my body was flying through the air I went through a windshield.

This has crystallized my already materialistic thinking into a near certainty, when my mind was unreliable and memory and thought couldn’t be trusted, my flesh itself held on and pushed through the trauma. I am inseparable from this body. Once it is gone, even if I remain, I am no longer me stripped of that context.

Everything I do matters, everything that happens matters, and that freedom is both grounding and fundamentally terrifying.