Within a month of starting this practice, I begin to experience the feeling of my brain reconnecting itself, like going from dim Fourth of July sparklers of ideas to full-on fireworks. It reminds me of the way I felt on the table during my blood patch, or during the CT myelogram at Duke, when after being injected with fluid, I felt the fog lift and my mind become clear, when I felt myself become Me again. I’m still struggling with regaining my explicit memory, with things like executive function and organization; I still lose words and find myself overwhelmed by situations which previous to all of this would have been trivial for me to handle. But a month into this piano therapy, I am able to hold ideas in my head, to remember numbers and dates, to have moments of insight. I can make connections between concepts, I can remember things better from one moment to the next, complete tasks more efficiently, have wide-ranging conversations and not lose my train of thought. Is this happening because of this piano practicing? Is it because I have more than twenty-five years of music training already in my brain, ready to be reactivated? Would other people without previous training have similar results?
It makes me curious: Is there a difference between learning new music I haven’t studied before now versus revisiting repertoire I learned and spent hours practicing as a teen, a time when the brain undergoes remarkable and significant development? Is there a difference between reactivating old pathways versus creating new ones? Or is my brain different now, after this leak, so that even those old pathways, from those decades-old years of practicing, when reactivated, become like new?
It also makes me curious about the idea of the self, about how the self that is me now recognizes the thoughts and memories of the self that was me when I first learned the piece of music I’m now revisiting. About how the self that was me when I was leaking felt cut off from the self that was there, lost in the fog, the “real me” that emerged when I had a bolus of fluid injected into me, raising my intracranial pressure, and—somehow—allowing my mind to once again resurface from the depths of my brain.
I think, too, about my experience of illness during those years in music school, when I battled with some of these same questions: the questions of pain, of being believed, of the value of my own narrative, of who I was. When I was sick then, with what I called Mystery Disease, and in the years afterward, when I recovered, I’d thought of that time as partitioned off, compartmentalized from the rest of my life. That was not the Real Me; that time I spent being sick was some kind of strange exception to the rule, some kind of secret side-quest, some deviation from the norm, not the Real Me, the me who was ordinarily healthy and productive. That compartmentalizing, I came to understand, was a choice I made to protect myself. My experience of myself as a sick person didn’t make sense with my experience of myself as a well person; it didn’t cohere. So thus it couldn’t be truly me. It was an aberration, a time in my life that was the exception, not the rule.
But before the leak happened, back when I was reading through my journals from music school while working on a book idea about conservatory life, I was suddenly able to see the continuity. That sick, struggling self in those journals, writing about being sick and not wanting to be sick—that self was still me. I recognized it. I saw it in the attempts at narrative, at understanding. In the stitching up of story, in the denial of story. I saw it in the comments written in the margins from Future Me’s at later times in my life, now all of them Past Me’s, evaluating what I’d written, taking issue with things, revising, correcting, reevaluating, clarifying, discounting, admitting. Reading through these diaries, this writing from a me who was at the time only slightly older than my daughter is now, I was able to accept and genuinely embrace, for possibly the first time in my life, a coherence of self. I was still me, even then. That sick me, that lost me, that ashamed me: It was still me. I was able to recognize it now. It was me, even when I thought it wasn’t, even when I didn’t want it to be. Sick me was actual me, is present me.
It was fitting, in a way, to have stumbled upon that self-acceptance, this understanding of continuity and coherence of self, before the CSF leak happened. Because although my experience of the leak was in many ways an experience of dissociation, of a splitting off of implicit me and explicit me, a distance between brain and mind, a sense of selflessness, I’m able to understand that I don’t have to understand this illness and recovery as a period of being Not-Me. I don’t have to decide now, the way I decided as a teen, as a young person in my twenties, to discard the time I spent lost and sick as Not-Me Time, some kind of distraction from Actual Me, all of it a Me that didn’t count. This CSF leak took my sense of Me-ness away for a time, and now, as I recover, I’m reintegrating, relearning what it’s like to be me, right now, in the midst of a process. Recovery is putting the pieces back together. Just like in piano practice. The part
