Read Online Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel by Jason Padgett, Maureen Ann Seaberg - Free Book Online

tried to talk me into going back. I couldn’t snap out of my agoraphobia. One of our salespeople took over the management of the store. When I needed groceries, I slipped out at three in the morning and filled the car to overflowing so I wouldn’t have to go out again for several weeks, checking my rearview mirror constantly on the way home to see if I was being followed. The light of the grocery store, bright by anyone’s standards, was blinding to me. I seemed to be developing photosensitivity from my isolation in the house. All people seemed suspicious to me after the attack, and the people in the store just jabbered on and on nonsensically. Their mundane world of appointments and coupon-clipping and idle talk on the checkout line didn’t interest me. In retrospect, I realize I must have seemed pretty strange to them—looking over my shoulder constantly and scooting from the aisle if anyone else came down it. I mostly subsisted on Pop-Tarts and breakfast cereals and frozen pizza rolls. I’d never really been one to cook because I spent most of my nights out in clubs that served bar food or dinner. I hated going to the supermarket, and if I could have forgone food altogether and stayed in my isolation, I would have. But I was afraid to have food delivered by strangers, and home delivery was too expensive for my budget anyway, so the shopping trips were a concession, an unavoidable risk. Though I formerly had had a healthy appetite, now it was gone; I ate very little, rationing my provisions to postpone those forays into the now-surreal market. I didn’t care what anything tasted like. I would eat once a day, just to prevent hunger pangs. My once-muscular frame began to wither away.
    Before I retreated permanently to my house I’d gone to the barbershop and said, “Cut it all off!” My eyes started hurting from the hours I spent researching online, so I dug out an old pair of reading glasses and began wearing them all the time. I looked in the mirror one day and didn’t recognize myself. I wanted to hide from that realization as much I wanted to hide from the outside world.
    Perhaps my darkened enclave was a womb of sorts; a cocoon where I could transform before I went out into the world as a new person. I didn’t know how to be that new person yet. Was this person a crime victim? Was he a brain-injury sufferer? Would the new visions I was having define who I became? I was able to compare the me from before the mugging and the me after it, and they didn’t match up, which was very confusing to me. I had trouble identifying with the fun-loving young man I knew I’d been before the attack. Now I felt like I had developed a completely different personality, changes well beyond the new visual abilities. I thought back to Phineas Gage, the brain-injury survivor who was described as being “no longer Gage.” Was I no longer Jason?
    It was hard to let go of the old me. In the beginning, I mourned the loss of my old familiar feeling of self, which was only a memory now. I’d been a popular guy with lots of friends and I’d had plenty of fun times, from going out on dates to clubbing. I couldn’t imagine doing any of that now, though sometimes I still wanted to be out there engaging with the world. I remember seeing a weather report on television during that time showing people playing at a swimming pool. Part of me wanted to be out there having fun, but the rest of me just couldn’t move to do it. I thought enviously about cases of amnesia I’d heard about. It would be so much easier to accept this new me if I didn’t have to remember who I once was.
    I took out some old Polaroids and marveled at this other self from the past; gone were the muscle T-shirts that best displayed my bulging biceps, and gone was the spiky fade haircut. The man holding these images had adopted a studious, bespectacled, but toned-down look, and I wasn’t quite sure why. I wasn’t the carefree boy in those photos any longer. I had too