Recovery and Magical Thinking

Morning at Live Art Ireland

I recently finished listening to Blue Nights by Joan Didion. The book is a meditation on the loss of her daughter, but it is also about memory—how we come to know someone through fragments, repetition, and reflection, sometimes more fully after they are gone than when they were alive.

One part of the book stayed with me.

Didion writes about her daughter's sudden medical emergency—a brain hemorrhage that, despite multiple attempts to save her, ultimately led to her death. Throughout Blue Nights, there are two moments in which traumatic brain injuries become turning points, forever changing the lives of those involved.

What struck me most was not only the tragedy itself but also the question of recovery it raised for me.

At first, recovery feels almost inevitable. After the emergency surgeries, everyone—family, doctors, loved ones—acts as though healing is simply the next step. Recovery becomes the story everyone is living inside. But gradually, as more surgeries are performed and more complications arise, it becomes clear that recovery, at least in the way they had imagined it, is slipping away. Didion describes this realization with extraordinary tenderness. Recovery was never guaranteed. It was a fleeting possibility.

Reading this had a profound effect on me, for obvious reasons, especially given my own experience.

I experienced my own traumatic brain injury, and my story has a different ending.

When I woke from brain surgery, I never questioned whether I would recover. I simply knew I would. There was no alternative in my mind.

Didion famously wrote about magical thinking (The Year of Magical Thinking)—the mind's refusal to let go of impossible hopes after devastating loss. As I listened to Blue Nights, I wondered whether my own recovery was also shaped by that same refusal.

What if my certainty that I would recover was, in some ways, irrational?

What if believing there was no other outcome became one of the things that carried me through?

Didion writes about speaking with her daughter's medical team, who gently reminded her that her daughter had already been living with multiple chronic illnesses before the brain injury. They were asking her to see reality as it was, rather than as she desperately wished it to be. It is a heartbreaking reminder that recovery is never simply about returning to a previous version of ourselves.

I think about my own experience often, especially in light of that reminder.

Before my accident, I worked as an energy practitioner. Healing was already central to my life, yet living through a traumatic brain injury taught me that recovery and healing are not the same thing.

Recovery is rarely linear. It is made up of progress, setbacks, grief, hope, exhaustion, and moments when you believe you are moving backward. For years, I struggled whenever those setbacks came. I saw them as failures rather than as part of recovery.

Many people in my life have reminded me how far I have come.

Ironically, one of the realities of a brain injury is that memory itself is often unreliable. Sometimes I cannot remember the person I was immediately after surgery, and sometimes I cannot fully see the distance I have traveled because I no longer have access to those earlier versions of myself.

My goal has always been to recover.

Perhaps that has been its own form of magical thinking, too.

Or perhaps magical thinking is sometimes what allows us to survive long enough to learn that healing does not mean returning to who we were. It means learning how to live with who we have become.

Listening to Didion reminded me that recovery is never promised. For many people, it is heartbreakingly brief, or never comes at all.

Maybe that is why I am finally able to appreciate how far I have come—not because I have arrived at the end of recovery, but because I now understand that every step forward was never guaranteed.