My dreams have been emotional lately. A week ago, I recounted painful parts of my first and current concussion recoveries. It ended in insight though, which is what matters.

All through my teenage years, I didn’t value my intelligence and saw it as a curse keeping me from fitting in. I tried to avoid opportunities like lab internships and better high schools. I drank, smoked, and fought way too much. I went too hard and got knocked out by a new fighter in our MMA school. I dreamt about that knockout and the car ride back home after. Powerful emotions kept me awake.

My latest concussion recovery involved losing my sense of identity and some potential medical discrimination. I was dizzy, nauseous, and struggled to form sentences for over a year. Some days I struggled to walk to the bathroom. I managed to hang on to my job during all of this, although my first manager gave me demerits for forgetting things and getting distracted, which are well documented symptoms. I’ve recounted this in other articles more fully, so I’ll leave it at that.

Some part of me wondered why I was feeling these feelings. I realized I would never know. There are too many dependent factors. Why does a wave spawn from the ocean? There are too many supporting waves to see which wave started which. Curiosity sated, a sense of peace came over me. Pain and joy were just hoodies to be worn.

Calmly, I was able to investigate deeper. I wondered why I wanted to feel these feelings. I tried recalling the feelings of the concussion recovery dream, but I couldn’t. There’s an insight there. Those feelings couldn’t arise because my self had been changed by feeling them. I became a different person after feeling these emotions. The senses of not being heard, cared for, or valued weren’t the suffering here. How could they be? They were the catalysts for becoming a stronger person. Resisting the change of self is the suffering. Resisting becoming someone else is the suffering.