I'm a brain injury survivor, I was hit by a driver running a red at >40mph. It's so important to have stories like this out there. It's a condition that is complex, individual and often hard to explain to the people in your life. Beyond the physical tells, my resulting mood disorder became intertwined with concentration problems that seriously inhibited my path to recovery.

I developed a cannabis addiction and when my lawsuit settled virtually everyone I knew, including members of my family, became so jealous of my windfall that my support network disappeared. My depression only deepened. I studied psychology part time in university and slowly recovered. Not working for 5 years though completely turned my group of friends, who also come from a blue collar background, against me. My efforts to wear a smile and share my wealth only tainted things further as they became convinced I was just a lazy lottery winner. People most willing to spend time with me and smoke my weed became the most eager to shame me among others.

I now medicate with the help of a doctor and his drugs work much better. I'm in a supportive relationship and although many people from those days still fail to understand my condition, I've mostly cut them from my life.

I also make art as therapy, I purchased a couple analog synthesizers and get great benefits out of a session of designing and recording sound. It's really a great art form for geeks looking for something outside visual art. You can create very complex signal paths when feeling ambitious or just experiment with some knob twisting and random plugging. Both methods have about the same success rate as far as interesting sound creation goes. Former cannabis users will get great satisfaction as they overcome the problem of music feeling dull outside of intoxication.