I have been working to understand the role of self-efficacy in my response to the injury. When I first encountered the concept, there was a moment of startling clarity. Self-efficacy appeared to explain so much of my behaviour especially the depressive events, or as I came to euphemistically describe them, the tailspins.

The worst of these occurred in the March / April 2013 time period. Following the accident there was a period of bliss in which I was completely unaware of the injury. This then segued into a period of confusion during which I sought to come to terms with what my Doctor’s were telling me but without being fully accepting of it. There were bouts of paranoia and mistrust until I came to understand the potential mechanism of injury which was unlike any of my prior understanding of brain trauma.

Toward the end of this phase, I was forced into composing a submission to the insurance company. My original intention had been to not file an appeal. My lawyer had dropped me as a client for reasons I didn’t understand, and I could not see going forward on my own. Then, when out for a walk, I noted the timing of the traffic signals at the intersection where my road enters the main road. I realized that these signals would have held back the driver of the vehicle which ended up hitting me. If I travelled at the speed limit, the only way the other driver could possibly have closed up the distance between the cars was if he had been travelling above the limit. This simple fact spurred me to unravel the accident and perform an accident reconstruction, something that I have prior experience in conducting. This initial review was provoked by my curiosity, and by the fact that accident investigation was a task that I knew how to do.

This investigation of the circumstances of the accident was the first rung on my rehabilitation and it was also my first encounter with self-capacity post accident. Accident investigation and reconstruction primarily involves the application of logic to build a rational explanation of the mechanical force associated with the collision. Logic is something I consider myself to be very good at. As a youngster tormented by his peers, I deployed logical analysis to arrive at an understanding of human behaviour, to gain a rational explanation why I was targeted for rejection and physical abuse, and what I might do to counter this problem.

Gathering facts, taking photographs, measuring the scene of the accident, assembling these factual elements in a reconstruction of events; all of these were actions I could perform. Composing a submission to the insurer was something much harder to accomplish. By the time I had completed the investigation and reconstruction, I had gained sufficient knowledge of brain injury to understand that physical contact was not required. The head does not need to smash into something in order to produce injury. An abrupt rotational acceleration will have an equally damaging effect. In fact, according to some of the literature I attempted to review, an acceleration injury may create a more serious set of problems than blunt trauma.

The insurance company had told my lawyer that my injury was impossible. Yet medical science indicated that injuries of my type were not only possible but extremely damaging. One’s chances of making a full recovery were better in the case of a blunt force trauma injury than they were in the case of a brain acceleration injury. When I came to understand this, I also came to feel that my entire life now depended on making an appeal submission to the insurer. Writing this appeal was one of the most difficult things I have done. I exerted myself to the utmost to complete it. I believed my life was dependent on its completion.