Awakening: Where Science Meets Spirit in the Reclamation of Self

I hesitated much on this first blog post, in contemplation of the best way to put myself out into the universe. I eventually settled on a more traditional route of sharing a bit of my recent story in hope to make subsequent posts carry more significance with appropriate context, full well knowing the following posts will flow and be able to be pieced together by anybody who may be interested, without needing so much of a standardized narrative.

Last year, I suffered a traumatic brain injury from a car accident while responsibly celebrating my marriage. It was six days after my fairytale wedding that I thought would be both the culmination of my life-long search for love and completeness and the beginning of my life. The extreme difficulties and changes in my brain resulting were evident directly after, yet went unnoticed due to everyone around me, including myself, only having the lens of psychiatry to be applied erroneously. A year later, the brain injury completely unacknowledged, my symptoms began to worsen significantly.

Amongst a myriad of complex and rather rare neurological symptoms as a result of the brain injury, I found myself writing nonstop, with a renewed and enhanced belief in God; it did not take me long to realize that the brain injury resulted in a rather extreme case of hypergraphia and hyperreligiosity. While I face an incredible amount of daily limitations, once I was able to figure out what was happening in my brain, I have remained eternally grateful to God every moment of each day.

I have found that the majority of my symptoms would be considered "normal," each in isolation and stripped of the great intensity of which I experience them. Psychosis and other psychiatric disorders have been ruled out, luckily, after facing much dismissal as having some mysterious mental illness by both close family and some unethical and uninformed doctors.

If I've learned one thing for certain throughout this whole journey, it's that society can not handle complexity - family members, lawyers and doctors alike. We have become conditioned as a society to want a neat little box, with a neat little label, with a neat little pill to fix what we identify as a problem. I've come to know, far too often we ascribe illness and wrongness to simple difference.

I worked in the mental health field as a clinician for a decade, while simultaneously being a psychiatric patient the whole time. From both a professional and personal lens, and my experience with living with a disabling brain injury while having all my "psychiatric" symptoms vanish overnight, I've come to distrust the "science" of psychiatry. Modern psychiatry in America aims to medicate difference, treating any aberrant behavior or thoughts as reason to permanently sedate an individual. But the "chemical imbalance" idea of mental illness drilled into our heads throughout my lifetime has all but proven to be a myth, acknowledged to be perpetuated by pharmaceutical companies. The field of psychology, when done right and as originally intended, aims to explore the depths of the human psyche, taking in the inherent complexity of each human being. The aim is to interpret and heal, rather than label and medicate with dangerous drugs.

I've long been a proponent in my personal ethos that whatever works for someone - be it medication, therapy, religion, or self-reliance - so long as they're not harming anyone, has never bothered me. We all need to do what we must to achieve peace within our hearts and what we interpret as happiness. Both psychiatry and psychology, however, failed me gravely - missing a lifetime of both neurobiological nuance and outright mistreatment and family dysfunction, which is what shaped me into becoming severely dysregulated, not some mysterious psychiatric condition due to an imbalance.

After the brain injury but before realizing I had it, I became fascinated with neuroscience and my own neurobiology. The actual science of our brains, the most complex organ in our bodies, resonated much more with me than anything I had ever been presented as fact from mainstream society. I quickly came to be able to piece together my vast array of symptoms as likely being related to right temporal lobe damage; the most rare as well as the most severe being the compulsion to write and my intense belief in God and preoccupation with the divine element of the universe.

In spite of great, daily confusion and a host of debilitating cognitive and physical symptoms, I see clearly that I am blessed with many incredible gifts from God. I have been given the opportunity to reclaim my authentic self, reset my nervous system, have true peace in my heart and freedom in my spirit. I have been granted the blessing of discovering God's path for me, the one intended since birth. I spend much time each day writing both about my own complex lived experience and the incredible clarity I've gained from it, as well as on my views of God, society, and the universe; views that I believe to have been inherent all along, but now, with the unexplainable clarity through the confusion, I can articulate them as I was always meant to do.

I've accumulated a large collection of essays since I regained the gift of writing, the gift of seeing. In subsequent blog posts, I expect that some may be fragments of thought or updates, and others polished essays of cultural commentary as well as spirituality and the divine. I've become rather fond of a tagline I created early on for my journey of awakening, "science + spirit." I've long refuted that belief in an all-powerful being conflicts with one's intelligence. I aim to illustrate why I've never found the two to be mutually exclusive in my life, and how I incorporate them alongside one another in my journey to see the light and share it with others.

I invite all to peruse as their spirit compels them to in these pages, and feel free to engage in reasoned discourse; I freely welcome thoughts from all walks of life, all beliefs, all views, no matter how different. This capability is what makes us human, and the lack of it in our current society is to our great detriment in the development and growth of the human race. If all I do is provoke thought, my job as a writer is done. If I'm able to move the spirit of even just one individual, my goal as a vicegerent of God will be fulfilled.

-Clara Noor.