When You Start Questioning Your Own Mind

When I first came back to work following the accident, I did so knowing I was coming back too damned early. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t healed. I still had too many doctor appointments, my leg was still a mess, and honestly, my mind wasn’t one hundred percent there.

Yes, I could think. I could talk. I could carry on conversations. But my mind wasn’t operating at full capacity. The TBI had left its mark, and I was still dealing with it. I had issues with short-term memory. Not severe, not anything like senility, but enough to make me nervous as hell.

But I had to come back. Disability had run out. Rent doesn’t give a shit if your brain is still healing.

So I came back. Head first.

I told my boss straight up that I was nervous. I asked him to tell me if he noticed anything off, because if my memory was truly compromised long-term, I’d step down. You can’t lead if you can’t trust your own recall.

And at first, it was fucking hard. The pace felt faster than I remembered. Information was flying constantly, and for that first month, it was overwhelming.

But then I found the groove again. I stayed on top of things. I tracked what mattered. And from everything I could tell, and everything my boss could see, I wasn’t missing a thing.

Then there’s Bob.

Every team has a Bob. Brilliant. Driven. The kind of person who can dig through documentation and not come up for air until the problem is solved. The kind of person you need.

But also, like a lot of gifted people, rigid. Opinionated. A little bit of an asshole.

Bob had been working on a subset of problems with a team of contractors, largely in his own lane. And we let him. Because sometimes you have to let your stallions run. You give them space, and they show you what they can do.

But the problem with running wild is you can lose sight of the rest of the herd.

Last week, that came to a head.

We ended up at odds over a piece of functionality that was already being worked by other resources I had assigned, aligned to a broader effort supporting our largest customer. I had even pulled in a sister IT organization to lead integration design.

Bob stepped in anyway.

He told those resources he was already working it. One of them happily used that as an excuse to disengage. And I made a mistake. I took the email at face value instead of digging deeper.

That part’s on me.

But then Bob took it further. He insisted we had already discussed this. Multiple times. That I had agreed.

And here’s the thing: we hadn’t.

Not once.

I had been asking about this every week since I returned, and he had never brought it up. But the way he said it, confident, unwavering, started to get to me.

It made me question myself.

My memory. My ability to lead.

My boss saw what was happening and pulled a meeting together with the technical leads. We were supposed to align, figure out communication, clean it up.

Instead, Bob doubled down. Again, he said I wasn’t remembering. Again, he insisted we’d already covered it.

And in that moment… I broke.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. But I cried.

In front of them.

I tried to hide it. I didn’t want to look weak. But the tears came anyway.

And here’s the part I couldn’t say out loud in that room: I wasn’t crying because of pressure. I deal with pressure every single day. Hell, more than most, considering everything I’ve been carrying since the accident.

I was crying because I was questioning whether my brain was still broken. I was wondering if I was actually forgetting major conversations-if something had been taken from me that I hadn’t yet realized was gone.

I was wondering if the woman who hit me hadn’t just taken months of my life… but something deeper.

I was questioning my own sanity.

Since then, I’ve asked everyone I trust, my boss, my friends, my dad, if they’ve noticed anything off.

Every single one of them has said the same thing: the opposite.

Sharper. Clearer. Stronger.

So no, I’m not losing my mind.

But now I have to be careful. Careful how I communicate. Careful how I engage. Because someone else’s ego would rather be right than protect someone else’s reality.

I even considered explaining it to Bob. Letting him know what the last couple of months have been like.

But I was talked out of it. And they’re right.

He’d weaponize it.

I can already hear it: “Well, you know my memory is better than yours…”

So no. That door stays closed.

But I’ll say this: I wouldn’t wish that feeling on anyone. That moment where you genuinely wonder if you can’t trust your own mind… if entire pieces of reality might just be gone.

It’s not stress.

It’s not pressure.

It’s something deeper.

And it fucking sucks.