My name is Matt Graber. For about twenty-five years I worked in performing arts marketing and fundraising here in San Diego, most recently as Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at San Diego Opera. I am not able to work right now, and this is the honest account of why.

This spring I went in for a medical treatment and had a rare adverse reaction. I came out with an acquired brain injury. Nobody hit me. There was no accident. The injury came from the treatment itself.

What this looks like day to day is hard to explain to someone who catches me on a good hour and assumes I am fine. I live with cognitive fog and deep exhaustion. When there is too much stimulus around me, I overload. My head physically heats up. I get overwhelmed. At the worst end I lose the ability to get my words out. That is frightening enough that it has put me in the emergency room, because it feels like a stroke. It is not a stroke. It is my cognitive load hitting a wall.

My family has heard me slur my words. I have collapsed. A recent outing left me in bed for days afterward. That is the pattern. A stretch of overload, then days of recovery on the other side.

My neurologist has described what I have as behaving more like a concussion than like the migraine syndrome it was first labeled as. Some days are genuinely good. Lately the good days have been rare.

I am tenacious and I am not going anywhere. Recovery of this kind is measured in months, not days, and I cannot rush it without setting myself back. Right now I have to conserve my energy and give my brain the room it needs to heal and to bring me back to the work I love.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for being here.