Sophia Papp's world changed in a moment on an ordinary September morning. She was riding in a car with her family, anticipating an idle day by the river, when the driver lost control and the car flipped. Sophia suffered a grave coma. She survived, but soon her parents noticed something strange. The 19-year-old woman who had woken up wasn't quite the same Sophia as before. She talked back to her doctors, played pranks on other patients, and flirted with a surgeon. A traumatic brain injury, her doctors found, had affected her inhibition control, completely transforming her personality. "A quiet, easygoing young woman fell into a weeklong slumber and woke up talkative, tempestuous, and inscrutable," writes Mike Mariani in this fascinating excerpt from his forthcoming book, What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us. So began Sophia's tumultuous afterlife. Though her physical recovery was strong, Sophia was determined to prove that her intellectual abilities, too, remained unaffected by the TBI. She enrolled in a university just months after the accident and devoted her energies to her studies. The exhaustive effort took a severe toll on her well-being. Eventually, with the help of others, Sophia came to understand that she could let go of her need to restore a continuity of self from before her accident. "When catastrophes cleave our lives apart, in order to restore purpose and cohesion we need to stitch our stories back together with a new throughline," Mariani writes. What doesn't kill us may make us stronger, or just remake us. Camille Bromley | Features Editor |
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