As mentioned in an earlier posting, I play piano, and as part of that, I was in a high school and early college Rock ’n Roll band that was modeled, in large part, after the band Phish - by this I mean we played songs with moderately simple chord structures and then improvised around those chords. We weren’t bad, but by no means amazing. The band formed just before my accident, and several of my closest friends from high school were in the group, and there was no doubt I would rejoin when I returned from the hospital. It was fun, and it gave me a chance to be socially active.
But it wasn’t always an easy social interaction. As often happens with brain injury, especially during early recovery, my accident changed a lot of my behaviors and this was difficult for my bandmates to understand. Here was this classmate they had spent years with - they had an image in their mind of who I was - but now I was overly affectionate, quick to anger, slow to comprehend a situation, and more common traits associated with recovery from brain injury. All the band members were supportive and did their best to be understanding - probably more so than many people would be - but they were also high school guys. They didn’t understand something, so they sought to label it in a way they could laugh. And so I took on the label “Gimp”.
It became my nickname, my title, and something I even encouraged by pasting it into my own language. If I made a mistake, it was easy enough to pass it off as an error of the Gimp, and as the name was used more often, I found it an easy way to amuse. “Don’t blame me, I’m a Gimp,” would often pull out a laugh. At least at first, but as usage of the term developed, I began to feel the cutting implications in the term.
Gimp is defined by Google as, “A physically handicapped or lame person; A feeble or contemptible person.” I didn’t know this at the time, but this was clearly how the term was making me feel. As use of the term continued and I began to feel it defined me, and the attitude of the band members became darker as well. There was one incident which I didn’t learn about until years later, where I was excluded from a social event because one member stated, “I just don’t want to deal with the Lethan circus.” As time passed, it seemed this attitude grew - it had been a year since my accident, I was in college, I was alive, why the hell couldn’t I act like I used to - or at least more normal? There was a certain, thinly veiled contempt by some band members toward having to do things with me.
Now, I must be perfectly clear when I say I feel no ill will toward any members of the band or my experience in the group. There were still a lot of fun times when the recovery from brain injury didn’t factor into our performances, and in retrospect, when the issue involving my recovery did come into play, I can see how this would be hard for anyone, especially high school boys - being in a band is, in many ways, about rebelling from responsibility, and here they’ve got this guy they need to keep an eye on to make sure he doesn’t do something irreversibly damaging.
Yet, this sense of being on the outskirts of the band - not fully a member - did hurt. I went from being a relatively popular “high school hippie performer” to someone my friends kept at a safe distance. I’m not sure the pain from that transition will ever fully heal. That’s not meant to be a cry for self pity, but a recognition of the reality of the emotions. I expect that there are many survivors who have also had to come to terms with these feelings of social stratification, and that may be scar that can never fully mend, but that’s only my informed guess.
There is also no clear resolution to this memory - no obvious ending. Things move on, and some must remain unresolved. The band went the way of many high school bands - dissolving as college took members to other parts of the country. I’ve remained close with some, lost contact with others, and life continues. As I’ve reflected on these memories for this blog entry, I’m recognizing how important these events were to me and how I may be still struggling with some of them, but have pushed these thoughts to the peripheries of my mind for decades. Returning to these memories by sharing this story is allowing me to look at the events from a new perspective and with a new maturity. Something to think about - thanks for letting me share.
No comments:
Post a Comment