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What is it like to have very low IQ?
I am 29 years old. At 24, I sustained a traumatic brain injury. It has been extremely difficult losing my intellect.
I attended a top liberal arts college and received mostly As. Since the brain injury I have lost two jobs and was told by a manager that I should not try to work a desk job.
Whereas I used to read novels for fun, now I have difficulty watching TV shows. Keeping track of the plots is a challenge. I now prefer reality television.
I planned to go to business school but got in the 20th percentile on the GRE. In high school I scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT.
When I first sustained the brain injury friends would tell me that with my determination I would recover quickly. They didn’t know a brain injury is a life long mental handicap.
I have been told im not as sharp as I used to be. It is indeed difficult for me to think quickly enough to participate in conversations.
I am headed to a grad program at an Ivy league university because admissions didn’t require standardized test scores. I had a high enough undergrad GPA. I don’t hope to get good grades. Just that I can pass and graduate from the program. Don’t take your intelligence for granted. Losing it was like losing a limb.
Oct 1 2023 Update: I wrote a personal essay for a class on the brain injury. I would like to share it here.
Reclining in Columbia’s SIPA library clutching an Airbar vape, I seem just like any other Columbia student. I am. And I am not.
You see after drinking one night, I fell off a balcony onto my head. I fell into a coma for a month. When I was brought into the emergency room at Zuckerberg General San Francisco Hospital I measured at a 3 on the Glasgow Coma Scale – the score with the highest mortality rate amongst brain injury victims. Thankfully I survived.
When I emerged from a coma around the New Year of 2019 things did not seem to have changed. But everything had changed.
Initially I couldn’t tell my life would never be the same. At the Spaulding rehabilitation center in Boston where I emerged from a coma, I felt remarkably calm. This was an inconvenience but little more. I had just been admitted into Venture for America (V.F.A), Andrew Yang’s selective entrepreneurship fellowship that connects promising recent college graduates with tech jobs to prepare them for careers as entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.
But then it came time to secure a job, it grew clear that the tech fellowship was little more than a job board. Traumatic brain injuries cause irritability – it is very difficult for victims to control their anger. This is because the prefrontal cortex – the region of the brain that regulates emotion – is amongst the parts of the brain most impacted by a head injury.
As it became apparent that I wasn’t going to secure a venture capital job through V.F.A my frustration boiled over. Worn out by the interview process, when asked by one venture capital firm why I wanted to work for them I replied that I simply wanted any job in venture capital.
Soon thereafter I received a call. “Partners have complained about you. You’re out of the fellowship” Elizabeth, a V.F.A staff member, coolly notified me. “But I had a brain injury,” I protested. “We don’t care.” Elizabeth retorted.
I had let my anger take over. Still my friends reassured me that with my determination I would be back to myself in no time. Little did we know that a traumatic brain injury is a lifelong mental handicap.
Days turned into weeks turned into months turned into years. And as my friends stopped checking in on me, memories of my mental acuity grew smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror. I gradually realized that recovery from a brain injury is like running towards a horse as it gallops away. In short, real recovery from a brain injury is fiction.
The profound changes wrought by the brain injury have robbed my mind of its natural agility. The gears inside my brain simply don’t turn fast enough anymore.
The world keeps spinning and my friends progress with their lives, earning promotions, getting married. I’ve lost jobs. Multiple. I’ve had my heart broken more than once.
Nothing can ever prepare someone for a brain injury. I certainly was not on a trajectory that left any room for an acquired disability.
At the time of my accident I had begun a career in venture capital. Through Venture for America, I had hoped to propel forward my venture capital career – one that would earn me substantial money doing intellectually engaging work. But when I fell into a coma, my venture capital career went up in flames.
And yet, I attempted to move forward as if I was the same person before the accident. Upon finishing a rehabilitation program at NYU Langone, I secured a job to help manage operations at Republic, an equity crowdfunding platform – think venture capital for the masses.
Unfortunately it became apparent that I didn’t work at the level expected of employees. One day in April of 21’ my manager Ray asked to speak with me. He explained that Republic was not renewing my contract.
After completing nearly a year of rehabilitation for the brain injury and my futile attempt to restart my career in venture capital, I asked myself what should I do now? Knowing full well that it may never be possible for me to realize a real career, what could I aim to do that would give my life meaning?
During the Spring after my accident, Greta Thunberg was making headlines for her eloquent call to world leaders to address the specter of climate change. The fate of the planet wasn’t something that I thought about in too much depth. Sure, climate change was an issue but it was not one I had carefully considered – or wanted to dwell on.
If the brain injury had taught me one thing it was that people tend to prioritize what is immediately before them. But perhaps we should give more consideration to long-term issues, including ones that affect those who come after us.
Once it dawned on me that climate change was perhaps the biggest crisis to ever confront humanity, I dove right into the sustainability space. And Greta Thunberg became a personal role model as someone in the climate space who overcame cognitive differences – in her case Autism.
I started a website, Greenly, to give people a platform to share their ideas about the planet. It’s not on very many people’s radars yet, but we’ve published nearly 100 articles to date and we’re launching a podcast! I also applied to and was accepted into Columbia University’s masters program in sustainability management. While enrolling in graduate school with a brain injury is daunting, the Columbia administration and faculty have so far been so accommodating and supportive.
I lost the life I was going to lead. But maybe, just maybe, I gained something else. I became the person I was meant to be. I don’t know if I will ever be able to hold down a full-time job. Yet I have found a field that gives my life purpose. Perhaps without the brain injury I would have remained a naive and selfish man my whole life.
Thank you Elon for sharing this essay. I wish you every success in the years ahead. In my case it was a horse riding accident in Zimbabwe … I fractured my skull, lost hearing right ear, sense of smell, amnesia, and so much more which the decades through science have acknowledged, hence my site in a lot of cases logs that journey of exploration in a subjective way. Hope people will benefit. I met some incredible people who gave my advocacy and support on my journey throuogh life; I met others too who tried to harm me. Jim Maguire, Psychiatrist, a very special person who died to young explained what had happened to my brain and here now I have found on the web the visual of same.
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Fortune Favours the Brave Paperback – 13 Dec. 2018
by Michelle Marcella Clarke (Author), Prof John Crown MB (Foreword)
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Michelle Clarke takes us on an extraordinary journey, through challenges most of us would never know, were it not for her courage to write this story. In 1993, aged 32, she suffers a fractured skull in a horse-riding accident in Zimbabwe, an event which changes her life forever. The traumatic brain
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