When I had brain surgery, I woke up with a lot of "obvious" issues stemming from my brain injury, like memory issues, executive dysfunction, anxiety.

One thing that wasn't as obvious and took me a long time to realize is that my "internal world" was gone.

I used to fall asleep every night thinking up of stories and characters and events. I would daydream about different settings and worlds and create my own worlds with stories.

My dream since I was a child was to become a fiction writer, and I was writing A LOT since I was young.

It was a place of escape to create worlds and characters and weave them together. I shared them with the world online, and I also went to sleep at night with them.

Suddenly, I could barely put my thoughts into words. A while later, I realized that I was experiencing Aphasia.

There are 3 types of Aphasia:

Broca's: Where we understand but can't put into words.
Wernicke's: Where we seem to speak fluently, but it often doesn't make sense (and we don't know we don't make sense)
Global Aphasia: Can't comprehend or form words https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/aphasia/symptoms-causes/syc-20369518

For years, I thought it was just that I was very mildly Aphasic. Mine was likely Broca's Aphasia, or "nonfluent aphasia"/"comprehensive aphasia."

I understood perfectly well what people were saying, and I knew what I wanted to say, but the words won't come out eloquently.

As a "Writer," this was extremely damaging to my self esteem and my self identity. Poetry, Prose, Essays, Fiction, everything used to come so easily. I used to blog multiple times a day, and get in lively discussions on Social Media with friends and foes at all times of the day.

Suddenly I could barely write few sentences to share about topics I deeply cared about on Fb. (I do wonder if my pull towards Twitter was the letter-limit; Everyone had to make do with 140 letters so I didn't feel as much pressure to be eloquent?)

For years, I stopped writing.

Over the years my writing improved a lot. I can write blogs, I write as job, and I've published eBooks.

When I published my "Intro to AWS for Newbies" ebook, my mom said "You published a book! It wasn't exactly the book I was expecting but you did it!" https://ebook.introtoaws.com 

My mom knows how much I used to love writing, and how I wanted to become a fiction writer when I grew up. And she saw that I stopped writing after my brain injury.

Honestly, we were just so glad that I kept my languages, and I COULD successfully struggle through school/work.

For years, I thought it was "just my aphasia" that kept me from writing anything other than technical documentations.

Recently, I realized that my "inner world" was gone, and that it's been gone for years. It's been gone since I had brain surgery in 2011. I didn't even know.

My "inner world" allowed me to write stories and weave together scenes. Without it, I feel like it's almost impossible to write fiction.

Everything I think about is task oriented. I don't daydream about the future or vacations. It's what needs to be done today/tomorrow.

Everything I think about is rooted in reality and what was/is/will be in the past/present/future.
One of these days I would love to compensate for the lack of "inner world" and write a fiction book. It'll be a lot harder than it would've been presurgery. But I hope it'll happen.

Until then, I'll be writing my blog, writing technical documentations, and thinking about reality. https://hiroko.io