Cinelle Barnes, A WAY HOME: A Memoir of Losing Yourself, and the Beauty of Returning
[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked.
[0:02]I'm Zibi Owens.
[0:04]I've interviewed more than 2,000 authors on this show
[0:07]and learned endless amounts about storytelling,
[0:10]reinvention, and life itself.
[0:11]Because when you talk about books,
[0:13]you're really talking about life.
[0:15]So get ready to hear from today's best authors,
[0:18]the best-selling and the not yet discovered.
[0:20]Come find your next great read
[0:22]and the story behind it.
[0:24]Enjoy.
[0:27]So now Barnes is the author of Monsoon Mansion
[0:29]in addition to a way home.
[0:31]She is also the editor of A Measure of Belonging,
[0:34]21 Writers of Color on the New American South.
[0:36]Sonelle is a brain aneurysm survivor.
[0:39]And sits on the South Carolina Brain Injury Leadership Council.
[0:42]She lives in Charleston with her husband, daughter, and cat.
[0:45]And she still suffers a lot of the effects
[0:47]of the brain aneurysm and wait until you hear her story.
[0:51]It is incredible.
[0:52]Welcome, Sonelle.
[0:53]Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked
[0:55]to talk about your book, Away Home, A Memoir.
[0:59]But can't read a memoir of losing yourself
[1:01]and the beauty of returning congratulations.
[1:04]Thank you so much.
[1:05]Thank you for being here.
[1:08]I know this isn't your typical summary,
[1:12]but it also is a summary.
[1:15]And I don't know.
[1:16]I just feel like everything I write
[1:18]is some kind of offering to the world.
[1:20]And this is my offering to the world right now.
[1:24]Well, this is kind of like two books and once.
[1:26]Because you interspersed your brain injury
[1:30]and the aftermath of that and all of that in italics
[1:34]and re-evics.
[1:35]And then you also have all of us on your travel adventures
[1:39]and what you were writing before.
[1:40]And it culminates in this sort of masterful blending
[1:45]of the two because we see you working
[1:49]and we see you thinking.
[1:51]And all of it kind of comes together, which is very cool.
[1:54]It was very magical.
[1:55]It was unplanned.
[1:57]Of course.
[1:58]Not the book I set out to write.
[2:00]I thought I just wanted for the first time in my life
[2:04]to do something frivolous.
[2:06]And I thought why not write a travel book
[2:10]from the perspective of someone who's
[2:12]had such a dicey relationship with travel?
[2:15]And so I did.
[2:17]And I want to see places as I made my way home
[2:21]to my birth country, to the Philippines.
[2:24]And then the worst happened, right?
[2:26]I had, I was actually writing a travel essay
[2:30]when I suffered a brain aneurysm rupture.
[2:35]And the world started to spin.
[2:37]Not what I thought the words globe trotter would mean.
[2:42]But it felt like I was trotting the world
[2:44]at full speed in a matter of seconds.
[2:47]And in a matter of seconds, I lost sight.
[2:50]I lost mobility.
[2:52]And life was that I knew it was over.
[2:55]And you wrote about this.
[2:56]You were at a cafe when this happened.
[2:59]Working.
[2:59]Yes.
[3:00]Next thing you know, you're on the floor.
[3:02]Yes.
[3:02]You managed to call your husband on 911 SOS
[3:05]or whatever on your phone.
[3:07]Memory, a muscle memory of typing his workplace
[3:11]on Google and tapping on my keys
[3:15]until it hit the call button.
[3:17]Wow.
[3:18]So I mean, that's lucky.
[3:20]I feel like that's been in a very unlucky day.
[3:22]And you said you heard clacking and noises
[3:25]and just from then on your cognition completely changed
[3:31]and your memory and your shorter memory.
[3:34]When you were in the hospital and you write
[3:35]about sort of being in the hospital and sort
[3:38]just to what happens after and how much do you remember
[3:41]and how much were you told?
[3:42]Like in the immediate aftermath of this cataclysmic event.
[3:45]Yes.
[3:46]In the immediate aftermath.
[3:48]It felt like everything was so surreal.
[3:52]And at the time I didn't yet have the words
[3:54]because it was a dust storm of symptoms.
[3:56]It was physical pain.
[3:58]You know, they ask you from 1 to 10.
[4:00]I knew how much pain are you having?
[4:02]Are you experiencing?
[4:03]I would go from 2 to 12 in a matter of seconds.
[4:07]And so there's that.
[4:09]There's suddenly not remembering
[4:11]what happened in the morning.
[4:12]I didn't know that a doctor had come back.
[4:15]I don't know why no one took my phone
[4:17]when I was released from the OR
[4:19]because I apparently bought 32 Christmas presents
[4:23]for my daughter, which was the best Christmas ever.
[4:27]She's like, now we're job well for me.
[4:30]And so immediately I could tell,
[4:32]oh, something's wrong with my memory.
[4:34]If people would tell me, you,
[4:36]did you like that new Chinese restaurant
[4:39]that we ordered takeaway from?
[4:41]Yes, I don't know what you're talking about.
[4:43]who feeling emotionally and cognitively distant
[4:49]from everything, including my husband
[4:52]and including myself.
[4:54]Feeling like I had hijacked someone's life.
[4:58]You know, they kept every day.
[5:00]It was routine morning, noon and night,
[5:03]a round of doctors, a group of doctors would do their rounds
[5:06]and they would ask me the same things.
[5:07]They would ask me to look left, right, left, right.
[5:10]Can you push my hands?
[5:12]Can you kick with your feet?
[5:14]And then they would ask me all these routine questions
[5:15]like I was in kindergarten again, you know.
[5:18]What's your name?
[5:18]How do you spell it?
[5:20]What's your husband's name?
[5:21]What's your address?
[5:23]And I was responding like a robot.
[5:27]I felt like I had memorized be flying
[5:30]and I had rehearsed be flying
[5:32]and I was just taking the place of someone
[5:35]until they came back.
[5:37]And the only connection that I never doubted
[5:42]was the one with my daughter.
[5:45]Because when I woke up for the first time,
[5:48]I just feel like I had to take care of her.
[5:52]And I had to protect her from this very hospital scene
[5:57]that we were asked to play our roles in
[6:02]and then discharged from the hospital weeks later,
[6:05]I realized, oh, this will be life for a while.
[6:09]I will have just like how I found my way home
[6:13]to the Philippines.
[6:14]I would have to find my way home to myself
[6:17]or whoever that was that they kept telling me I was.
[6:22]It was a very strange experience.
[6:24]One of the ways I described it in the book is,
[6:27]you know when you write your name over and over again
[6:29]and then you start to doubt how it's spelled.
[6:31]That's how it felt.
[6:34]I would wake up and I would feel like I was a piece
[6:37]of furniture in this beautiful house
[6:40]that this woman had purchased and put together
[6:44]and any minute now she was going to return
[6:48]and then I was going to lose my place.
[6:50]Do you still feel like that?
[6:53]Much less because you're really invited.
[6:56]It's really you today.
[6:57]It isn't me today.
[6:59]It is me today.
[7:00]I've been looking at the address on my phone
[7:04]and I used to live in New York
[7:06]and I went to school not far from here
[7:08]when I went to Hunter College.
[7:09]Oh, I didn't know that.
[7:10]Yeah.
[7:10]And, you know, emerging out of the subway
[7:13]asked like, that's my school.
[7:15]Mm-hmm.
[7:16]I went there.
[7:18]It is me.
[7:19]Great.
[7:19]Yes, that's good, yes.
[7:20]Yes.
[7:21]And I think in some ways that everyone's experience daily
[7:28]is when I've described how the world can feel for me,
[7:34]people have looked at me like actually, you know,
[7:37]whether they're entering motherhood
[7:40]or entering a time of, you know, an emptiness
[7:44]or there in the middle of a divorce
[7:47]or starting a new job or leaving a job they've had for years,
[7:51]I've just talked to so many women who've said, you know,
[7:56]the world feels a lot like how you describe it.
[8:00]You know, and there's always the disclaimer.
[8:02]That's not to dilute their experiences.
[8:04]No, no, no, no, I think really for me,
[8:08]it's just been so cute and obvious of an experience
[8:11]that I can put it into words.
[8:14]But I think everyone has experiences, prolonged experiences
[8:20]of feeling detached from their worlds or surreal
[8:24]or, you know, looking around and realizing, oh my gosh,
[8:28]I participated in the building of this life.
[8:31]You know, wouldn't you say something?
[8:34]Yeah.
[8:35]And I'm sure everybody at times feels like, well,
[8:38]maybe they don't, but I know the feeling of like being looking
[8:42]down and being like, oh, here we are.
[8:44]I need a middle school dance.
[8:45]Yeah.
[8:46]You know, all of that when you're feeling, you know,
[8:48]apparently anxiety can lead to that same sense
[8:51]of depersonalization.
[8:53]So in that way, it's shared.
[8:54]But this is a very unique phenomenon, you know,
[8:58]the post-brain injury, perception of the world,
[9:02]which is fascinating on the outside,
[9:04]but I'm sure not.
[9:06]So fun on the inside.
[9:07]When you wrote about in the book,
[9:09]when you woke up in your daughter was sort of at your feet
[9:12]and on the table and you felt that sense of connection,
[9:16]but you wrote about it like, I don't know who this girl is,
[9:18]sort of at my feet, but I care for her and then the man
[9:22]whose name is Stevens would come over
[9:25]and then people would tell me that's my husband.
[9:26]And just the way you were processing the world,
[9:29]like, okay, I feel this even though I don't know this.
[9:33]Yes.
[9:33]And it kind of transcends the brain.
[9:35]Yes.
[9:36]Which in a way is actually quite comforting.
[9:39]Yes.
[9:39]When we think about souls and love and eternity,
[9:43]I don't know how do you, what do you make of that?
[9:45]I think, yeah, what's interesting is as I was recovering
[9:51]from all of it from both the aneurysm and the surgery.
[9:56]AI was just emerging, right?
[9:59]And I was talking.
[10:00]to feel like there's this thing that's getting smarter as I'm basically losing my mind.
[10:07]And feeling those strong connections, even though it was just blips of connections
[10:17]here and there reminded me that one we are more than our physicality. We are more than our material
[10:25]even though our material selves are very much a part of us, we are more than what we think.
[10:30]I think today we're so consumed by what we think and clearly in those moments when I couldn't
[10:38]remember, you know, details about my own life, I was still clearly me because I was also more than
[10:48]just my memory, my cognition. There is something beyond. There is something that we can render
[11:01]and that there's an imprint we leave on this earth that's more than just what we really say,
[11:07]but we think what we physically feel. It's actually the accumulation of all those things
[11:16]they add up to something that the conscious brain can't really grasp, I think. Oh my gosh.
[11:24]So meanwhile, you have all of this going on, you're in the hospital for a while, you come home,
[11:29]that's a very brutal transition. Oh my gosh, sounded horrific. I'm so sorry, like the pulling out
[11:37]of pain medicine and not having IV pain meds, any way to counteract the excruciating
[11:44]feelings you're having and then trying to acclimate to your job before, which is like,
[11:49]I'm a travel writer, I'm writing this book, I'm did it, I'm an achiever, I'm going to do this
[11:54]that other thing and having to accept that things are different and come to terms with all of that.
[12:00]Yes. How did you do that and like how or do we just, did you just find your way through the way?
[12:07]And I know you write all that and we get to see it, but you could summarize it,
[12:12]so how do you do it? How do I do it? I always say that people are saying you're so resilient,
[12:19]like even my neurologists and my neurosurgeons and my neuropsychologists are like,
[12:24]you're like this model patient, you're so strong, you work hard, you know, your recovery and you
[12:30]really sought out all the information and you've done all the work plus more and I've been able
[12:39]to tell them not just me, resilience is rooted in community and that is very much,
[12:47]you know, one of the feces of this book is no one journeys home alone and so that's one part,
[12:56]that's that's how I did it. I relied on the love and support and help and knowledge and expertise
[13:03]of so many people and I let them, that didn't used to be me. I was a very independent and
[13:09]capable artist and in some ways it was this odd gift to lose the mind that, you know, had just
[13:20]propelled me through life at both force and have to suddenly rely on so many people and animals
[13:28]and I think the other part is I had to figure out, okay, they say I'm this woman,
[13:37]they say my name is Chanel and they say I'm all these things but who is she really without
[13:44]the achievements without the hard work, without even, you know, the oppression she's endured
[13:50]without the history of many different traumas, who was she and who do I feel like we are
[13:59]and it always came down to this kindness that I felt like never left me. You know, I started
[14:08]reading the manuscript that my old self had left behind and what kind of rose from the pages was,
[14:18]she was very kind of hard, like underneath all of the striving, all of the doing,
[14:25]all of the temper tantrums that we all have was this very kind hearted person who was also
[14:32]attracted to kind hearted people and she had woven this web of kindness around her very kind people
[14:43]came to her rescue, our rescue, my rescue and that's who she was and that's, if that's who
[14:50]the people that came around her were and that's probably who I am and so I just little by little,
[14:57]yeah, it's kind to make it the nurse laugh, I did that, it's kind to share a cookie with this girl
[15:05]who comes after school to see me at the hospital, it's kind to pickle the cat's nose and
[15:12]the accumulation of all these little moments of kindness, I think it's what brought me back to
[15:18]myself. That's so beautiful. Oh my gosh. I know we haven't even gone into how you came over from
[15:27]the Philippines being adopted, you know, age 16, 17 where your life is completely uprooted,
[15:35]citizenship versus, there's so much, there's so much here. Yeah. But I feel like at its core,
[15:42]it's a story of identity and what that really means and your search for the truth behind that
[15:51]and that's something that is so relatable to so many people and this is an extreme way of finding
[15:57]identity and resilience and all of that but it's really the first account of the specifics of
[16:04]brain injury recovery that I've read in detail like this and that I found absolutely
[16:10]really fascinating and I'm sorry you have to be the first and you live it for the rest of our
[16:15]you know intellectual enjoyment but you know thank you for sharing it with us because it's
[16:21]something we should all really know. I mean here we are all walking around with brains that we know
[16:26]so little about them and brain injuries are far more common than we realize. You know brain
[16:33]aneurysms happen to one in 50 people in the U.S. and that's just aneurysms that's not counting
[16:40]strokes and motor accidents and sports injuries and we don't really live in a world that is
[16:48]honoring the nervous system and general and especially impacted or injured nervous systems.
[16:56]I'm so glad that of all the deficits I could have had. I did not lose ultimately my ability to
[17:04]write. I am so grateful to be able to be a kind of voice for this very large and very diverse
[17:11]community of brainies. Well so now congratulations on the book. Thank you.
[17:19]A double congratulations because of what it took to get this across the finish line
[17:24]and the commitment to doing so and not giving up something that the times felt completely
[17:31]impossible and I know you're still struggling with some symptoms and that this is a long road ahead
[17:37]as well but the community that you talk about is going to grow exponentially with this book.
[17:43]So good move. That is the hope that is the hope. Thank you for listening.
[17:49]To totally booked with Zibi, formerly moms don't have time to read books.
[17:53]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens
[17:59]and spread the word. Thanks so much. Go and buy the books.