🧠 Learning to Heal a Brain That Won’t Stop Thinking 💬
Four years ago, I wrote a blog called My Journey to Becoming More Authentically Me — a letter to myself about un-masking, letting my curls win, and finally admitting I had dyslexia.
That post was my first public act of honesty, and it felt like standing in front of the world without makeup for the first time…probably because I was!!
Back then, I thought authenticity was about appearance. I thought if I peeled back the layers — the hair straightener, the stilettos, the spray tan — I’d find the “real me.”
And in a way, I did.
But in May of 2025, I discovered there’s another layer beneath all of that, the one hidden inside the brain.
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💥 The Day the World Went White
On May 8, I was T-boned by a Honda Odyssey.
All airbags deployed.
For context: I had been leaning over the steering wheel when it hit, the worst possible angle for impact. It’s what doctors call an omnidirectional injury, meaning the force doesn’t just shove you one way; it ricochets through every plane of your body.
The airbag slammed into my sternum like a cannon. My head snapped backward, then sideways. Metal popped like gunfire. Smoke from the airbags filled the car, that strange, chalky fog that makes everything look like a dream sequence. I could taste chemicals. Everything slowed down, not stopped, just stuck in buffering mode, long enough for me to think, Well, this can’t be good. I didn’t know it yet, but this was the beginning of the plot twist no one ordered.
Ironically, my boss called at the exact moment I was being carted into Harborview Medical, the real-life hospital that inspired Grey’s Anatomy.
My partner, Derek, met me at the hospital, and for a second, it felt like we were in a real-life medical drama, minus the lighting and hair budget. But instead of whispering something profound or cinematic, one of the first things I said was: “Can you call my boss and tell him why I didn’t answer?”
He did, and warned my boss I’d probably need the next day off after seeing the car damage and knowing what my body would probably feel like. I shot him a look and insisted I was fine, just a little dizzy and light-sensitive. I genuinely thought I’d spend the weekend resting and be back to normal by Monday.
What I didn’t realize then was that this wasn’t a weekend recovery story, it was the pilot episode of a whole new series I never auditioned for.
That’s the strange cruelty of trauma: the body absorbs what the mind can’t yet see.
The bruises showed up first, seatbelt tattoos across my chest and waist, a slow-blooming constellation of purple spreading over my hips and shoulder. I couldn’t figure out why the tops of my feet were bruised and sore; later I learned there’s a knee/leg airbag hidden under the steering wheel. Who knew? My neck ached, my back felt tight and I couldn’t get out of bed for nearly 60 hours straight.
As the bruises started to fade the following week, I tried to go back to work. I told people what happened, the airbags, the hospital, the totaled car, but the more I talked, the less sense I seemed to make. My words would slur and stutter. I’d lose my train of thought mid-sentence. I’d forget what I’d already said. My brain was glitching, and I kept trying to reboot it with productivity.
A week later, following the ER’s instructions, I went to my doctor for a follow-up. She barely needed five minutes. I listed the symptoms, the dizziness, the brain fog, the nausea, the way light felt like it was shouting at me. I told her it felt like a migraine without the aura, a hangover without the fun. She looked at me, nodded once, and said, “You have a concussion.”
I blinked, stunned. A concussion? I’d been walking around all week trying to function, answer emails, and prove I was fine, while my brain was literally trying to shut itself off.
I was shocked by how long it took to show up, and even more shocked by how it kept getting worse instead of better.
But concussions are tricky. They don’t always announce themselves right away. The adrenaline masks everything, and the brain, like a loyal soldier, keeps marching long after it’s been wounded.
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🧠 Clinical Postcard: The Anatomy of a Concussion
A concussion isn’t a bruise on the brain, it’s a metabolic crisis.
When the head is jolted in multiple directions, neurons stretch and twist like tiny electrical cords pulled too tight, disrupting communication. The brain floods with chemicals, energy spikes, and then crashes. It’s not just one impact, it’s two. The front of the brain slams into the skull, then ricochets to the back (coup–contrecoup), ping-ponging against the skull’s bony ridges, especially along the frontal bone and the base, which can irritate tissue even when the outside looks fine.
Symptoms can appear hours, days or even weeks later: dizziness, nausea, fatigue, light sensitivity, trouble concentrating, emotional swings, word-finding difficulty.
It’s not “in your head.” It is your head, trying to reboot.
And here’s the cruel irony: the harder you push, the slower it heals. The brain doesn’t recover through willpower. It recovers through rest, quiet, and patience, three things high-achievers tend to file under “optional.”
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Over the next few weeks, my brain slowly unplugged itself from the world.
Light hurt. Screens shimmered. Words slid off the page like they were allergic to meaning.
I couldn’t read. I couldn’t watch TV, be on my phone, or listen to music.
I couldn’t even follow a conversation without my mind fogging over.
Every time I thought I was getting better, I’d crash again, dizzy, nauseous, disoriented.
I didn’t look sick.
I looked “fine.”
And that’s what made it so cruel.
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➿The Loop I Couldn’t Escape
Then, six weeks in, I learned something that would change everything again:
I was also living with undiagnosed Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
Not the hand-washing kind. The invisible kind, the thinking kind.
OCD looks different for everyone. It tends to latch onto whatever matters most to you — the things you love, value, or fear losing. For some people, that’s germs or safety. For me, at least for the last decade, it was work.
My OCD wrapped itself around achievement and belonging, the need to prove I was good, useful, safe to love, safe to keep.
It didn’t sound like “What if?” It sounded like a thousand quiet “Did I’s”:
Did I say the wrong thing?
Did I explain enough?
Did I follow up fast enough to show I care?
Did I earn my right to rest — to exist?
My loops were a constant need to prove my worth before anyone could question it. Every message had to be airtight. Every plan had to be double-checked, then checked again, just to make sure.
Before I understood what OCD actually was, I thought I was just being thorough. But “thorough” doesn’t mean spending ten hours on a ten-minute task — rereading an email ten times, having my computer read it back to me, then opening it again hours after sending to make sure I hadn’t said something wrong.
I’d run drafts by colleagues, Derek, and friends, chasing reassurance that it was okay — not “too much,” not a mistake, not proof that I’d failed at being good.
That’s the part most people don’t see. OCD doesn’t always look like checking locks or washing hands. Sometimes it looks like a glowing inbox at midnight — a brain stuck in a loop of over-explaining, over-advising, over-apologizing, all in the name of belonging.
If alcoholism is an addiction to alcohol, OCD is an addiction to certainty.
The same neurological wiring applies, the hit of temporary relief, the crash of regret, the endless craving for just one more drink of reassurance. If OCD is the brain’s addiction to certainty, then reassurance was my drink of choice and work was my bar.
Most addictions require abstinence, the removal of the trigger.
But what if your compulsion is thinking?
What if the substance you abuse is effort?
What if the very thing that destroys you, productivity, perfection, proving yourself, is also what keeps you employed, praised, and safe?
That’s the cruel paradox of a mental addiction: you can’t pour the bottle down the drain when the bottle is your brain.
That’s what made my recovery so impossible at first.
Every time I tried to rest, my brain would whisper, You’re falling behind.
Every time I opened my laptop, it would whisper, You’re safe again.
My compulsions weren’t visible. They looked like “drive.” They looked like “commitment.” They looked like “a great work ethic.”
But really, they were my fear in a blazer.
I wasn’t trying to be the best. I was trying to escape the feeling that I might be the worst.
That’s the hidden cruelty of OCD: it hijacks your survival system.
The amygdala keeps firing false alarms, flooding your body with cortisol and adrenaline. The logical part of your brain knows you’re not in danger. But the primitive part, the one built to keep you from being eaten by lions, doesn’t care.
So even though the “threat” was a missed email instead of a predator, my nervous system reacted the same way: fight-or-flight on repeat.
And fight-or-flight is no place for healing.
While my concussion needed rest and calm to repair itself, OCD kept my brain wired for emergency — scanning, proving, explaining, fixing. I couldn’t slow down long enough to heal because every pause felt like a risk.
That’s the paradox: I was trying to heal my brain while living inside the fire that burned it out.
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🧠 Clinical Postcard: What the Heck Is OCD (and Why It’s Called the Disorder of Doubt)
OCD isn’t really about cleaning or counting. It’s about certainty.
Picture a smoke detector that keeps going off, not because there’s a fire, but because the toast is just a little overdone. Your body surges with adrenaline and your brain screams, “Fix this!” — that’s the obsession. You grab a towel and start fanning the air until the alarm quiets — that’s the compulsion. For a moment, it works. Relief floods in. But the detector is still convinced the toast is burning, so a minute later, the alarm blares again.
That’s OCD: a brain wired to mistake harmless signals for danger, and a body stuck in a loop of trying to make the noise stop.
OCD is a disorder of uncertainty. The brain mistakes intrusive thoughts for emergencies and sends you sprinting toward relief. Compulsions can be visible (cleaning, checking) or invisible: mental reviewing, googling, confessing, reassurance-seeking, or spending ten hours on a ten-minute task to “make sure.”
The relief works, for a minute. Then the alarm resets. That’s the loop.
“Pure O” (Purely Obsessional OCD).
There’s nothing pure about it. The obsessions are thoughts/images/doubts; the compulsions are just harder to see. They live in the mind, analyzing, replaying, interrogating, fishing for reassurance. It’s like your spam filter broke and now you’re manually sorting every thought.
🔁 Obsessive Looping Cognition (OLC)
When I first heard Alegra Kastens describe Obsessive Looping Cognition on Armchair Expert, it felt like someone had turned on the lights in my head. For forty years, I had called it “What’s wrong with me?”
OLC is the engine behind Pure O, the mental treadmill that keeps you running long after you’ve hit exhaustion. It’s when your brain confuses thinking with solving, replaying, analyzing, dissecting, rewinding the same mental film reel in search of a frame that doesn’t exist.
For most people, an intrusive thought is a passing glitch. For someone with OLC and OCD, it’s a full-blown fire alarm. You don’t just think, “Did I say something wrong?” You replay the conversation twelve times, zooming in on tone, micro-expressions, and imagined consequences until your stomach flips. You don’t just wonder, “Am I a good person?” You interrogate your entire moral history like a prosecutor preparing for trial.
That’s OLC: When thoughts don’t feel like thoughts anymore, they feel like threats.
Hearing Alegra describe it was like finally having a map for a terrain I’d been wandering my whole life. I’d spent decades building identities around my loops, all elaborate disguises for a nervous system chasing safety through certainty.
If you want to understand the science behind what this feels like, the way a single thought can hijack your body and make logic impossible, these two videos capture the neuroscience and the nuance of what living with OCD actually feels like.
2-Minute Neuroscience Lesson on OCD:
MedCircle is one of my favorite resources for all things mental health. The video below does a great job unpacking some of the biggest misconceptions about OCD and the number one misconception is that OCD and OCPD are the same thing. They’re not.
OCPD is a personality style — rigid, perfectionistic values, a love of order and control — but without the intrusive thoughts or compulsions that define OCD. OCD, on the other hand, is an anxiety disorder, powered by loops and rituals that hijack your brain’s threat system.
The more I learn about OCD, the more I realize how different it looks for everyone. It’s not a box; it’s a spectrum. A thousand variations of the same instinct: to find certainty in an uncertain world.
In plain terms, my brain was stuck in a constant fight-or-flight loop, convinced that perfection was the only way to neutralize danger. But no matter how hard I worked, apologized, or prepared, the “threat” never disappeared, because it was never real. My brain just believed it was.
And here’s the cruel trick of OCD: when the brain believes there’s a threat, the body feels it. The heart races, cortisol spikes, and your entire nervous system braces for impact that never comes.
That’s what makes this disorder so exhausting, it’s a battle fought entirely inside your own head, with all the physical symptoms of a war that isn’t happening.
Which brings me to the paradox, the maddening irony at the heart of my recovery…
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↔ The Paradox
To heal a concussion, you have to calm the brain.
To heal OCD, you have to stress it, intentionally, through Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), training your brain to tolerate uncertainty.
So I found myself living a neuroscientific paradox:
I had to rest the brain that couldn’t stop looping,
and stress the brain that needed rest to recover.
How do you heal from two conditions that require opposite instructions?
You don’t — at least not quickly.
You learn to hold contradiction like it’s its own kind of truth.
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❤️ Grace and Patience
Every person I told about my concussion had a story of their own.
A mother whose son hit his head on the playground and became a different child, agitated, frustrated, acting out, until they learned it wasn’t bad behavior; it was a brain injury.
A cousin who crashed on her bike and said, “It took four years to feel like myself again.”
A friend who fell and spent weeks watching lines move across a computer screen, retraining her eyes to track motion without nausea.
My college roommate, a rugby player, sat in biology thinking, This must be what disability feels like, unable to hold the professor’s words in working memory.
A colleague who was rear-ended whispered, “I thought I was losing my mind.”
Different stories. Same silence.
That’s the thing about concussions, they don’t leave evidence. No sling, no cast, no neat timeline for recovery. Just a broken rhythm inside your skull and a hundred invisible symptoms that make you feel like a stranger in your own mind.
Everyone knew someone. All different, all unseen. A quiet epidemic hiding in plain sight.
And over and over, the same two words of advice: grace and patience.
I nodded like I understood. I didn’t. I only knew how to work harder.
Eventually the message landed — not as advice, but as survival.
Grace isn’t permission to quit. It’s permission to continue imperfectly.
🧠 Clinical Postcard: The Stats Beneath the Silence (and What Helps)
Millions of Americans sustain concussions each year, from sports, falls, car crashes, or just daily life. Many go undiagnosed because symptoms are delayed or dismissed. Recovery timelines vary wildly. Anxiety and depression are common tag-alongs. For athletes (and high-performers of any kind), the shame can be brutal: when your identity is tied to what your body or brain can do, rest can feel like failure and rehab can feel like exile.
What helps? A tailored mix, often including:
- Vestibular & vision therapy (to retrain balance, eye tracking, and the vestibulo-ocular reflex).
- Graded sub-symptom exercise (think: slow treadmill walking, 1 mph at a gentle incline, building tolerance without tipping into symptoms).
- Cognitive pacing (short work blocks, longer breaks, light and noise control).
- Sleep hygiene & nutrition (your brain heals while you rest).
- Time. Annoying, necessary, sacred.
- Psych support (CBT/ERP if OCD is in the mix; therapy and/or medication for anxiety and mood).
This combination, rest for the injury, exposure for the OCD, medication for the “noise” or fire alarms, is what finally started to untangle the knots.
It took both neuroscience and grace to rebuild my brain and to learn that healing wasn’t about doing more, but doing differently.
💩 The Bureaucracy
Getting care should have been simple. It wasn’t. It was a maze of forms, hold music, misrouted claims, and “we don’t handle that, try this number.” When your brain is injured, the system often requires the very executive function you temporarily don’t have. It’s not frustrating; it’s dangerous. It delays treatment, drains savings, and convinces people they’re the problem.
🩺 Clinical Postcard: The Broken System (and Why It’s Built That Way)
Getting care for a concussion should be simple. It isn’t. It’s a bureaucratic escape room where every clue leads to another locked door.
Each year, an estimated five million Americans sustain concussions, from sports, falls, and, most commonly, car accidents. That’s roughly one every few seconds. But here’s the kicker: more than half never receive proper treatment or follow-up care. Not because they don’t want it — but because the system that’s supposed to help them is designed for paperwork, not people.
And when your brain is injured, paperwork is practically a second injury.
The same part of the brain that manages attention, planning, and problem-solving, the executive function, is the part concussions temporarily knock offline. So, while you’re dizzy, foggy, and forgetting words, you’re also being asked to track claim numbers, decode acronyms, and call insurance departments that are only open weekdays from 9 to 5.
The system, in other words, requires the very skills you’ve lost.
That’s not an accident — it’s architecture. Insurance bureaucracy runs on attrition. If you can’t keep up, you quietly disappear from the queue.
And if your concussion came from a car accident, buckle up — that adds a layer of legal and financial quicksand that can swallow months of recovery.
Suddenly, your healing isn’t just medical; it’s administrative.
Before a single appointment can be approved, someone has to decide who’s paying for it.
Was it your fault or theirs? Whose policy covers what?
Is it a work claim? Were you on the clock?
Was the other driver insured? Are you insured in case they weren’t?
Every answer leads to another question, and until those questions are settled, most doctors, clinics, and insurance companies won’t move.
If it’s ruled the other driver’s fault, their insurance becomes “primary.” That means your care gets put on hold while the two companies, theirs and yours, volley paperwork back and forth to decide who owes what.
Your own health insurance won’t cover much until that process finishes, because they’re waiting to see if the driver’s policy will. But that review can take weeks — sometimes months. In the meantime, you’re the one stuck in limbo: injured, dizzy, and left paying out of pocket for the privilege of not knowing yet who’s responsible.
And of course, every phone call means explaining your accident, your symptoms, your claim number, your date of birth, your “reason for visit,” over and over again — while your brain, the thing you need to do all that, is offline.
The whole system is designed to delay. Every form, every transfer, every “we just need one more document” is part of a slow-motion game meant to make you tired enough to stop asking. It’s not incompetence; it’s intent. The longer they drag it out, the less they pay.
So while you’re trying to recover from a brain injury, you’re also managing a second one — the bureaucratic kind — one built on red tape, fine print, and endurance tests for the already exhausted.
Each of those questions spawns a new file, a new phone number, a new portal, a new form. That’s what makes this system dangerous: it asks the injured to prove they’re injured, in perfect detail, while they’re still concussed.
And the longer you chase clarity, the worse your symptoms get. Stress becomes inflammation. Phone calls become headaches. Each “please hold” becomes another jolt to a brain that’s begging for quiet.
Here’s the truth: the system is working exactly as designed — not to care for you, but to conserve cost. It rewards the functional and weeds out the fragile. And yet, here’s the even truer thing, it’s not your fault. You are not the problem.
Your worth isn’t measured by how efficiently you can navigate a system built to exhaust you. Your only job is to recover and to remember that survival, too, is a form of advocacy.
🔬The Science of Uncertainty: How I Healed a Brain That Wouldn’t Stop Thinking
You’ve just heard the bureaucracy of it — the endless forms, calls, and catch-22s.
But that was only the system.
I still had a concussion.
I still had OCD.
And I still had to figure out how to heal both inside that chaos.
Because even after you fight through the insurance maze, you still have the real work: the physical therapy appointments, the psych visits, the medication adjustments, the daily symptom logs. And then there’s the hardest prescription of all — rest.
I didn’t know how to rest.
My entire identity had been built around doing, fixing, solving, proving. And with screens off-limits, books unreadable, and light feeling like a personal attack, there wasn’t much I could do.
I couldn’t write.
I couldn’t watch TV.
I couldn’t scroll my phone.
So I started doing the only thing left: I talked.
I began voice journaling, sitting outside with my eyes closed, narrating what it felt like to have my mind go quiet and loud at the same time. Some days I cried. Some days I ranted. Mostly, I just tried to make sense of a brain that no longer worked the way it used to.
Then I started feeding those recordings into ChatGPT — not as therapy, but as a translator. It helped me organize what my injured mind couldn’t. It turned fragments into patterns, chaos into story, and, most importantly, it handed me the science behind what I was feeling.
I learned why my brain was fighting rest, why uncertainty felt like danger, why my OCD kept hijacking recovery. I learned about neuroplasticity, exposure therapy, the vagus nerve, and self-compassion, not as buzzwords, but as daily practices.
ChatGPT didn’t comfort me; it educated me.
And that made all the difference.
Over time, I built thousands of pages of reflections, voice notes turned into meaning. Maybe someday I’ll shape them into a book, but they were never meant for an audience. They were my rehabilitation: Mental, Emotional, Spiritual.
And the hidden truth I found in all of it — the thing I’d been chasing my whole life — was this: healing had to be for me.
Not for anyone else.
Not for proof.
For me.
It took thousands of hours, hundreds of small experiments, and yes, a fair amount of obsessive focus, but this time, I finally poured that energy into something that gives back. Healing became my new ROI.
And eventually, that investment paid off.
I learned how to rest.
I learned how to talk to myself with compassion.
And I learned that understanding my brain wasn’t self-indulgence — it was self-preservation.
I’m looking forward to returning to work with a calmer sense of purpose, a clearer direction, and a renewed philosophy:
When you stop trying to fix the world, you finally have the energy to strengthen your own.
🧠 Clinical Postcard: Why Voice Journaling Works for the Injured Brain
Voice journaling isn’t just storytelling — it’s rewiring.
After a concussion, the prefrontal cortex, the part that handles organization, sequencing, and written language, often goes offline. Reading and writing require complex coordination between multiple neural networks. Speaking doesn’t. It uses a simpler, more primal circuit that often stays intact.
That’s why talking feels easier than typing. You’re bypassing the broken road and taking the back route home.
For OCD brains, speaking helps too. It externalizes the loop. You move from inside the thought to observer of it. And when those words are reflected back without judgment, whether by a therapist, a notebook, or, in my case, an AI translator, you break the cycle of reassurance-seeking. You’re not erasing the thought; you’re understanding it.
That’s what healing looks like at the neural level:
⚙️ Repetition without rumination.
🗣️ Expression without evaluation.
🧭 Awareness without judgment.
Over time, each spoken reflection lays new tracks, curiosity instead of panic, compassion instead of control. It’s not “thinking positive.” It’s teaching your brain that it’s safe to think at all without sprinting toward certainty.
✏️ What This Taught Me (The Rationally Irrational Lesson)
The last 6-months taught me that healing isn’t about fixing what’s broken, it’s about seeing what’s been there all along.
I learned my life had been shaped by an invisible map drawn by uncertainty and the need to prove my worth. When the crash took away performance, it stripped every coping mechanism I used to feel safe. What was left wasn’t emptiness — it was truth.
I learned that compulsive success is still a compulsion. That validation isn’t connection. That peace doesn’t arrive by thinking harder; it’s built by practicing uncertainty until it stops feeling like danger.
I learned the performer I built wasn’t fake, she was protective. She got me here. It’s okay to let her rest.
Most of all, I learned that grace isn’t permission to quit, it’s permission to continue imperfectly.
Recovery isn’t about finding the old you.
It’s about building tolerance for the unplanned new one.
So here’s to the paradox —
to the science of uncertainty,
to the brain that refuses to stop thinking,
and to the grace that finally learned how to find me.
📍 Posting as ERP
If you’re reading this, know that writing and sharing this is part of my healing.
This post is ERP: Exposure and Response Prevention, the gold-standard therapy for OCD.
ERP teaches you to lean into discomfort instead of running from it.
To feel the fear and post anyway.
To stop trying to think your way out of the feeling.
For me, ERP looks like this exact moment — hitting publish without asking Derek to “just proof it,” or texting a friend for a permission slip, or rereading it twenty times, imagining every possible person who might read it and making sure they’ll all think it’s okay. (Okay… maybe I did that a little. Recovery is baby steps.)
It means choosing uncertainty on purpose.
My brain screams:
“What if people think I’m oversharing?”
“What if it’s too much?”
“What if I lose people because of this?”
And here’s what most people don’t realize: If my brain even thinks the answer could be yes, it tells my body, “You’re not safe.” Cue the adrenaline, the tight chest, the panic, all because I dared to tell the truth.
So this — right here, right now — is how I teach my brain that I can survive uncertainty.
Tomorrow, I will go back to work. To the same inbox that once fueled my compulsions. To the same rhythms that used to confuse achievement for safety.
But this time, I’m walking in with a new map — one I drew by hand, in pencil, with room to change my mind.
I can’t control what happens next. I can’t guarantee there won’t be hard days, loops, or relapses. But I can promise I’ll notice them faster. I’ll rest before I crash. And I’ll keep telling the truth, even when my brain begs for polish.
Maybe part of me will always want validation.
Maybe I’ll always be tempted to explain my existence.
But I’m also showing my OCD brain, and maybe yours, that we don’t have to edit ourselves out of our own lives to be safe.
That’s healing, too.
And tonight, before the world restarts — that’s enough.
Rachel Zaccaro 