My brain is a rebel; I like to say I took the path of most resistance after it broke.

I’ve never been a lover of the simple. This essay could’ve been about how I’m the hardest worker you’ll ever meet; but I wouldn’t want to take the easy road. Instead, I want to tell an Odyssey of how my brain was healed by Russian literature.

That tale begins in the fall of junior year, when I suffered a concussion after my teammate dove onto my head during our league playoff game (but this isn't a typical sports injury story, I promise). After taking a few weeks off and enjoying an easy recovery, it happened again. My first game back, a ball hurled into my head during warm ups (well, that’s what I was told happened—it was lights out for me). One concussion became two.  

The year most notorious for its academic rigor and importance turned out to be the year in which the ship I had so carefully constructed to carry me through, crashed on the shore. 

But it wasn’t as if my ACL was torn and I couldn’t play a trivial game to sustain the human condition’s demand for competition. My brain had to rest. My soul, fulfilled by my brain, became an insatiable void of loss. I could no longer be the hardworking overachiever that everyone had praised for harboring a pure passion for learning.  I was supposed to be hosting book clubs, peer tutoring, working on my STEM Fair project, attending captain’s meetings for Varsity volleyball, and receiving a Homecoming Queen Crown.  

 Instead, I was alone in darkness (quite literally; Web MD says that sunlight hinders the concussion recovery process). But I was more a prisoner to my thoughts than to the dark room I was forced into. I was allowed to exist, but not to live; it felt like both my soul and my mind were broken. I no longer knew who I was.

But I’m a rebel, one who would not know how to take the path of least resistance even if I tried (and oh, my circumstances tempted me). 

My AP Lang teacher had given me Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Illyich to comb through after I expressed my love for reading at the beginning of the year. The book shot darting glances at me, tempting me to clean off its dust and break its spine as I stared around my dark room. At this moment, I decided to write my own future by healing my soul, not just my brain. I creaked open my shutters, letting rebellious beams of light illuminate the pages.

Serendipitously, it was as if my brain, in its post-concussive haze, had developed a penchant for the intricacies of the Russian soul. Although my heart ached to scarf the pages of Tolstoy in one foul swoop, my brain needed rest; I was forced into tackling the book in painfully small sections. In five minute increments, the few beams of reverent sunlight sparked light back into me. I didn’t stop. Tolstoy turned into Dostoyevsky who turned into Nabakov, and with each turn of the page, I found myself less a prisoner to my own mind. More so, a gatekeeper to the Russian novels which tale fragmented souls finding an odd solace in the absurd. As I saw a close mirroring of my very physical injury with the intangible grapplings of characters in these tales, I also saw how close the intangible and tangible operate in real world problems. I had always loved science; it explained the skeleton that encased the very marrow of human nature. But as I combed through novels, I realized that the truest, most important 

 And whether we have experienced this flavor of suffering or will do so in the future, we will encounter the absurd--we cannot avoid it forever. Every day, around every corner packed in every moment of our future, we may find ourselves in confounding, ludicrous, laughable situations. I know I did. But to take one road would be the path of least resistance. True meaning stems from the intersection of both the intangible and tangible, of literature and science.  

So perhaps it was serendipitous indeed. Without my broken brain, my soul wouldn’t have broken. Without my broken soul, I wouldn’t have been able to heal. Sometimes we need to take the path of most resistance, because it leads us to open up to a world as people who laugh at fear, afraid of no challenge, rebelling at the sound of the race horn. Isn’t that a scary thought?