INVISABLE WAR, VISABLE DESTRUCTION...THE WAR THAT RAGES IS REAL.

A glimpse inside my mind how i truly view the world around me. This is a small piece of a truly sad reality. And I am not the only one, there are more.

David A Johnston (aka The Buffalo Bandit)

6/1/20267 min read

Exit from the 403 west to Erin Mills pkwy.

If you break your leg, they put it in a cast. People hold doors for you. They give you the benefit of the doubt because they can see the damage with their own two eyes.

But when your brain takes a hit? When the wiring inside your skull gets damaged? You are entirely on your own.

In 1989, my life changed. I sustained a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). But the real tragedy wasn't the accident itself; it was the decades of living with a shattered internal system that no one else could see. To the outside world, I looked perfectly fine. But inside, I was fighting a war every single second of the day just to process the world around me.

People think a brain injury just means you get headaches or forget things. They don't understand the mechanical failure of it. They don't understand the processing delays.

Imagine sitting with someone you care about deeply. They look at you and say something incredibly important—something you’ve wanted to hear. But your brain simply cannot process the words. Ten seconds go by. Then twenty. Then thirty. You are frozen. Inside, you know exactly how you feel. You know what you want to say. You love them more than they could possibly realize. But the connection is severed. To the other person, your silence looks like you don’t care. They take it personally. They get hurt. And you are left trapped inside your own head, screaming at yourself to just speak, but the words won't come.

That was my reality. But the cruelest part of this injury was the false hope.

There were times when my life would finally stabilize. I would build things up. I would look around and think, Okay, it’s over. I’m finally past it. Past what? I didn't know. I just was glad it stopped. And then, after I worked to rebuild, not just my life (meaning financially and legally), but also the relationships in it that sadly were often destroyed.

I could have years of stability and I would be happy and content with life. I would form new relationships and then one day the feeling in the pit of my stomach would return. I learned to recognize that feeling and what it was, and it wasn't good. That feeling meant the demons were coming back and before long the war would wage again. I would unknowingly sabotage myself. The wiring would misfire, the luck would turn, and I would watch everything I had built start to crumble, completely unable to stop it.

When the demons were back and the trouble started, it inevitably started conflict in all areas of my life, but especially with those I was closest with. People look at a person who appears fine, they don't see any physical damage, and they think all that is going on is you are just an asshole. They don't know about the battle that is raging in your head, they don't know that you struggle with even finding a reason to continue to breathe. They don't understand the decisions you make or your actions, which are almost always you trying to seek some sort of relief or at the very least not make the battle worse.

To everyone around you, the battle is silent and it doesn't exist. They view how you are acting as cold, uncaring, like you don't respect their feelings or what is important to them. But what is really going on is you are a soldier in a very dangerous conflict and you are literally doing all you can to stay alive. To everyone else, it looks absolutely stupid what you are doing and it creates conflict. You try to explain, but they don't listen because what you are doing is directly affecting their life.

You really care about these people, they are your friends, girlfriends, in some cases they are your once in a lifetime, your soulmate. And you desperately try to get them to understand, but they don't get it, and the conflict makes the war even worse, and nobody understands that nothing you are doing is you not caring or trying to be an asshole. They just see an asshole and they start to respect you less and less, and the conflict increases and the respect continues to fall. While inside you are becoming more and more devastated by what is happening and you are fighting hard to maintain some kind of advantage over the demons so they don't kill you, and at the same time you are trying desperately not to lose those you love and care about who view you as an asshole who doesn't care about them. And in almost every situation you end up watching those you cared about and loved the most walk away and become someone that you once knew.

The people that leave and walk away from you go on and live their lives believing that you never cared and they feel justified because of the things you've done, the things that you said, and all your actions that they view as reckless and not in line with the actions of a normal person. They are right, the actions are a lot of times reckless and they definitely aren't in line with how a normal person would act. What they are is battle plans, trying to outflank the enemy, the enemy that nobody else sees, but that doesn't mean he's not real. But sadly what ends up happening is the people you love don't get it and over time become an enemy as well, even though you still love and care for them just as much as you always did, probably even more. And now instead of them picking up arms and fighting alongside you and being part of the resistance, they instead become part of the invading force and try to destroy and hurt you.

Nobody, unless you have lived with this, could ever understand what it feels like to not only lose the ones you love over and over because they never understood, but to have to defend yourself against attacks from someone you never believed would hurt you and to sometimes have to launch counter attacks just to try and get it to stop, all while still fighting the demons, the legal system because of the fallout with the demons, and any other personal conflicts that come because of it all. Nobody can imagine what that is like, and then it gets worse when resources start to run out and all the people that were your allies now view you as an enemy and will not do the slightest thing to help you, but will go out of their way to hurt you, but inside you still love them the same as you always did.

The entire war is waged in secret, nobody knows but you despite the evidence of some kind of major conflict littered everywhere. The hundreds of empty beer cans and alcohol bottles, the hidden crack pipe, the white residue on the piece of glass on the table. The car smashed and steaming in a field. The arguments and smashed phones and broken glass, the never-ending charges and court dates, the police always at the door. The jobs lost, the suspended driver's license, the grass and weeds growing in the yard, the unwashed dishes, the diminished appearance, the huge ideas and plans that all just sit there started but idle. The larger-than-life person who you were to some becomes the enemy, and when you view it all this way, it's pretty plain to see that the war you are fighting in your head isn't all that invisible to others.

The injury you suffered that people think they can't see so they treat you different when you don't conform to their norms... well the injury is right there and scattered everywhere for everyone to see and it's a devastating injury, one that left untreated will just keep causing more and more hurt and more and more injuries. It will destroy every last thing the person fighting the war cares about, and what it doesn't destroy it will take.

Here are some examples of how the battles rage, there are many more but here are a few for now. Very few people in this world know how to just sit down and talk. When people get angry, they yell. They push. But for someone with a severe TBI, yelling isn't just annoying—it triggers a dangerous, physical overload.

When someone would scream at me or push an argument, the pressure in my head would build at an alarming rate. It wasn't an emotional reaction; it was a physical one. My head would literally feel heavy. It felt like it was going to explode. And when that pressure reached its breaking point, a switch would flip.

It wasn't a conscious choice. It wasn't me deciding to be an asshole. It was an automatic, uncontrollable fight-or-flight survival response, only the "flight" option was broken. My brain's only goal was to make the pressure stop at all costs. I would become aggressive, loud, and say the most hurtful things imaginable just to shut the conflict down. It would take thirty to sixty seconds before I even realized what was happening. By the time I regained control, the damage was done. Things were broken. Trust was shattered.

The machine in my head was misfiring so badly that it wouldn't even let me rest. I would sleepwalk—but not the kind you see in movies. I would walk around my house completely unconscious but engaging with people as if I were awake. I’ve drank household cleaners like Mr. Clean and Windex while asleep. I've woken up trapped in storage areas, or sitting in the driver’s seat of cars with no idea how I got there.

Sometimes, I would say things to the people I loved while completely asleep, and they would think I was awake. They would start yelling at me for it, and I would wake up to someone screaming in my face. Within three seconds, that pressure would build, the switch would flip, and another relationship would fracture.

Nobody understood it. I didn't even fully understand it. The world just labeled me a problem. People didn't see a guy whose brain was misfiring; they just saw an asshole. Friends walked away. Relationships I cherished more than anything—people I would have given the world for—were destroyed because my brain couldn't handle the pressure, and the world refused to wait a few seconds for me to catch up.

Before the family courts laid their trap, before the police abused their power, and before I lost my daughter, I was already fighting a brutal, exhausting war against my own mind.

This isn't an excuse. It’s the truth. And it’s the beginning of the ledger.

Before you can understand how I survived the machine, you have to understand how I was broken.

I'll be back soon,

The Bandit