THE THINGS NOBODY KNEW

Blog post description.

David A Johnston (aka The Buffalo Bandit)

6/1/20263 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 invisible 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. And then, 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.

And it always got worse when there was conflict. 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 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