Yes, I’ve hit the top of my head on the ceiling twice.

In our old house in Virginia, the attic was finished for my mom’s embroidery computer and I used the scanner in there often. I once stood up before I cleared the slope of the ceiling and broke my glasses that I had propped on my head. In my diary, I complained about breaking my new glasses and still having a headache three days later.

My second encounter with a ceiling happened when my dad and I were replacing the sheet rock in the basement after a pipe burst in the ceiling one winter. He let go before I was ready and I dropped the sheet rock onto my own head. I remember seeing black spots when it happened.

There was the wreck we had in my sister’s brand new used car—she’d owned the turquoise Geo Prism for about three hours before we were rear-ended at a stoplight. The car that hit us was going about 35 miles per hour and knocked us into the car in front of us. I’d just commented on how the CD player didn’t even skip at the abrupt stop my sister made and then we were hit by a drunk woman in a Suburban.

I got hit by the windshield blowing out against the back of my head. I was picking safety glass out of my shorts while we waited in the hospital for my sister to get checked for a concussion. I don’t remember what she was diagnosed with (whiplash, most likely), but I remember having a blinding headache and just wanting to go home.

I genuinely don’t remember what not having a headache feels like. I’m not sure I’d recognize it.

After graduating high school, I had less opportunity for head injuries. It was more down to me being clumsy (dropping Sheetrock on my own head is next level clumsy) than me being an athlete.

Samson apparently killed a thousand Philistines with a donkey jawbone, and I remember thinking “yeah I believe it” when I hit the back of my head on a horse’s jaw. Her name was Kit.

You see, what happened was—I was feeding her an apple and when she bit it in half she dropped it and I bent down to pick it up. Right when I started to come up from a crouch, the horse craned her neck down to try and beat me to the apple and BAM. Kit’s jaw hit the back of my head.

A horse’s head weighs about a hundred pounds. I was not standing up slowly. She was not reaching down slowly. I hit the back of my head on the edge of her jaw, balanced myself against her neck, and I remember seeing spots. In a tumblr post about the incident, I mentioned being glad that someone had a codeine pill I could take.

Here is where I curse Past Me for not taking that head injury more seriously.

Just because I have had a head injury in the past that felt much worse than whatever worryingly hard knock happened, doesn’t mean the current noggin hit isn’t as dangerous.

That’s my biggest issue. Just because I’ve been through worse doesn’t mean what just happened wasn’t bad. I have a skewed sense of pain.

It’s so skewed that I’ve gotten drowsy during two different sessions at the tattoo parlor. I do recall actually dozing during the tattoo on the back of my left wrist and came close to falling asleep entirely during the one on my neck below my right ear that’s the Mandalorian sigil for a brain injury. Oddly—or perhaps not that oddly, given how a different pain can be distracting—getting tattooed is pain relief for me. That’s how weird my pain tolerance is.

For contrast, I was in a car accident in 2006 and I was treated for whiplash. I totaled my truck and couldn’t turn my head without everything hurting. They left me strapped to the backboard for three hours. The pain of the weight of my head pressed on one small spot was the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. I was essentially laid out in a stress position for those three hours. I remember my mom shoving her hand between my head and the backboard after I started crying from how much it hurt because I was still immobilized from the ambulance ride and I couldn’t do anything about it.

Not seeking help for head injuries also stems from my discomfort with doctors. More on that later.