Welcome To Your New UnNormal (Paperback)

Something changed. No warning. No manual. No one who really understood.

Welcome to Your New UnNormal is a deeply personal collection of eleven poems and true reflections about life after a significant brain injury. Chief Chuck E Carroll writes about the things people cannot always see: lost words, memory struggles, fatigue, frustration, anger, identity, and the exhausting experience of having to explain yourself again and again. With honesty, sarcasm, humor, and heart, he gives a voice to the moments that are often difficult to put into words.

This isn't a story about becoming the person you were before. It's about learning how to build a life with what you have now. Through powerful metaphors of crooked houses, missing blueprints, stolen words, labels, boxes, manuals, and measuring tools, these poems explore what it means to rebuild without a clear plan. Most importantly, they remind survivors that they are more than a diagnosis, more than a label, and more than what they've lost.

For anyone living with brain injury, supporting someone who is, or simply trying to understand what life can look like from the inside, Welcome to Your New UnNormal offers something rare: recognition. It doesn't promise that everything will return to normal. Instead, it offers hope, connection, and the reminder that starting over isn't failure. Sometimes hope is simply getting up one more time, taking the next step, and continuing to build. You're still here. And that matters.