Limitless

Limitless

*Jim Kwik (2020)*

A boy with a broken brain

A five-year-old boy is climbing on a radiator in his classroom, trying to look out the window. He slips. His head hits the cast iron on the way down. He blacks out. When he comes to, he is told he had an accident, but nobody uses the word that will follow him for the rest of his childhood. Traumatic brain injury. From that day forward, Jim Kwik cannot focus the way other kids can. He cannot read at grade level. He cannot finish a thought without it dissolving on him. School becomes a daily small humiliation.

The line that breaks him arrives a few years later in a regular elementary school classroom. He is struggling, again, with a lesson he should have understood. The teacher loses patience. She points at him in front of the other children and says, "That's the boy with the broken brain."

He is nine. He believes her. For most of the next decade he carries that label inside his own head like a verdict. When he fails a test, broken brain. When he is picked last, broken brain. When he reads a paragraph three times and still cannot tell you what it said, broken brain.

By his freshman year of college he is on the edge of dropping out. A friend invites him home for a weekend. The friend's father, a stranger, asks how school is going. Kwik bursts into tears in the man's driveway and tells him the whole boy with the broken brain story. The father walks him to a room lined wall to wall with biographies and personal development books and asks four questions Kwik has never been asked before. What do you want to be? What do you want to do? What do you want to have? What do you want to share? Then he hands Kwik a stack of books and asks him to read one a week.