Alicia Eastes

On September 13, 2011, in my second week of the graduate screenwriting program at UT, I crashed my bike on my way from class and was knocked into a coma for 13 days. It’s a miracle I survived at all when I collided with a truck in an intersection, bounced off the hood and flew 40 feet, sliding under a parked car.

I awoke, mysteriously, the day I was transported to Dallas for rehab at Baylor, and spent the first two weeks in agitation, completely disoriented and primally unstable, in the infancy of my rebirth. I thought I was in rehab for drugs and I had no memory.

The morning my mother arrived, she reawakened my memory with the sound of her voice, and for the first time, I recorded and retained the story of what put me in the hospital; that I’d been in a bike accident, in a coma, and I was rehabilitating. Very soon after digesting that, I told her that I wanted to marry and have a baby.

Four years later, I had completed my MFA in screenwriting, gotten married to my husband, and started my career as an intern at Detour in Austin, with Richard Linklater while he was nominated for an Oscar. That led to working on a documentary about Linklater, when I realized that I had some important brain injury health issues to address, because I was barely having a period each month. They became short, and light, which was unusual. I did a 30-day yoga challenge in the summer of 2015 to get my periods back, and I got pregnant instead. The yoga worked to stimulate my pituitary function and allow me to conceive.

Each day of my pregnancy, I felt more and more like myself. My balance and my amnesia significantly improved during the pregnancy, thanks to hormones. When my daughter was born, I was reborn, into Matrescence, or motherhood.

Today, I’m a mother of two young children, a daughter and a son, founder of Women in Film and Television (WIFT) Austin, and I’m making a documentary film about female sex differences in Neurotrauma.