The internet can often feel like a vapid place, propped up by self-interested, shallow interactions as users compete for the most subscribers, views and shares.
But reluctant YouTuber James Inkson Stevens has what most content creators don’t; he’s in regular contact with at least half of his subscribers.
He sometimes gets frustrated with making videos, and finds the process very tiring, but keeping Stevens going is the memory of how alone he felt 16 months ago, after he was assaulted and left with a traumatic brain injury.
Stevens, 35, was working as an actor in London before he decided to move back to Southampton, where his family live, to buy a flat.
He’d saved for a deposit and was viewing flats, and hoped to have his first home in within the next few months. But what happened during a friend’s birthday celebrations on March 1st last year completely derailed his plans.
In a strange twist of fate, Stevens had just been to visit his older sister, who was in the Wessex Neurological Centre after having an aneurysm a few days earlier. When he left to get the bus to town, he couldn’t have known that he’d be back there four hours later, as a patient himself.
At the pub that evening, Stevens got into a disagreement with a friend.
“It wasn’t a heated argument, more of an end-of-our-friendship sort of thing,” Stevens says.
“He was being nasty to people. He’d come to my birthday a few months before and done the same thing. He’d occasionally put me down, told me I was a failed actor, and he’d had enough chances. I walked away with my back to him.”
Stevens’ attacker, who was, he estimates, about four stone heavier than him, ran up behind him and punched the back of his head. Stevens’ skull cracked on the pavement, and while his friends waited for the ambulance to arrive, an off-duty nurse walking past spotted Stevens lying on the ground and noticed that it didn’t look like he was breathing.
Just as she went to feel Stevens’ pulse, he gasped for air. He was later told by specialists it’s possible his heart stopped and started up again on its own.
Before the attack, Stevens was working full time at a letting’s agency. He walked miles every day, went to the gym three times a week and spent a few hours every weekday writing a novel. Now, Stevens is staying with family, unable to work.
“The work ethic and the energy I had, I felt like someone broke in and stole it from me. The book is going a hell of a lot slower now,” he says.
He describes his life now as much like the recent lockdown.
“Life was like this before, for me. I see friends about twice a month; it takes a week for me to get back to normal energy again, but it’s worth it.”
His doctors explained to Stevens that traumatic brain injury was like a ‘muddy puddle’. They told him his recovery so far has been consistent with what they expected, but they can’t predict how it will go beyond the 18-month mark, in two months’ time.
Stevens’ short-term memory has taken the biggest hit, and he suffers with chronic neuro fatigue and pains across his head if he concentrates of exerts himself too much, and has chronic oversensitivity to loud noises.
When he came out of hospital, Stevens didn’t feel like he had the energy to retell what had happened to all his friends, so he filmed a video and posted it online.
He decided to continue making videos because he knows he can help encourage people to have positive attitude, when he’s feeling positive himself, and spread awareness.
“Having a strong support network helped me in the early days, but I still felt unbelievably alone. A friend told me about brain injury support groups on Facebook and I soon didn’t feel alone anymore. People were processing the same things I was going through,” Stevens says.
Stevens attributes his confidence to his career in acting, and says he feels lucky to have retained that.
“The more I research traumatic brain injury, I realised how lucky I was to still have that ability, and that the damage hadn’t been a bit to the left or the right.”
But he finds filming and uploading the videos tiring, and pushes himself because he wants to connect with others, and help others without a community connect with each other.
“It’s important to help in whatever way I can. It helps me feel less powerless. And this is the only way I can help.”
But he doesn’t want to portray his own recovery inaccurately.
“One viewer told me I seem high functioning. Maybe I am, it probably seems that way, but simple things take their toll,” he says.
“On the surface, particularly when I’ve had a coffee, I can seem normal. I was already a motormouth before, and my injury hasn’t affected that, but people don’t see how much making a video takes it out of me afterwards. You can’t get an accurate view of someone from 30 minutes a week.”
Stevens compares life before his brain injury to being a third of the way up the Snakes and Ladders board.
“When the brain injury happened, a snake came out of nowhere and I slipped to square one, but then the entire board flipped over and when it was rewritten it was a new game I’d never heard of and couldn’t understand. Every day I’m learning the rules.”
You can watch Stevens’ videos here. In addition to his own YouTube channel, Stevens was recently a guest on the ‘A Battle Within’ podcast.
