If you've ever been told you look fine when you feel anything but, or found your people somewhere nobody expected, pull up a chair.

More info, resources & ways to connect - https://www.tacosfallapart.com/podcast-live-show/podcast-guests/nicholas-ruchlewicz

Nicholas Ruchlewicz Survived a Traumatic Brain Injury. Then He Used Pathfinder TTRPG to Help Put Himself Back Together.

On March 15, 2016 - the Ides of March, smack in the middle of Brain Injury Awareness Month - Nicholas Ruchlewicz was in a single-vehicle motorcycle crash that changed everything. He woke up not knowing where he was, seeing double, unable to control his own hands. Doctors had to tie them down because he kept pulling staples out of his own skull. He had a plate holding his pelvis together. He was living in his mom's basement with the handles taken off his wheelchair so he could fit down the hallway.

That's where this story starts.

In this episode, Nicholas walks us through what early recovery actually looked like... the speech therapy he fought tooth and nail because he "just hurt his legs," the 12 steps on a walker that were the hardest he'd ever taken, and the Pandora station full of Type O Negative and Opeth that his girlfriend played in the ICU and that you could literally watch lower his blood pressure on the monitors.

The conversation gets really interesting when we get into how Nicholas found his way back through tabletop role-playing games. He'd already been playing Pathfinder before the crash. After it, rolling dice at a game store gave him a reason to get out of the house, a way to rebuild his cognitive function, and a community that showed up for him in ways he didn't expect... including visiting him in the hospital. He now runs organized play events up and down the East Coast, has run nearly 400 Pathfinder games, and uses the platform he's built to speak to political organizations and members of Congress about brain injury recovery and mental health.

We also get into why TTRPGs specifically hit different from other hobbies when it comes to healing - the creative freedom, the social scaffolding, the way playing a confident character can quietly build confidence in real life. Nicholas has watched it help people work through social anxiety, find community, and feel seen in ways that are genuinely hard to manufacture anywhere else.

He also shares a couple of practical life hacks from his recovery that honestly apply to everyone: the "1-2-3" pause technique and the Viktor Frankl principle about the space between stimulus and response being where your power lives.

Nicholas's story is a good reminder that recovery is rarely linear and help shows up in unexpected places... sometimes in the form of math rocks and imaginary creatures, and a table full of people who are just glad you showed up.

Traumatic Brain Injury & Using TTRPGs & Gaming in Therapy with Nicholas Ruchlewicz