On 17 October, 2002, I found myself on a train platform in India with no idea who I was or why I was there. I was found by a police officer. I started hallucinating. I spent three days tied down in a mental institution in India hallucinating heavily and screaming nonsense. The nurses claimed I was the most entertaining psychotic they'd ever had. All of this behaviour was the result of a malarial prophylaxis I was taking. What happened to me isn't as rare as I'd like to think. Amnesia, aggression, hallucinations, suicide are all side effects of this drug.

On the third day, my mom and dad showed up. When they walked in, a little arc of blue electricity sparked in my brain. I recognised them. And by the way they were looking at me, I was able to get an idea of the kind of person I was. I was loved. I had grown up in a family who loved one another.

My parents took me home to the house where I grew up; it's a small town in Central Ohio. I hadn't lived there in a decade or so. The walls of their house were decorated with pictures of me and my sisters. It was like touring a museum of myself. I recognised some things. I didn't recognise others. The things I didn't recognise I brought to my mom and she'd tell me stories. She was the docent of my life. She knew so very much more than I did and was eager to tell me any stories I needed.

Through the long years of recovery that followed, my mom was the most reliable resource on me that I had. Someone at a party told me that I was a misogynist. I went to my mom. She told me that to call me a misogynist would imply that I respected men. She said I wasn't a misogynist but a misanthrope. I was, in her words, "a real equal opportunity asshole".

Five years after I woke up on that train platform, my mom was in a terrible accident in which she broke her neck. During the long recovery - through the physical rehabilitation, the surgeries, the interminable spates of bed rest where she'd spend the day watching her favourite catalpa tree from the hospital bed set up in the living room - she'd call me. She was often terribly depressed. Life had radically changed for her in a half a second. All of her plans, all of her ideas about the future were put on hold. And this is where I was able to become a docent for her. The docent of recovery, the docent of trauma, the docent of depression. It did seem impossible, I'd agree with her. It did seem unfair. During our daily lives, it did often feel like we were blithely skating on the thinnest ice possible. And I didn't have any cheerful wisdom for her. I didn't have any tips for making this time productive or maximising her recovery or how to make lemonade out of a broken neck. Instead I listened. Because at some level that's all trauma really has to teach us - how to listen better, how to nod and say, "yeah, I just don't know".

It's now seven years since she broke her neck and twelve years since I woke up on that platform. My mom has recovered. It's exactly the kind of woman she is. She breaks her neck and is fine afterwards. I have mostly recovered (which is exactly the kind of person I am - the kind who equivocates his own recovery). We were able to be exactly what the other person needed during our darkest times, each of us the unlikely guide to worlds the other never expected to tour. I think this is what it means to be loved.

David's book, The Answer to the Riddle is Me, is out now, published by Short Books.