After her return to land, she discovered that she could not read. The head injury had affected her ability to process written text in ways that were not immediately apparent but became clear when she tried to return to ordinary activities. It took approximately six years for this deficit to resolve sufficiently for her to read normally. The specific neurological mechanism is not described in her accounts; traumatic brain injury can produce a range of cognitive effects, and difficulty with reading is one of the documented sequelae of significant head trauma.
She also could not grieve, not fully, in the first years. She describes the period after her return as one in which the trauma was held at a distance, managed rather than processed. She kept looking for Richard Sharp in crowds. She had nightmares about being lost at sea and losing him. She describes, in her book and in subsequent interviews, a period of approximately eight years during which she was not fully healed and had not found a way through the grief.
She did not seek formal counseling in those years, by her account. The specific reasons she gives for this choice — that she did not know how to ask for it, that she was not sure it would help — are recognizable from the pattern of trauma response that research has since documented more systematically. She was living through what is now understood as post-traumatic stress, in a period before PTSD had been fully defined and before its treatment had become widely accessible.