There Is Nothing Wrong With You

"Talking perceptions, people. Do we really see each other for what we really are, or do we just see what we want to see, the image distorted by our own personal lenses? I lost someone today and the funny thing is, I don't even know who she was." Jeff Melvoin, Northern Exposure, Lovers and Madmen, 1994

My friend Sue keeps telling me that. I don't know why it's so important for her that there be nothing "wrong" with me. Part of the problem is probably that she didn't meet me until after the accident. She only knows me as I am now, so for her, there's nothing to compare, no "before" to my "after".

I find it extremely difficult to deal with the "oh, you're fine" attitude. While it is true that brain injuries, especially the mild ones, can be largely invisible injuries, I am impacted daily by my new modus operandi.

I say "new". It's been almost four years since the accident. It's still new to me. Comparatively speaking 37 years versus four - yeah, it's still new.

I understand that many of my friends and cohorts are hitting their midlife stride. With that comes some alterations, changes in vision, hearing, perhaps mild cognitive decline, "Where DID I leave my keys?" But it is fleeting. It is occasional. It is not pervasive. Let me say this definitively, It is NOT the same as a brain injury.

Misplacing your keys occasionally because you're overbooked, or overworked or overtired or over caffeinated doesn't compare. (I know you all mean well when you say things that attempt to normalize or minimize but at some point it just becomes frustrating.)

As an illustration of my point, I offer an example. On Tuesday I dropped of some artwork for a show. I needed to fill out cards which were taped to the backs of each painting. They listed the title of the piece, my name, the medium and the price. I was in the midst of a migraine so from the get go, I wasn't at the top of my game. I made some error and apologized, telling Sue, who was sitting across the table from me, that I wasn't having a good day. She's known me long enough to know that's my code for a "Bad Brain Day". She laughed, made a dismissive gesture and said, "Oh, you're FINE. There's nothing wrong with you."

I seethed, and continued to fill out the cards for my six painting.

After I finished, I said my goodbyes and I left, four crumpled cards balled up in my jacket pocket. On one, I'd written down the wrong media. Another, I'm mis-spelled a word in the title. The third I'd written something on the wrong line, and the fourth - on the fourth card I had spelled my last name incorrectly.

I spelled my name wrong.

How often do you spell your name incorrectly?

How often do you make THAT many mistakes in rapid succession?

The more I think about this incident, the more I want to believe Sue. As I try to come to terms with who I am now, I want to accept my new abilities and limitations as simply factual, without judgement or disappointment or regret. This is how I am. This is who I am. While I am definitely changed, and have definitely lost some speed and some ability, I need to stop judging that fact and, by extension, myself. In that sense, perhaps there really is nothing wrong with me.

You Can Take of Leave It If You Please

"Anyone desperate enough for suicide...should be desperate enough to go to creative extremes to solve problems: elope at midnight, stow away on the boat to New Zealand and start over, do what they always wanted to do but were afraid to try." Richard Bach

Suicide is a hot topic right now. There's been a rash of teen suicides in the U.S. that are being connected in the media, and in many people's opinion, with bullying.

I maintain the unpopular and challenging opinion that healthy people do not commit suicide. Even when the situations in their lives appear bad, or even hopeless, psychologically health people seek different alternatives.

Acknowledging that this is uncomfortable for many people, let me also say that placing blame is one way to make sense out of what feels to many to be a senseless act. We want to know "why". It is a basic human need. We want to make sense out of things that are difficult. How many times have we all heard someone say, "If would all be easier, if I could just understand..."?

It's easier to blame something bullying than to try to understand why someone felt that killing themselves was their only option. Bullying is wrong. People who bully are bad. If the bullying was the final stressor in a series of stressors that pushes someone over the edge, so to speak, then we can feel good about blaming the bullies for the suicide.

But...

There is one problem with this logic. The bullies aren't the ones who pull the trigger, or swallow the pills, or open the vein.

If someone decides to rob a bank because his friends repeatedly taunt him and egg him on society still holds the bank robber responsible for his actions. We each have choices. We choose to seek help or succumb to bullying or torment or financial stressors. People choose their fate. They choose to live or die.

The bully does not make that choice for them. THEY choose for themselves.

With that being said, there are factors that make reasonable choices about suicide more difficult. Being a child or teenager is one of them. Adolescent brains do not have the impulse control abilities of a fully mature brain. What that means is that adolescents have a harder time stopping themselves from doing things, especially when those things relate to peers, or coincide with heightened emotional states.

Ok, once again, adolescence + heightened emotions + peers = bad judgement.

Add a brain injury into that mix and you've got a recipe for disaster.

Brain injury often affects something called "Executive Function". Executive Function is the brain's decision making ability. Brain injury can also damage impulse control and other areas of behavior and emotional regulation.

Do you see how any of these symptoms can make a bad situation infinitely worse when dealing with multiple external stressors (bullying, death in the family, poverty, legal issues, etc.).

The following article is about the suicide death of a football player who, after autopsy, was found to have suffered repeated brain injuries.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/09/14/thomas.football.brain/index.html?hpt=C2

So what's the answer? I don't pretend to know. Perhaps there isn't one. However, I am suggesting that subtle brain injuries are very likely behind some of the adolescent behavior which adults find distressing like AD/HD, ODD, Depression, and Suicidality. I am suggesting that people, especially adolescents, with a known Brain Injury should be monitored differently than uninjured people.

I am suggesting that these injuries can, in some people, create a perfect storm of depression, hopelessness, frustration and impulse control and can end in suicide.

I am also suggesting that there is always more than one reason why someone commits suicide, and the easy answers aren't necessarily the best, or most illuminating.

Acme Overload (100th Post!)

"Physical pain however great ends in itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous horrors sear the soul" - Alice James

Back in the 70s there was an Acme Market in my hometown. Just like the one in the picture it had a huge wall of windows and I remember it being lit primarily, during the day anyway, by light from the windows. It wasn't a mega-store. Mega-stores didn't exist in the 70s. There weren't hundreds of brands on the shelves. It was just enough.

Our Acme closed, but they still exist in New Jersey and I shopped at one today. Alas, it was not the charming experience like that of my memory. Inexplicably, they were pumping some horrid techno-dance music through the speakers. It was so loud I could actually FEEL the beat. I could think of nothing else; the music was all that existed. Well, the music and the endless rows and rows of food.

It was my own fault, really. I'd stopped at the Acme on my first night here to pick up some supplies and they were playing ridiculously awful music then as well. It was late at night so I'd figured it was a fluke, or the night staff playing fast and loose with the sound system. Apparently, the horrid techno is standard fare.

Techno beats are literally one of the most distracting things in the universe for me now.

I don't know how I managed to get the things I needed. Actually, I didn't the first time. I got some, but not all. It got to the point where I had to leave.

Tonight, it took forever. I wandered around for much longer than it should have taken. Perhaps that's the point, although I didn't see anyone else wandering the aisles looking like a lost puppy.

I used to be able to shop well. I was like a commando on a mission. In, out, one shop, one kill - or something like that. Now, I shop like a man. Slightly confused, lost in the store, distracted, frustrated... the list goes on.

I finished, obviously, but I'm disturbed by my inability to function well in commercial settings. I either lost it and flee the store, or end up buying tons of crap I don't need and, more often than not, forgetting what I'd gone shopping for in the first place. Lists help, but half the time I forget the list, or forget to put everything ON the list.

More and more I think I may need to invest in a smartphone. The idea of having a calendar and lists and reminder alarms all in one place is quite attractive. The downside is that it's just one more thing to misplace, and losing a two hundred dollar phone would ruin my day. I also think that the act of writing, physically marking something down, is more supportive for memory than typing something into a phone.

There must be a better solution, some way to not become completely overwhelmed. It has been suggested that I try Ritalin, but I hate to add to my pharmaceutical cocktail.

This is my 100th post on this blog. It should have been better than this.

The Habit of Joy

"It's possible to forget how alive we really are. We can become dry and tired, just existing, instead of really living. We need to remind ourselves of the juice of life, and make that a habit. Find those places inside that jump for joy, and do things. -Anonymous (http://www.thinkexist.com/)

I am at the beach, or, more precisely the water. A strange chain of events provided me with a lovely cottage on "the channel" in Stone Harbor. For months I'd been promising myself this break. It's been a rather rough year, working on my degree, an internship, Gram's illness and death, months of testing to see if I had Lupus, the collapse of my marriage, continuing legal woes. Any one of these would have been enough to warrant a few days away. Taken together, I'm thankful I'm not writing this from a padded room.

Today I walked to Nun's Beach. Nun's Beach is the (semi) private beach in front of the ocean-front convent in Stone Harbor. The nun's know a little something about going on holiday. Location, location, location, dearies.

I am tired from the walk. It wasn't far, but I'm out of practice. The internship and doctoring and fatigue has prevented me from keeping up with the walking I'd started in the spring. It's a difficult decision, do I maintain a consistent exercise practice which I know will help and support both my physical rehabilitation as well as my mental health, or do I try to lead a "normal" life (keep a real schedule, try to hold down a "real" job)?

Is it even possible for me to maintain a normal schedule and life?

At the moment, for me to function best, I need at least 8 hours of actual sleep (not just lying in bed, but sleeping), an hour of movement (walking and aquatic exercises are best) and approximately an hour of stretching/yoga which works best when divided throughout the day. I admit, that doesn't sound like much, until you try to actually fit it into a day. Especially when you're exhausted from trying to do normal things, like pay your bills, or take a class.

I don't want to sound like I'm whining. I don't want to whine.

I'm scared.

How on earth am I going to find a job that allows me to do all that and work during my "good" hours and allow me time off for doctors and bad days? The answer is, I probably won't. Realistically, I'll be lucky to find any job at all in this market.

But this was supposed to be about joy.

Lately, I've been watching people that appear happy. They are not overly concerned with the details. They are responsible but their work and responsibilities do not seem like a chore. Quite a few of them are self-employed or part-time workers. They have time to do things that they love, and spend time with the people they care about.

What is more important than that?

There's no point in preserving life or even living it if there is no joy in it. Struggling and scrambling just to continue struggling and scrambling isn't enough. We must make joy a habit. We must do the things we love, the things that make us who we are. This is what sustains us when little else is left.

Tomorrow, I will walk to Nun's Beach again.

Who Am I?

"My life has been one great big joke,
A dance that's walked,
A song that's spoke,
I laugh so hard I almost choke,
When I think about myself."
-Maya Angelou

Yesterday's post got me thinking about how my idea of self has altered since the accident, which made me realise that any injury or acquired disability is an assault or, at the very least, a challenge to the self.

But what is the self? Who am I? Who are you? Are you your idea of yourself or something else?

How does our self-image relate to the reality of who we are? Does it relate? Does it matter if our idea of who we are is vastly different than others' idea of who we are?

My idea of who I was changed drastically during my recovery. For years I was what I could do. I was my intellect. I was my achievements. I was my talent. I was my ability to stay up for three days and get ANY project done at the last minute.

Now... all that has changed. Or, at least it feels different from the inside. None of those things feel the same as they did before. Now, I feel as though I am my injuries. I am my story. I am my limitations.

At the same time, I understand that most people who meet me can't immediately tell that there is anything wrong with me. Some of them never notice. On one level that is a relief. I still pass as "normal". On the other hand, my injury is invisible. No one knows how hard things are for me now. No one knows unless I tell them, and often, that just feels like complaining.

I'm caught in that no-man's land of non grievously injured enough to be an inspirational recovery story, and walking away unscathed. I'm stuck with a life, and a self that has been irrevocably changed. Perhaps in some ways for the better, in others, definitely for the worse.

I cannot deny that I have been changed by this experience. Perhaps the most difficult thing to accept is that change is inevitable, even we are changeable. We tend to think that we will always be as we are. Or at least, that if we change, it will be by our choice. That's just not the case. Change comes, whether we are prepared or not. Do we move with it, and choose the outcome, or fight the inevitable, changing against our will while desperately clinging to the idea of what we were?

*** Blog Contest: Download, print and color the image in this entry and email it to lmestishen@comcast.net. Be sure to include your name and address. The winner (my choice, obviously, gets a copy of one of my favorite books.

Who's Who

"Looking back, you realize that a very special person passed briefly through your life, and that person was you. It is not too late to become that person again." - Rober Brault

This evening I had the pleasure of having my portrait painted by artist, Eric Armusik. It is the first time anyone has created an image of me, in a medium other than photography, since I was five. In 1975, while my family was vacationing in Ocean City, a boardwalk artist did a charcoal sketch of me. It still hangs on the wall in my parents' house.

Sitting for the portrait, while a great deal of fun (Eric and his wife Rebekah are delightful), was taxing. Staying still is harder than you think, especially when you MUST remain still. The neck and back injuries began protesting almost immediately, but I was allowed breaks to stretch and reposition. That aside, it was a marvelous experience and I shall treasure the portrait, but all this focus on my visage got me thinking about the self and our, or rather my, image of it.

One of the scarier moments post accident was when I was casually flipping through the photos on my ex's phone and found a picture of a woman I did not recognize. She was smiling at the camera, with a look that implied a relationship with the photographer. It wasn't vulgar, or flirty, just, knowledgeable.

I freaked out.

Who was this woman? Why did he have a picture of THIS WOMAN on his phone? Why was she smiling? What the hell?

As I began my rant and asking those questions, in escalating degrees of shrillness, my ex looked at me, at first amused and then baffled. "Are you serious?" he asked.

"Yes."

I was deadly serious.

He paused a moment and said, "It's YOU, Lor."

Then it was my turn to pause. I looked at the picture again. Then I looked harder. Then I realized that the woman was wearing my jacket. And that I recognized the location. Although I knew it HAD to be me, my brain still wouldn't accept the fact. There was absolutely no recognition that the woman in the photo was me.

I was terrified. Nothing had ever happened like that before. Sure I'd forgotten names and dates and things since the accident but I didn't recognize myself. Disorienting doesn't begin to explain the feeling.

Lucky for me, I've never had a repeat of that experience, but it was enough to give me a taste of what "real" amnesia must feel like. Technically, I have what it know as an "Amnestic Disorder", which is, simply, a problem with how memory is created, stored, or retrieved. It comes in many forms, some more benign than others. Even with the things I have lost, when I consider this incident, I feel like I got off easy.

A Verry Merry Unbirthday to Blog

"I tried to commit suicide by sticking my head in the oven, but there was a cake in it." - Leslie Boone

How distracted am I? Well, I missed my one year blog anniversary. (This was supposed to be a year-long project.) Yeah, I was supposed to write everyday too, we see how that worked out.

One might conclude that if I'd been writing here more often, I would have noticed that I had reached the one year anniversary. You'd be correct.

Still, I suppose it is something to celebrate, even late, even though my posting has been sporadic at best. Do I even bother writing something like, "I'll try to post more often."? Eh. Trying is for losers. Only what you do matters.

I've been sacrificing my health in order to finish my internship. (I've been trying to stay active and eat better.) See what I mean, trying doesn't count for anything. You might as well just replace the word "trying" with "failing".

The hours are uncomfortable for me. Longer than I am able to sustain and remain functional. When I get home, I'm mostly useless. My mountains of paperwork continue to grow. The physical improvements that I was seeing when I was consistently working out and stretching have mostly disappeared. Strange isn't it, that we scramble for jobs so we can afford health insurance in order to pay for medicines and treatments that we wouldn't need if we had more time and energy to take better care of ourselves?

Although I have been enjoying the internship, I look forward to it ending, if only so I can get back in shape, and get back on a normal sleep schedule. I'm sleeping, at best, two hours in a row, then waking, eventually falling back to sleep, sleeping two hours, waking...all through the night. It's not the most conducive to rest and restoration.

I don't know what is next for me after this internship ends. I don't know what kind of work I will a) be lucky enough to find, and b) be able to sustain. Staying in school, in a doctoral program, was a great way to hide. I could stay in school for another 5 years and not have to worry about "getting a real job" and trying to fit my broken brain into a "normal" work week. Either way, it looks like I will have a bit of time once I'm finished before I re-enter the workforce.

Even if I do get hired, it's probably going to be a contract position which will only pay if a client actually shows up. Yes, I've seen others in these types of positions sit around all day waiting for clients and have NO ONE show up. Since these are contractor jobs, I'll be paying for my own insurance, etc. This is if I'm even lucky enough to get one of these. Locally, one of the biggest social services companies just fired a slew of people. There are plenty of folks out there with more experience who will be after the same jobs I want.

I hope this was the correct choice. I hope all this "research" I've been doing can be of benefit to someone.

Oh, yeah, and "YAY!" for the Mildlytraumatic year anniversary! I guess I should change the tag-line if I'm going to continue this.

The Secret Ingredient

"When life demands more of people than they demand of life - as is ordinarily the case - what results is a resentment of life almost as deep-seated as the fear of death." - Tom Robbins

This started out being an exploration of frustration. Then, in a truly wonderful example of just that issue, I was unable to cut and paste the piece I'd written in word into this blog.

Don't ask me why I am suddenly unable to copy and paste things here. I don't know. Perhaps the coding changed (I USED to be able to do it), or maybe I inadvertently altered some setting. Whatever the reason, I am now unable to copy and paste text from, well, anywhere onto this site.

This angers me. This annoys me. This frustrates me. I resent people who can blog easier and can copy and paste into THEIR blogs.

Ok, maybe I resent plenty of things now.

I do. I don't like it, but I do. I like admitting that I do even less.

(This is not what this entry was supposed to be about.)

I resent people that get away with doing whatever they want without regard for others. And here's where I begin to make sweeping generalizations and start sounding crazy and the ranting begins. I hate people who take their own hearing for granted and do not respect mine. (Ok, this one is more concrete and you know who you are, or at least you should, if you were thoughtful enough to consider the matter, which you are not, so it follows that you do not, in fact, know who you are.) (OK, that was the crazy rant part.) I'm am referring, in this instance, to people who blast their MP3 players to point where someone standing across the room can hear every note and lyric and sing along with what was designed to be a personal listening experience.

I resent people who drive drunk.

I resent people who break promises.

I resent people who have jobs and blatantly fail to DO their jobs when so many are un and under employed.

I resent people who...

And now I've distracted myself by wondering if you can actually resent people or are you resenting the action?

Resent is from the French "ressentir", "to be angry", and the Old French, "resentir", "to feel strongly".

And now I'm not angry anymore. Not much, anyway. I'm just tired and frustrated again. This post was supposed to be about my inability to deal with paperwork post injury. Really, I just can't get it together now. I'm in the process of trying to organize my paperwork for my '09 taxes and I just can't seem to do it. I am overwhelmed. It doesn't make sense to me.

How do I tell people that? How do I admit to anyone, really, that I stare at piles of paper for hours sometimes and simply don't know what to do with them? (Well, I'm admitting it now, am I not?)

If it were only so easy to actually DO the thing. I am an embarrassment to my family because of this. They don't get it. They don't understand it. I can't ask them for help because they think I'm just being lazy and defiant and a procrastinator. I'm not. I don't pay my bills because I don't know how to do it anymore.

I recognize that doesn't make sense. You open a bill. You sit down. You write a check. You mail the check. Or perform some version of that in an online format. It doesn't sound so difficult. I can enumerate the steps I just can't make the steps happen. I'm always wrong. I'm always behind. I always miss something. Just when I think I've paid everything successfully something gets returned... I wrote the wrong date. I paid the wrong amount. Some other silly oversite or error and I'm back to square one again.

The worst part is that it's endless. Bills come at different times. Yes, I guess I could adjust some of the billing dates, but not all of them. Just when you think it's over, here's the new set. There's no respite. I will have to do this for the rest of my life.

Did I mention that I was not this way before the accident.

I can show you the books from back when I owned the catering business. Books so clearly and obsessively organized that it would make an accountant cry with joy. Weekly logs, receipts, spreadsheets, I did it all. I had it together. I used to pride myself on having an easily understandable system that worked. Now... chaos.

Do I organize by month or by type? Hell, I can't even find half of the receipts and bills. I don't pay anything in an organized fashion anymore. Some bills I pay with cash. CASH? Who pays their bills in cash anymore? Some with checks. Some online.

I'm lost both in the paper chase and in the virtual world.

I resent people who can do this easily.

I resent people who have a system.

I resent people who have jobs and lives that allow them to have systems.

I resent the fact that I'm using this space to rant. I feel like this will have wasted the time of anyone who reads it. Sorry about that. Still, this is what's going on in my head. It is a fairly faithful document. That's the best I can do at the moment.

Ooooh, That Smell

"One must lose one's life in order to find it." - Anne Morrow Lindberg

In hindsight, perhaps watching the video of a PSA featuring a montage of dramatic auto accidents wasn't the best choice prior to going to bed. One of my friends had posted it on Facebook. I watched. I had to. Just to see if I could look the demon in the eye, I suppose.

I went so far as to re-post it, with a short commentary about how, at my internship today, as I was auditing charts and checking dates, staring at calendars from 2006 to 2010, I perversely counted the days since the accident.

One thousand, two hundred and ninety one.

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,

Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear.

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,

How do you measure, measure a year?

My fortieth birthday is this Sunday, three days away. I get maudlin near my birthday. And the New Year.

So there I was counting the days and reviewing what I'd done with them. Had I progressed? Had I learned? Had I grown? Had I healed?

Was it worth it?

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball,

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all."

At 2:04 a.m. I awoke smelling burning plastic. Since the accident, I have olfactory hallucinations. No, that's not quite correct. I don't suppose they are technically hallucinations if they occur in dreams. Let me be precise then, I dream in color, which I always have, and now, I perceive odors while I dream. It's usually the smell of something burning. Toast. Plastic. Metal.

The fact that I awakened and all my muscles were pulled tight like harp strings, my neck corded and taut, my shoulders locked and ready and my inhalation paused mid breath makes me think I was in the middle of a nightmare. I did what I always do in these situations. I breathed. Then I tried to figure out if something really was burning.

Then I realized the smell of burning plastic was really the smell of the deployed airbags.

S'io credesse che mia riposte fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo

Non torno vivo alcun, s' i'odo il vero,

Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

I got out of bed, and walked around the house checking, just to be sure, that nothing was on fire. It's my fate now. To sometimes doubt my senses, my memory. Then I turned on the laptop and began to write this.

So what is the answer? What is worthwhile?

After posting the video I learned that this was the anniversary of my friend Shannon's brother's death. He died in a car accident. He did not, somehow, inexplicably, extricate himself from his vehicle and live to tell about it, and live to blog about his recovery and experiences. He doesn't get to be maudlin and self-deprecating about how much he hasn't done in the years since.

The answer is, "I don't know." And I do know. And it doesn't matter. And everything matters.

Someone asked me recently, "If you could go back and relive any time of your life, when would it be?" This wasn't asked in the sense of returning to alter the past or correct mistakes. She meant to ask which time period was so good that I would trade my now for it.

I shocked myself with the answer. None. I would not return to any other time in my life.

I guess that means I'm happier than I thought I was because, honestly, all things considered, now is just as good, if not better than any other time.

I am learning. I am healing. I am making a difference, even if I don't always understand how or to whom.

In three days I will gratefully celebrate my 40th birthday and toast what I have survived and who I have become because of it.

How do you measure, a year in the life?

How about love?

How about love?

How about love?

Measure in love.

Seasons of love.

How Tired Am I?

http://lamestishen.blogspot.com/2010/05/round-and-round.html

But...

"Life, death and rebirth are inevitable." - Rig Veda

All the subtle changes since the accident have made me feel like a different person. I feel like me, but not me at the same time. I am not tired like this. I do not have trouble finding words. I do not have attention problems, or difficulty reading.

But I am all those things. I have all those things.

And slowly, I've been coming to terms with these new parameters. Some of them are, admittedly, more difficult to accept than others. All in all, they are disorienting.

I don't like the "new" me. I don't want to be like this. I didn't ask to change in these ways, and I'm angry that I'm being forced to be less than I was "before".

But...

(There is a "but".)

Sometimes, especially in the last several weeks, I've got this strange, almost exhilarating feeling. It's the feeling you get when you have nothing to lose, the feeling you get when, having nothing to lose, you decide to just jump in and see what happens.

I feel like I could change anything I wanted right now.

Sure, I had a plan, I spent the last several years working toward very specific goals. They aren't working out. I did everything right. I worked VERY hard. I amazed myself and others with my dedication and focus. But...

(Another "but".)

But it isn't working out. Having followed and completed all the right steps, I'm not where I should be. I went to school. I got the grades. I got the recommendations. I got the test scores. What I didn't get was an acceptance letter to the doctoral program I wanted. Actually, I didn't get an acceptance letter to ANY doctoral program. What the hell did I do wrong? Was I just so awful at the interview? Are there really THAT many people who did as well as or better than I did?

Maybe there are. Perhaps I overestimated my own worth and achievements. Either way, I've spent months and months working very hard for something I am not going to get.

So now what?

Part of me says, "anything at all". With nothing to lose, anything is possible.

Don't mistake this for a healthy attitude, because I'm not sure that it is. On some level, this scares the heck out of me. I really do feel like I have nothing to lose. I feel that, if none of this mattered anyway, if all my hard work and effort were for naught, then what does matter? Who cares? I might as well stay home and knit toilet seat covers and sell that at the local flea market. It would be less stressful, that's for sure.

I haven't figured this out yet. I don't know if I ever will. I don't even know if it matters if I do, or if I don't.

Cello? I Can't Hear You

"Where it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead." - Benjamin Disraeli

I am considering buying a cello. Music does wondrous things for the brain. Playing music is even better. It uses both hemispheres and anything that does that help the brain integrate and reroute after injury.

When I was about 12 I briefly took cello lessons, but stopped because I was not overly fond of the teacher. She was one of those straight-backed people who seem not to be capable of experiencing joy or humour or sponteneity. How could someone like that teach music? It didn't make sense to me. Besides, she wanted me to cut my fingernails. I had lovely fingernails back then and was very proud of them. While other pre-teens were fretting about their nubby little nails and experimenting with faux fingertips, I proudly displayed strong, long natural nails.

So the lessons didn't last long.

But I still pined for the cello.

I fantasize about playing cello. I see myself on the dock of my house on the bay, practicing as the clouds form over the water, signalling a gathering storm, my music building with the wind.

Yeah, I'm so full of crap. But that's what I see when I think about playing the cello. Guys fantasize about wailing on a guitar in front of throngs of cheering fans - I play cello, alone, on a dock. Don't judge. I'm sure everyone has their own bizarre ideas of who they really are, on the inside.

What is the line from "Pride & Prejudice"? Darcy's Aunt says something about music and the piano, asserting that, "had she ever learned, she would have been a great proficient."

So I kid myself and tell people that I am buying a cello for therapy. Really, it's a midlife crisis of sorts. I'm at a point where I can change everything - my job, where I live, my relationship status, my idea of what I wanted from life, even my idea of who I am. I find that suddenly I can pick and choose what I want to keep, and what I want to delete.

And I still see myself, sawing away at that cello, perhaps badly, perhaps without any skill at all, but there I am, on that dock, as the storm approaches, and I am still playing.

Muddy Blurder

"I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity." -Marcus Tullius Cicero

If you can say loquacity, you obviously are not tongue-tied. I, on the other hand, have been suffering a spate of mealy-mouthed mumbling. Ok, it's not really mumbling.

I switch letters. It's always the first letter of two words. So I'll say, "muddy blurder" instead of "bloody murder". The results can be funny. Unfortunately, this, like so many of my new brain quirks, happens most frequently when I am stressed, highly emotional or tired.

The switcheroo is not something you want to be doing when trying to appear professional and competent at, say, an interview for an internship, or when trying to convince the local code enforcement officer that you should not have to make any repairs or changes to your building since there are no tenants residing there. I could have made up something more dramatic, but we write what we know.

This is the kind of thing that is funny when it happens to someone else, but mortifying when it happens to you. If you were frustrated or stressed or angry to begin with, telling someone to, "Stop that night row!" doesn't help.

So what is causing my current linguistic loopiness? I really don't know. My stress level has ramped up as of late, but I have been getting enough sleep. (At least I think I am.)

This is one of the things that fascinates me about TBIs. I want to know why we make the mistakes we make when we make them. Ugh. That was inelegantly phrased. What I mean is, why only switch the first letter? Why only some words? It seems mostly to be consonants. Parts of speech are stored differently in the brain, does the same go for consonants and vowels?

I was hoping to be able to study this sort of thing if I got into a doctoral program. Maybe it's really not that important, but I do think it would help us understand not only how a non-broken brain works, but also help identify subtle brain injuries that might not show up on standard medical scans. If there are "mistake patterns" that are typical for head injuries, it could be another way to diagnose TBI. Like so many other brain injury symptoms, this is not a constant, it comes and goes and depends on a number of other, external and internal, factors. Still, I would like to find more a more quantitative means to pin down this slippery diagnosis. Language patterns, especially mistake patterns might be one way to do it.

There's a dissertation in there somewhere; I knust jow there is.

"All things truly wicked start from an innocence." - Ernest Hemingway, A Movable Feast

I had this great quote about the innocence of childhood, which, like the innocence of childhood, I lost, so you get Hemingway instead.

All this was brought on by the Peep Show photo at the left. You see, when I was a kid, my Mom and Gram used to tell me stories about when they were kids. One of the things that I always used to love hearing about were the "Peep Shows". Now don't go there. When my mother was a child, she went to a fair, possibly the Bloomsburg Fair, and they had a display of newly hatched chicks and the more approachable fluffy yellow, yet slightly older, chicks. The fluffy yellow chicks were provided with chick-sized Ferris wheels and sliding boards and merry-go-rounds for their chick amusement.

Apparently, they actually did hop onto the Ferris wheel ride and slide down the sliding board.

I had long thought this to be a figment of my mother's imagination, until this year, when I saw a similar stair and sliding board arrangement for ducklings at the PA Farm Show. That will teach me not to believe my momma.

So I grew up hearing about these "Peep" shows. We called chicks, "peeps". She also told me about buying pink and blue dyed chicks at Renniger's Market and flower shops when she was a kid. They'd sell them around Easter, and even I remember boxes of little yellow and white chicks for sale on Sunday's at "the auction" when I was very young. Sadly, or maybe not so sadly for the chiklets, party-colored chicks had fallen out of fashion by the time I was a kid in the early 70's. Still, there are square black and white photos of me, at about two-years old, reaching a tentative index finger toward a tiny, oblivious peep, staring up at my comparative hugeness from the news-paper covered kitchen floor. Peeps were delicate, and I was always told to pet them with "one finger" to avoid an untimely peep death caused by my juvenile exuberance.

The peeps magically disappeared when they started to grow pin feathers and get ugly. I have no memory of this, but I am assured that they lived long happy lives on Wagner's farm. Wagner was our milkman and came every week to the house to deliver our glass bottled milk. I'm pretty sure that PETA would challenge the "long happy lives" part of that equation, but for the sake of maintaining my relatively happy childhood, I intend to continue believing just that.

The punchline to this story came years later as my family and I were driving to Philadelphia. I must have been about six or seven, and could read well for my age. As we travelled down Rt 61, I noticed a sign on a storefront we were passing. Excitedly, I yelled out from the backseat, "Oh look, a peep show! Can we go?"

You could have heard a pin drop. I'm surprised that my Grandfather didn't slam on the brakes and kill us all.

Really, it was an innocent mistake on my part. I'd been hearing these stories about "peep shows" and there was a sign for one. Of course it was also a sign for the "local" Adult Shop, but I wouldn't know what that was for another few years. All I knew then was that I'd said something that horrified everyone in the car and that the advertised "peep show" was definitely NOT the type of peep show I thought it was.

No one adequately explained, at the time, what that type of peep show was.

My cunning plan was to bring this all around and talk about the loss of innocence that occurs after an injury or serious illness, but instead I'm going to leave that (mostly) unsaid, and just leave you with the image of me, hands splayed against the backseat window, wishing for all the world to see pink and blue peeps joyously riding miniature Ferris wheels.

Truth be told, and with all apologies to PETA, I'd still like to see that.

You Say, "College," I say, "Collage"

"One of the great mind destroyers of college education is the belief that if it's very complex, it's very profound." -Denis Prager

Laughter is sometimes the only option. I just finished posting an update on my art-blog, a forlorn thing, even more ignored than this step-child of a blog. My intent was to update my four "fans" on the status of some upcoming art shows which would be exhibiting my work.

I do collage.

I'm also a pastel painter, but that's not the focus at the moment. We're talking about collage. Which, incidentally, I just mistyped as "college". Which was the entire point of THIS post, because after typing "collage" (spelled correctly that time), I sat there and stared at the screen and couldn't get my brain to not read it as "college".

Everything ground to a halt. You could smell the burning brain cells.

I knew my thinking was wrong. I knew "collage" was correct...but...the broken part of my brain just. couldn't. accept. it.

So there I sat, chugging away mentally, trying to force my brain to tell the difference. Finally, I did a search on "collage", and, lo, there it was, (god bless Wikipedia) describing a "collage" as an assemblage of various things, bits of newspaper, etc.

I was saved. "Collage" was art. "College" was...well, fill in your favorite college experience here.

Now I just need to retrain my brain to know the difference.

Possibility

"Failure is impossible." -Susan B. Anthony

This past weekend I attended a training conference on Ericksonian Hypnosis and Brief Positive Psychotherapy. It was taught by a gentleman named Ron Klein and I probably learned as much from watching him deal with the disruptive and derailing "elements" in the group as I did from his actual presentations on the topic.

One of the things that I discovered over the weekend was that, apart from the residual difficulties stemming from my injuries, there isn't all that much that I'd really like to change. This stemmed from his asking for volunteers who had something relatively simple that they would like to change about themselves. Granted, there are plenty of things that would like to change but they are BIG things, not something you can hypnotize away. In defense of the program and the process, we weren't learning to hypnotize anything "away". That's not how it works. In any case there were plenty of people who had phobias, and smoking habits and inabilities to deal with confrontation or loud noises, etc., and it made me look at myself and I realized that I was willing to face my demons directly and didn't want to have them miraculously disappear. I realized that if I wanted to change something about myself, I could do it myself.

That alone was worth the price of admission.

Again, don't get me wrong. I am not perfect. I just wasn't there for a quick fix. Although I did have to come up with something for one of the exercises and I chose going down stairs. The vision changes I experienced after the accident altered my depth perception. I also still have double vision in my right eye. This tends to make walking down steps a bit challenging. Before I found a Neuro-opthalmologist, which took over a year, I got in the habit of going down stairs like a blind person. As I lowered my foot onto the next step, I would "check" the location of the step with my heel, pushing it back against the upright of the step. In essence, I was feeling my way down the stairs. I also had a bad habit of looking down and always felt like I wasn't quite sure where my feet were going to land.

My goal during my turn as the client was: I want to go down stairs confidently and agilely.

That night after dinner, I burned off the extra calories by dashing up and down the fire stairs at the hotel.

Yes, I'm saying that it worked. It worked well. This isn't the cure for everything, but it sure seems like a valuable tool to put in my bag of future tricks. The other thing I took away from the weekend was the idea that there is no failure, only feedback. It's a good way to look at things. One that is important when dealing with life changing injuries and chronic illnesses.

When there is no failure, anything is possible.

Life With a TBI

"Some minds seem almost to create themselves, springing up under every disadvantage and working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles." - Washington Irving

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgtHvBF4t-E

Last week I had interviews for several doctoral programs. One of the interviewers asked about my TBI, and I explained my injury and symptoms. He looked at me curiously, cocked his head to the side and said, "Hmmm, I guess you're one of the 8%." I must have raised and eyebrow or something, and he clarified. "Most people get better in the first six weeks or so."

Oh.

I couldn't decide if he was implying that he didn't believe me or just making an innocent comment.

Then again, in psychology, no comment is an innocent comment.

So I've been doing a bit of research on lingering symptoms, and recovery in general. The link above is to a video that is quite good, showing a range of after effects and a variety of people who are living with this type of injury.

Brain injuries, if they are not profound, really are invisible injuries, but they are most definitely there, even if they are only perceived by those of us who have them.

Sing Out, Louise!

"He who sings frightens away his ills." Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

As I've mentioned before, my brain hears things differently since the injury. It was one of the first things I notices after the accident. When I was feeling well enough, my family took me out to dinner, ostensibly to celebrate my survival, and I was looking forward to a night out after being cooped up in the house alternating ice and heat packs for several days. The first thing I noticed after being seated was that I couldn't follow any of the conversations at the table. The second thing I noticed was that I couldn't NOT focus on the background music, or, more precisely, the music that was background for everyone else at the table was decidedly foreground for me.

It was worse with music that contained vocals. They pulled my attention. If there was someone singing in the "background" I couldn't attend to regular spoken conversation. The obvious solution for this was to insist that everyone address me in song. Unfortunately, my family and friends are not gifted singers. I thought this new quirk was something that would eventually go away. It didn't.

Whistling is another attention grabber for me.

The irony of all this is that my husband sings and whistles constantly. It was something I loved about him prior to the accident, now, it makes me want to hit him with whatever is handy. I feel awful asking him to "stop that infernal whistling/singing", but I do. Honestly, it gets to the point where I just can't stand it. There are days when I can't even think straight with someone singing or whistling. Again, this is all tied to fatigue.

Today, I found an interesting article that is somewhat related. It involves research into rehabilitating stroke victims who have lost their ability to speak by teaching them to sing. Apparently, the area of the brain that governs speech is not the same area that controls singing. Professional singers have "over" developed "song" areas.

So did my speech area get damaged or did my song area get kicked into overdrive?

I suspect it was the speech area that got slammed since I had other speech problems, but where does the whistling fit in?

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8526699.stm

A Deaf In the Family

"You have to deal with the fact that your life is your life." - Alex Hailey

These days, my hearing is crap. I can't hear worth a damn in crowded places, or even not so crowded places when there are multiple people talking. Background noise and music does me in, as well as phones and cell phones.

The phone thing is especially difficult as there are certain vocal ranges that are just impossible for me to understand. Women are more difficult on the cell phone as is my uncle, who has a rather deep voice. My friend Georges is impossible.

I hate, HATE, telling people about this. I feel like an idiot when I'm constantly asking people to repeat themselves. On the phone, I blame the phone or the connection. Sometimes, I fake a disconnection and just hang up, and email later.

There are certain people I've told. I try to explain it to friends and family but even they just don't get it. Case in point, last weekend I was filming a short with my husband and some of our friends. One guy talks very softly. I missed about 80% of what he said. I felt like everyone was whispering and trying to cut me out of conversations. Paranoia set in. I was sure that my husband was just ignoring me as I'd ask him questions and he'd walk away. He claims he was answering or did answer. There was so much going on I will never be sure. He has a habit in busy situation of sort of calling out answers as he's moving or talking to other people so he may have been answering me but I thought he was talking to someone else. He tends not to address people directly, as in, "Yes, Lor, we need to move everyone to the other location."

Basically, I'm saying that I'm embarrassed that I'm deaf.

But I'm not really deaf. My ears work, it's my head that doesn't. Ha! So I'm even marginalized there. Does a Central Auditory Processing problem count as deafness? Or hearing impairment? It's a puzzlement.

I often use captions when I watch movies now. The background music and other noises is sometimes too much, or the speakers have accents...whatever. It's just easier to do that then to keep messing with the volume or re-watching segments to catch the dialogue.

Next week I will follow up with my OVR counselor. So far, that little experiment has been perfectly useless. I should qualify for assistance but now that I'm not working I don't know whether or not they'll be interested in helping me. The hearing aid that works best for me is, naturally, the most expensive one. It's about $2500. I nearly fell over when the audiologist told me the price.

Even if I get it, I'm going to be frantic that I'll lose it or break it or something stupid. Really, I'm not the best person with small expensive objects. Things tend to go missing around me. (Ok, I lose them. Or put them somewhere safe - so safe that I don't find them for three years.)

As it stands, I will have to suffer through tomorrow night. There's a showing of the films at the gallery that sponsored the 48 hour film competition. I want to go, obviously. I wrote the script and I think we did a really great job on the project. The Quiet Talker will be there as well, so I've got soft conversation in a noisy group setting to look forward to. Yay! Part of me wishes that Crenshaw would subtly clue people in to what's going on with me so I don't have to announce to everyone that I'm deaf as a post. I'd do it for him. We kind of had a fight about that Sunday night. He was yelling at me because I didn't say anything; I was yelling at him because he should know that if I'm walking away and ignoring what he's saying I probably didn't hear it in the first place.

I shouldn't have to fight about this crap with the people in my family. I shouldn't have to fight about it with my husband. I shouldn't have to fight with OVR.

In the meantime, "Don't make fun of me. I can't hear you."

Healing 101

"When praying for healing, ask great things of God and expect great things from God. But let us seek for that healing that really matters, the healing of the heart, enabling us to trust God simply, face God honestly, and live triumphantly." - Arlo F. Newell

It goes without saying that there is a difference between "healing" and "curing". Right now there are so many issues surrounding me, they remind me of the green points on the mandala image at the left. They are everywhere. My own unresolved health issues, my issues (both physical and emotional) with fertility, the health of my family members, and my husband's recent diagnosis with ADD all compete for my attention. I feel helpless in the face of most of these points. I cannot hope to heal or cure my Grandmother, my husband or my uncle or mother. For that matter, there is precious little I can do for many of my own ailments. Ah, but that's not really true, if I'm honest. To that end, I've begun making some fairly important changes. My diet was definitely an area needing improvement and I have started down that path. I'm working on adding the movement part.

But so what? No one really wants to hear what I ate for breakfast, which, by the way, I can't even remember. Ah. I didn't eat breakfast. I was on my way to yet another doctor for blood tests. Fertility doc this time, and no good news to be had there. My official appointment is next week and I'm fairly certain he'll tell me that there's naught they can do and my eggs are bad and thank you very much for coming.

On top of everything else that I've lost in the past few years, the idea of not being able to have a child of my own feels like the final straw. Without that element, I'm afraid I don't have any set direction. It's just something I assumed would happen "when the time was right". Guess that time never got here. Or it did and.... well, never mind.

It's so strange. I don't tell this to many people and now I'm writing it here, telling anyone who wants to read it. I found out I was pregnant a month before the accident. I miscarried about two weeks before it happened. On one hand it was a blessing. I don't think I could have handled losing the pregnancy because some idiot decided to drink too much and run a red light. On the other hand, the accident was kind of a low blow after the stress and emotional upheaval of initially finding out I was pregnant and then losing it.

Blah blah blah. Plenty of people miscarry.

Yeah, I know.

Unfortunately, I probably can't get pregnant now. And I feel like crap about it. Maybe I should have done something different. Maybe it was because I was ambivalent at the time. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

None of it matters. All of it matters.

I was so ok with it then. I'd done a lot of soul searching when I found out. I struggled. I came to terms with the idea of being pregnant and being a parents and then.... gone. And then BAM! accident, injury, recovery, etc. And now... sorry, thanks for playing, no family for you.

Bah. On one hand it's probably best. I still struggle with chronic pain on a daily basis. Raising and infant and young child would be challenging, especially when I can barely lift anything over 10 pounds. I need sleep, it's critical for my functioning. Babies and sleep don't normally go hand in hand, at least not for the parents. I'm still trying to find a way to have a career that will allow me time and space to keep functioning and take care of all the things that allow me to function (doctor's appointments, therapy, sleep, etc.). Add a kid into that mix and I don't know what the outcome would be.

But still...

I feel like I'm missing something. I feel like I would be a good mom. I'm sad when I see so many people parenting badly, or ignoring their kids, or not treasuring them. I would like the opportunity to have that experience - to help someone shape their life and make their experience of growing up in this world special and meaningful.

And then I look around and see how awful we humans are. We are violent and petty and selfish and small, myself included. Then I think maybe it's ok or perhaps even preferable not to bring another human into the world.

But I wanted my family to continue. I'd always wanted to have a baby while Bill, my Grandmother's second husband was alive. He was definitely my adopted grandfather, although not officially. He loved babies and never really got to experience his own granddaughter or great grandchildren and I wished that I would have had a child while he was here. Now, facing the imminent demise of my Gram, I'm facing my own infertility. Not only will I not have a child in time to meet her and know her, I probably won't have a child.

Although she never pressured me to have children, I know the "family line" is important to her. At the moment I'm the end of that line, and I'm sure it saddens both of us.

For the past year or so, I've been praying that I would be able to have a child while she was still alive.

I don't know what to do with all this. Honestly, I've been feeling quite a bit sorry for myself. Watching my Gram go through her own process of dying, has led me to consider the fact that while she is passing away surrounded by family members who love and care for her, I will shuffle off my mortal coil alone. No one will bury me. No one will mourn me. No one will care. I'll be warehoused in a nursing home with strangers changing my diapers. I only hope I either die before that or that my TBI kicks in and I'm so far gone down dementia lane that I think it's the summer of 1985 and I'm having the time of my life at J.F.K. pool with my friends.

Yeah, that won't work either. 1985 wasn't really that good a year.

So what do I ask for now? What's my prayer? My intercession? For Gram to go gently into that good night? Sure. I hope to God she dies in her sleep. Her blood chemistry is so out of whack it could happen at any time. She could have a stroke, or, more likely a seizure or heart attack. Please, let her just drift off while she's asleep. Please. I don't want her scared. I don't want it to happen when I'm at class and my mom is at work and one of the caregivers is with her. If she's awake and aware, let one of us be with her. Let it be me. That's fine. It would probably be easier for me than my mom. I can talk her through it, I know I can.

Let it not be scary or painful. Let her be welcomed on the other side by our ancestors: by her mother, and Pop and Bill and the baby I didn't have. And let her know that she was loved.

It goes without saying that, selfish and frightened as I am, I pray the same prayer for myself.

Live, Learn, Learn Some More, Live Better

"She had an unequalled gift...of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities." Henry James (1843-1916)

I think I may have told off my MIL last night. She called my cell while I was driving to class and asked me to give C. a message. That sounded more Mafia than it really was. "She wanted to send him a message." Really, it wasn't that kind of message.

Anyway, I said some things that were pretty blunt.

I was tired. Really tired. Sleep has been quite elusive this past week and its absence does take a toll. Did I also mention the whole brain injury = no internal editing problem? Well, yeah. Sometimes, you know, when I'm tired, or stressed or in pain, or the more usual combination of those three fates, my editing system seems to go off-line.

When I was younger, eh gads, that makes me sound old. Let's try again, before the accident, I hated confrontation. Frankly, it scared the heck out of me. Don't get me wrong, I'd do it if I had to, but it was a major effort. It cost me. I always felt like I was going to vomit right before, during and after, the terrifying act of saying something that might be perceived as offensive or challenging.

I know, those of you who knew me before and after will probably say, "Huh? What the hell is she talking about? Nothing bothered her. She was confident, she said what she wanted or needed to say."

Ahem. Well, appearances are deceiving.

I was bullied in school. A lot. I was the fat smart girl with glasses who went to Catholic school. (Think Mary Catharine Gallagher from SNL.) Yeah, that was me. Geektastic doesn't even cover it. And I figured out pretty early on that if someone is trying to get a reaction from you and you don't give it to them, they lose interest and go bully someone else. Believe me, it does work. The other piece to this puzzle is that my momma raised me to stand up for what I believe in. (Cue the patriotic/inspirational music, please.) This tended to make me feel that I needed to speak up, even though I was terrified, when an appropriately important issue arose.

So, there you have it. Me: terrified on the inside. Maybe not showing it so much on the outside. That lasted until March 07. Clearly shyness and social anxiety can be cured by a good slap upside the head.

(Ok, the social anxiety part is still there if I'm not in a heightened emotional state.) But the rest. The whole righteous indignation thing. Oh, man, I have GOT THAT DOWN now.

The joke in my family now is that, "I ain't got no qualms." As in, "I have no qualms about reporting this incident to the local constable." Or whatever. And it's true. Good lord is it true. If my old friends thought I didn't suffer fools gladly before, I don't suffer them at all now.

What I learned from those years of teaching was that a) subtlety is wasted on 98% of the world, b) stupidity is rampant in America and c) I just don't have time to spoon feed the people who are old enough to know better.

(My MIL is going to read this and think ALL of this is about her. It's not. Get that, it's not you. It's ME.)

(Cue Carly Simon music. "I bet you think this blog is about you. You're so..." Eh, nevermind.)

For example, there was that time at "the club" having breakfast with mi familia. We were in the process of ordering and there was some issue with bacon. Yes, BACON, which incidentally, makes everything better. The question was something like what's the difference between Eggs Benedict and Eggs Bernadette. Sounds like a bad joke, doesn't it? Well it had something to do with the meat. (That still sounds like a bad joke.) Anyway, Canadian Bacon came into play and our server, who, in her defense, was young, giggled and admitted she had no idea what Canadian Bacon was.

Really.

And I just couldn't let that go. I asked if she was serious because, really, she had to be joking, right? No. She had no idea. "Well it's just like bacon, from Canada, right?" At which point, I just sort of shook my head and looked at her across the table and said, "Oh, sweetie, if you're going to be serving brunch at a private club you need to know the difference between bacon and Canadian Bacon."

Years ago that wouldn't have happened. I would have waited until she walked away and THEN made the snarky comment. Today. I figure people deserve the respect of having me make the snarky comment right to their faces.

If I feel what I'm saying is true and justified, I have no fear. (This if you haven't already noticed is very dangerous because I always think I'm right and justified.) Sometimes it's good for the inside voice to stay inside my head.

Last night was one of those times. I'm not sure exactly what I said nor do I know if she took offense or not. I think MIL tends to bruise easily and I fear I might have played a bit rough, verbally that is. She'll die before saying anything to me about it, or C. Unless she writes me a letter. THAT she might do. I should probably write her a note first. It's just like a Jane Austin novel! Letter Wars 2010: The Comeuppance.

Eh. On the plus side, every time I mouth off to someone I can blame it on this terribly convenient head injury and begin preaching about the dangers of drunk driving. Maybe this isn't so bad after all.

I Pity the Fool

"Self pity comes so naturally to all of us." - Andre Maurois

That last quarter of last year's entries started to sound a bit like the transcript for my own private pity party. I'm hoping to stay away from that in 2010. No one wants to read my ceaseless griping. Heck, I don't even want to hear my ceaseless griping.

Stop griping, right?

I'm working on it.

So how to manage that? How do you keep a positive attitude in the midst of chronic pain and fatigue and overwhelming financial and relationship issues. Maybe it is just a matter of "butching up" and soldiering on.

Why is it that there are so many cliche's about pushing through problems?

Butch up. Man up. Soldier on. Get a grip. Put on your big girl panties. Deal with it. Keep a stiff upper lip. Just do it. Damn the martinis full speed ahead. Suffer in silence.

I'm sure I've missed some good ones. We definitely have a love/hate relationship with facing challenges. We don't want to have to face our own. We want to hear stories about people who overcame theirs, but we definitely don't want to hear any complains or even descriptions of challenges people are currently experiencing.

It's the Hollywood complex. We don't want to hear the struggle if we don't have the guaranteed triumphant ending.

Not everyone gets the triumphant ending. We can't even guarantee a triumphant ending for ourselves, and on some level we hate being reminded of that fact. It's like being reminded of our own mortality. We KNOW death is unavoidable, we just don't want to be reminded of it.

So my attempt here is to illuminate the process, the struggle and discovery of learning to live with a brain injury. Some days will be triumphant, some will not. I can't guarantee a Hollywood ending, but I'll try not to bore you, or myself in this process.

I don't want a pity party, even when I'm in the midst of throwing one for myself. What I really want is understanding. If you can understand how a person's life is impacted by their disability, you can move beyond pity and annoyance and see the little triumphs as well as the failures. The failures are perhaps the most important parts, because it is through failure that we learn.

My failure here has helped me to learn how I want to portray this injury and how I want to measure my successes. Letting you in, via this journal, means allowing you to see the struggle even when it isn't pretty and doesn't show me in a positive light. I hope that even then, something good may come of it.

Now Watch

"I live now and only now, and I will do what I want to do this moment and not what I decided was best for me yesterday." - Hugh Prather

Now. Not yesterday. Not last year. Not before the accident.

Now.

That's all that really matters, right? That's all we have to work with. Right now.

There, it's gone. You missed it.

Wait for it....

NOW.