Still having a great deal of difficulty. Have been trying for the past two weeks to come to an understanding of what is troubling me. My present belief is that it has to do with a loss of agency.

I have been through crises before. The triggers for major crises involved the sudden unwanted forced recognition of the gap between my perception of self, and the reality of self. For example:

In the period immediately prior to the re-purposing of this blog, I attempted to create a national newsletter intended to service the goals of a non-profit to which I belong. The work relied on the use of very basic IT related skills – the technical sophistication was relatively low. In the course of the project, I discovered my technical skills were impaired, and that I introduced a high error rate. It was possible to compensate for both of these failings through an increased time investment – I maximized the total hours spent on the project.

A third problem had to do with a loss of social skills; I was unable to navigate the mixed response from the user environment. This activity required something closer to a real-time response cycle. I found myself unable to respond in a timely manner and I became totally backlogged and overwhelmed. This sense of being overwhelmed fed back into my technical abilities and served to further undermine any competence. The associated loss of confidence undermined the will to generate any further increased time investment. Simply adding hours would not resolve the multiple problems. In any case, there were no more hours to be had. The project had become a 24×7 round the clock activity.

The aftermath was a general psychic collapse. This left me wondering exactly what had happened and how it had all come to pass. At the time of these events, it was not possible to develop the perspective required to achieve an appropriate understanding. Left holding the rotten bag of emotional collapse, I tried to keep moving forward.

Something similar occurred during a later attempt to develop a website in association with another non-profit. The psychic collapse followed a similar template. This set of events followed exactly one year after the prior set of problems. Since this was essentially a repetition of the first event, I was in some respects better prepared to address the associated problems. But I lacked my present perspective and understanding.

A child learning to walk has to fall and risk some degree of injury. Then they must dust themselves off, get up, and make an identical attempt at taking their first steps. This process is repeated until such time as a rudimentary mastery is acquired. At that point, we all get to forget the difficulty we at first encountered. We simply utilize our mobility skills, think nothing more of their painful acquisition and take them wholly for granted.

Making an accommodation with the present injury shares some aspects of learning to walk. I make several attempts to operate using my prior competencies. I fall flat on my face and do not fully understand the reason, or am not able to accept the reason. In essence, I either refuse to acknowledge the injury, or am incapable of the cognitive awareness required to understand my reduced “self”. So I reiterate the error and suffer the same psychic insult and continue with this repetitive pattern until I gradually arrive at the forced acceptance that the “me” that I knew, that I once inhabited, that was expressed in my lived environment is now gone, totally gone, is no longer available to me. What once was me has disappeared from the face of the earth and is unlikely to ever return. I am left with a sort of a husk, and am faced with the task of determining my new limits and abilities.