I have been doing spring cleaning. In the process I am encountering something I believe to be called death of the self.

A milestone was reached with post number 100. There was a minor sense of elation, the growing confidence that I might actually accomplish something. In place of a human vegetable there is now a human vegetable with 100 blog posts to his credit. Believe me. In the psychological places I have been, that is a genuine accomplishment, not simply a weak attempt at a joke.

As I clean, I encounter objects for which I have no recollection. Since I have no memory of what they are, or their intended purpose, they move with ease to the bin. Other artifacts are also found, items that contain my written scrawl. The writing is not legible but the artifacts clearly form elements of some larger project. I left the notes to myself to guide me in fitting each part into the final creation. But my markings no longer make sense. The artifacts have become the droppings of the other man, the man who existed before the accident. When these objects are ushered into the bin there is a twinge of sadness as they disappear into the dark of the wasteland. It is as though I am disposing of myself.

At this point I remember a phrase used by one of my doctors. I am engaged in mourning the death of the self. Each discarded artifact is associated with the old me. The old me understood their purpose, he knew their meaning, he had shaped them in accord with some reasoned plan, had designed them to be incorporated into some larger project. The new me chucks them out.

I have difficulty doing much. When I break into a sweat I push on a bit longer, become fatigued and then halt. My goal is to treat the clean up like a blog post. If I chunk the work into discrete units that are within my capacity, and if I complete one chunk each day, then the mathematics of the process are inevitable. At some point the work will be done.

My motives are not entirely based on cleanliness and good order. I wish to understand the experience of cleaning and determine my capacity to perform this work. I suspect it will be the only work available to me and I need to perfect my ability to perform these tasks quickly and competently.

The benchmark of 100 posts triggered something else as well. It renewed confidence in my abilities. In the extremely dark days, when I was continually contemplating suicide, it was impossible to accept the person I had become: slow, bumbling, incompetent, forgetful. The man who lost not only his car, but also regularly forgot the carefully crafted lists intended to protect him from failures of his own memory.

When I contemplate the more recent posts, especially the recent series concerning an inability to remember the details of a conversation, I feel a renewed surge of confidence. The inability to remember remains a concern. But balanced against that is the fact that I was able to think my way through that dilemma, that I was able to exercise my faculties, to arrive at a judgment in regard to the situation. In essence, I was able to do what adults do every day of their lives without a second thought. An action the average person would laugh off in a second, or two, required me to devote four whole days.