Rule # 1

I need to stop dealing with people who leave me feeling suicidal.

Rule # 2

I need to understand the drivers that give rise to Rule # 1 so that I can more effectively address them.

These are the thoughts that popped into mind on waking at 0230. The Chief University Contact, fits well within the Rule # 1 category. I end up blaming myself for being defective, for not being able to function as I once did. When I have this experience within the confines of my own home it is difficult enough. When I experience the same event in a public setting, it drives home the nature, and the extent, of the injury, the degree to which I have made only a limited recovery within the past four years, and the degree to which that recovery has been confined to a narrow suite of tasks, principally the production of written documents.

My success at writing comes about not because of some magic wand recovery, but because I devote an enormous amount of time to the creation of a single text. My entire life, 24×7, gets swallowed up in the act of creating a single document. When active in document prep mode, I am consumed by a temporary mono-mania, the totality of my effort being dedicated to getting comprehensible words down on paper. Effort is positive factor #1.

I spent weeks writing a TAQ submission on my document production process. Writing this submission was extremely illuminating for me but I doubt it holds significant value as evidence for TAQ. Creation of the document forced an awareness of the following aspects of my behaviour:

1) I devote totally unreasonable amounts of time, all hours of the day and night, for weeks on end, to complete a single document.

2) I have established a unique mode of production. In brief, this consists of the collection of random thoughts, firing this random thought stream at the proverbial wall for two or three weeks, and then inspecting the wall to see what has stuck. This is actually a form of topographic analysis. I throw stuff at the wall for two weeks, and then inspect the wall. The biggest mound of stuff then becomes the core topic. The second biggest mound becomes topic 2 and so on, until all the random thought has been organized into a set of appropriate buckets. The buckets are then re-ordered to form the logical outline of the text. This is a laborious way of working but it delivers reasonable results.

3) If writing is a form of thinking (I would argue that it is) then I have developed a mode of thought that works for me in spite of the injury. This mode of thought is cumbersome, and time bound. It does not facilitate prompt repartee. When I encounter a logical obstacle, or an interlocutor lacking in genuine concern for concussion injury, I am not entirely speechless. I can talk. I am able to mouth linguistic sounds. I have the capacity to appear to be speaking. But, in reality, I am spinning my wheels, consumed by my inability to function on that very spot, within the context of that very moment. I may as well be deaf and dumb and dead. And that is the impulse I must address.

When I operate on my own, I do not face the problems described within 3) above. If I do encounter them, they are incorporated into a mode of working that permits me to overcome them. But this mode of working requires a huge consumption of time. In writing this, I realized, just a moment ago, that I am still working to address events which occurred over 60 hours ago. I am still fighting to come to grips with a 30 second event in a boardroom ten physical miles away, but a thousand miles distant in cognitive terms.

—————————————

Rule # 1

Rule # 2

Links to Similar Header Images: