Sense of Self

I seem to be facing multiple issues. All of them bear on my sense of self.

The first concerns the degree of effort that must be exerted to complete the TAQ submissions. Due to the complex nature of the material under review, I appear to “conk out” at the four hour mark. Even though there is more work to complete, there is a need to stop the work activity unless I wish to face increasing fatigue, and headache onset. There is an implicit conflict between my awareness that I must perform these tasks, and the awareness that I cannot easily perform them.

There is a contrast between this present contemporary effort and my first similar effort which was launched in November of 2012 and continued up through the first two weeks of January 2013. The prior effort appears more “pure.” It was a struggle against my own impossibility of performance. Today’s struggle appears similar in many respects with the major difference being there is now a negative psychological overlay. Not sure how else to describe this.

One of the psychological issues derives from the knowledge that I am still performing the same tasks I was attempting in the winter of 2012. I have been writing these damn submissions for over four years. For four years I have woken up each day asking myself: “What do I need to do today to advance the case?” With each task, before beginning, I will also ask: “Does this activity advance my case?” If the answer is no, then I abandon that activity until I find a task for which the answer is “yes.” This process is imperfect. There are days and times when I go down a rabbit hole and spend an hour breaking ice into shards for no reason other than it is a routinized activity that is immediately habitual. That I know I can accomplish. Something the new me can actually perform with relative ease.

One outcome of this questioning is that many aspects of my life receive little to no attention. There exists a significant degree of deferred household maintenance. This is a polite way of saying the house is a mess disaster.

A second psychological issue stems from the recognition that what I am doing is pointless in the extreme. The insurer laughed at me when I commenced the insurance application. I was sitting in my doctor’s office, together with my doctor, on a joint call to the insurer. The insurance agent made the bald statement that the insurance company had never before encountered an injury such as mine. This is an impossible statement given the significant incidence of mTBI injury, and the fact that motor vehicle collisions are one of the few activities to generate the high forces required to cause the injury. You do not get mTBI from standing in the kitchen, sitting at a computer, or watching old Woody Allen movies.

I have this recurring thought of expending all of this effort only to be laughed at once again. This is very hard to accept. There is a strong impulse to abandon the effort, to walk away from the fight, to preserve what is left of me, to avoid further rejection. When I examine this abandonment impulse in the cold light of rationality, it makes no sense whatsoever. I would be turning my back on over four years of effort.

The final chilling, and most unwelcome, thought has to do with what takes place should I prevail in the case. I win nothing. Not even a booby prize. Regardless of the outcome, I will be left with all of my current deficits. There will be no judge waving a magic wand to make everything better. There will be no quick restoration of my prior abilities. No one gets out of here alive. It is unlikely I will get out of here injury free.