Up since 0700. A chill grey day.
Have been working to push myself to accomplish little things. I am fighting to remain engaged. Realize I have spent much of the past week sleeping. Dr H wants to put me on anti-depressants.
Have found myself messing around with photographic imagery. Trying to use this image work as a means to regain normalcy, climb out of the tailspin.
I feel myself giving up. I am not sure how to address this.
Before I go to see one of my Doctors, I will write out an “inventory” of the issues I wish to discuss. When I read through the past list of issues, and the dates, I observe a sequence of events, and discoveries, each of which has had a significant impact.
Since posting on the Blog Hiatus, I have experienced a series of small psychic detonations, a slow cascade of revelation, and insight. This insight provided the motive and the trigger for the subsequent extended series of blog posts.
What I now sense is that I am running out of steam. I once held the belief that insight would open a pathway to recovery, that insight itself might have curative properties. That simply gaining an understanding of the issues would be sufficient to dispel them, diminish them, vanquish them.
I am losing that belief.
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Update June 15th 2014
This post was heavily edited and rewritten. My poor state of mind was evident in the writing.
My experience of life has become a daily struggle. There is little sense of “winning,” of accomplishment, of fruition. Every day becomes another confrontation with the same issues. No matter how I exert myself, I make no headway.
This is a bleak, but realistic statement of the facts. Yes, there have been some minor improvements. But these positive changes are the same as a year spent learning to bake chocolate chip cookies. After a year’s dedicated effort, you stand proudly in the kitchen and announce only 97% of the latest batch were burned black. An improvement? Certainly! It is better than burning 100% of the batch. But given the amount of time spent (years) and the focus (daily, hour by hour) it seems a little rich to announce any improvement at all. It is similar to making the claim “This year I am drowning, but I’m drowning 2% slower than I was last year.” And I am nowhere near being able to get out of the water. The true message is Never get out of the boat! But I was pushed.
There are other aspects of struggle. These include the following:
I intend to examine each of these in future posts. The one topic I wish to address here is the fear of slipping back into vacancy.
I do not know exactly how to describe the vacancy. In my reading on TBI (which is not extensive and which suffers all the faults associated with poor comprehension), I have not come across any mention of anything similar. Perhaps this item should be subsumed under a general fear of the unknown, of being knocked out of regular life patterns, and habits, and being unable to easily resume them. When we talk about “knowing” we are really speaking to the fact that major elements of our life constantly repeat. We know where we work – we go there almost every day. We know what we do – our work typically does not change very much. We know our friends – by definition friends are a constant presence in our lives. We know where we live – unless we are young adults we tend to remain in one location for extended periods since moving causes such disruption in our normal patterns. We know our daily routine – our diet tends toward the habitual, as does our choice of garment, hairstyle, and all the rest.
We think of ourselves as being engaged in constant change. When it comes to cellphones and service plans this may be true. But, for the most part, we are deeply embedded in a series of long term, unvarying routines. It is not until you are injured, and unable to continue with the routine, that you realize the degree to which you have come to depend on constant repetition to ease your way through life. We speak of brain injury rehabilitation but we might more accurately speak of a process involving involuntary loss of old routines and being forced into the acquisition of new ones.
Exactly how the vacant state fits in with this pattern I do not know. I do know that becoming aware of myself sitting, staring blankly into space, was key in forcing me into a daily struggle to recover.