Monthly Archives: July 2014

Day Off

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I cannot remember where this particular idea originated. I think it was contributed by Dr H. She suggested I should take a day off. On the face of it, this is an absurd idea. My problem concerns the fact I am on permanent days off. What I want to do is get back in the game and exit my forced “vacation.”

Getting out of the house for an extended walk is a good form of therapy. So today I played hooky. As I walked, a number of thoughts popped into mind. Some of these were useful, others less so.

In the less than helpful category, I found I was blaming myself for all of my present problems. If only I had been more aware. If only I had understood the signs of injury. If only I was better informed about TBI and CTE and DAI and a large forest of technical jargon and acronyms. If only.

During the walk, I reviewed the first months after the accident. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, I can identify the signs of injury that should have driven me to seek medical attention. I berated myself for being stupid, for not recognizing these signs. In retrospect I perceive my error. But I only perceive it due to having worked hard to become better informed about brain trauma. I did not obtain a detailed, in depth, knowledge of the injury until well after the accident. Even when I was first diagnosed as suffering from TBI, I refused to believe it.

Today, on the walk, I beat up on myself for being stupid. Then I beat up on myself for beating up on myself. Then I tried to change the subject of my thoughts and keep moving forward.

A more useful insight had to do with complexity. There is a common thread which runs through my recent experience of life. This thread has to do with my inability to handle complexity. This applies to all of the abandoned projects. It applies to the letters, notices and invoices I put aside. It applies to my preference for routine behaviour. It applies to the present household clean up effort.

My home is not large. But it is too big for me to manage. I only use small portions of the space. My past work was awash in complexity. Programming is complex. Computer hardware is complex. Bicycles are complex. Cooking, at least as I used to do it, is complex. Photography was complex until I simplified it. Writing dwells on the border of complexity but writing is a therapeutic exercise that appears to benefit me so I force myself to engage in it even when I wish to avoid the effort.

This is not an exhaustive list of my thoughts, or a detailed examination of the issues. But my sense is that this insight into complexity sheds light on the nature of the problems I face and the behaviour patterns that emerged after the accident. I thought I had a problem with excessive reliance on routine. I don’t. What I actually experience is difficulty in dealing with any area of complexity. A reliance on routine offers a solution to this problem. The house has become too complex to manage? I retreat into a small corner of it. My past projects were too detailed, too sophisticated? I abandon them. I have books filled with complex ideas. I am unable to read them.

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Day Off Update

After making this blog post I spent time reflecting on the three month period that followed immediately after the accident. I experienced a great many different problems. I dropped things, had balance problems, became easily confused, and felt as if I was operating inside a mental fog that would not lift. I attributed these issues to the fact I was attempting to transition back to a normal day schedule after almost three years of working nights. I could not understand why this transition was so difficult for me and I contemplated seeking out a physician. In Québec there is a critical shortage of physicians and it seemed easier to just focus on my sleep discipline.

 

 

 

 

Floating World

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I became distracted by the prior post and failed to complete it. Or I entertained thoughts that I then suppressed. Take your pick. What I failed to describe was the sense of existing in a floating world.

This set of thoughts is difficult to unpack. It is like trying to catch a young trout by hand as it flashes by in the stream. There is a sparkle and a splash and it is not until the water subsides that you open your hand to see what you have caught.

On the periphery of mind there is another cluster of thoughts. I am not sure what they encompass. Or perhaps I do know and am therefore resistant to address them.

Life is a strange sort of magic trick. We step on to a stage, there are bright lights, applause, a series of effects follow one after the other. We conjure ourselves from out of this experience. We have no interest in understanding how the magic works. That would spoil the evening and reduce the spectacular to the mundane. We need to remain convinced of the excitement and the promise, left hungry for all the magic nights to follow.

When I locate myself in a series of incomplete projects, I am not sure where that leaves me. I become reduced to a set of appetites which help animate a floating world which, despite its knocks and hard edges, is little more than a set of diaphanous veils we wish to never remove.

If my life is nothing more than a string of events that can be abruptly and accidentally halted, then what is it I seek to achieve? What did my appetites fuel? Or perhaps I should write that as Who do my appetites fool?

I am not sure where this line of thought leads. I am not sure that it leads anywhere. I do find myself asking why I continue to struggle forward.

There is a sense of loss as I recognize that part of the reason I cannot engage with past projects may be due to my present inabilty to engage in complex thought. Many of the projects were embedded in a concept of the future. I no longer have this sense of the future. I appear to be anchored in a one dimensional present. Part of my night wakefulness derives from the attempt to investigate, define, and forecast, the immediate future. I find this extremely difficult to do.

There is the thought of penury and the future cost of “buying back” the very objects I am today throwing out.

There is the thought that I am lucky that I did not experience this injury when I was younger. I have had the opportunity to experience life, to learn from it, to enjoy it. I shudder to think of the impact brain injury would have on a young person, the degree to which it would curtail their experience. On the other hand, I suspect that had I been younger I would have escaped all injury.

There is the question of how shall I earn an income? What is abundantly clear is that I am unlikely to return to the type of work I performed previously. But I am then left with the question if not that, then what? To date I have not encountered any resource that would help me answer this question.

 

 

 

 

Suppressed Thoughts

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On the walk to the post office to mail the reimbursement submission, I realized I have actively suppressed thoughts. I was not aware of this until today. This insight explains some of my other behaviours.

I know that I am trying very hard to avoid a depression spiral. This is the proximate cause of the problem. A thought enters my mind, I recognize the thought involves a negative association and I seek to suppress the thought. At night, when falling asleep, I am less able to suppress thought. At the edge of sleep, all those thoughts I have attempted to suppress, or ignore, come floating back into consciousness and I am unable to avoid them. This surrender to the problematic results in an extended period of wakefulness that makes it impossible to enter sleep.

Suppressed Thoughts

This may not be a complete inventory. These are some of the thoughts I found myself attempting to suppress today.

Loss of self as evidenced by projects, or objects, toward which I no longer have any emotional attachment. This has two aspects. The first is the shock that accompanies each “Pompeii moment.” In Pompeii, the citizens became frozen in time as they were smothered by the ash of the exploding volcano.

My Pompeii moments result from the accident. As I clean up the house, I discover old projects abandoned in progress, projects abruptly arrested by the after effects of the crash. I downed tools, walked away, and never returned. The project has been untouched for three years.

This phenomenon has a second aspect. It also speaks to the degree of routinization. Subsequent to the accident, I became enmeshed in a narrow routine and rarely exited this behaviour pattern. The routine focused on the most basic life skills. I cooked. I washed. I slept. I wrote. Everything else was cut away, abandoned, left untouched.  Today I have become an archaeologist, picking over old tracks, trying to interpret and make sense of what I find.

It is a cold shock to rediscover my injury in the form of these abandoned moments. Each discovery leaves me more hesitant, tentative, uncertain, mistrusting. I learn that I cannot trust myself for the world I perceive as “out there,” this world of solid phenomena, exists primarily in here, in the wet pulp between my ears. Somehow a set of operations more intimate than sex, more complex than calculus, that unfathomable nugget that is me, was me, has eroded away, become atrophied, lost, disappeared. And this ghost of ego departed on quiet cats paws, silently, without me ever noticing it had left.

There is nothing positive about this epiphany.  It leaves me shaken and choked to the core. Even when writing these words I am left to struggle with my comprehension of these effects, their implications for what it means to be “me,” to be human, a member of homo sapiens sapiens.