I want to begin this post with a quote taken from my Accident Log:

Back from voting and grocery shop. Ran into problems making sandwich for lunch. Believe I was thinking of too many things i.e. more than one thing at a time. Realized that I did not know what I was doing with the sandwich and the sandwich ingredients, and the kitchen implements. I blurted out loud the recognition of this fact: “I don’t know what I am doing.” This seemed to help. Brought the focus of attention back to the sandwich. Like a 5-2-5 moment.

This passage illustrates what I believe to be a non-Flow state. There is no intense and focused concentration on the present moment. Instead there is a melding of multiple moments, a mixing up, a confusion.

There is no merging of action and awareness. Action halts due to the awareness of no awareness, of inappropriate or confused awareness.

In place of a loss of reflective self-consciousness there is an intense self-consciousness that results in a discrete separation from the immediate action environment. In place of being immersed in the action event, I am ejected from it, pushed outside and turned into an observer, a man watching his own incompetent fumble and uncertain of how to recover.

There is a complete loss of personal agency and control. If prolonged, this will lead to intense frustration. I maintain an awareness of intent coupled with an awareness of my inability to correctly execute that intent. I have somehow become the enemy of myself. There follow a series of psychological burdens which I begin to impose on myself due to the rising discord between agency and action.

Instead of an immersive experience of time, the present is shattered, laid bare and exposed. I experience being stuck in the unpleasant moment and unable to move beyond it, or regain immediate control.

The experience is jarring, unpleasant and negative. Self confidence becomes shredded. If the event occurs in the presence of others there is a sense of humiliation and embarrassment, a desire to shrink away, to disguise or hide the problem, to socially withdraw.

I am going to postulate that if there exists a state recognized as Flow, there may also exist an antithetical state to be labelled as anti-Flow. This state of anti-Flow is my experience of a brain injury moment. Just as it is not possible to maintain a continuous Flow state it is also not possible to maintain a continuous anti-Flow state. The two states constitute the opposite ends of a continuum of experience. Most lived action occurs in the period of time between these two opposites.

I have difficulty now in remembering details of the first year after the injury. In the first week following the accident I had an inordinate demand for sleep. I came home from the office and slept until it was time to return to the office. Since our work had been transferred to another global location, there was nothing to be done and I found myself napping at my desk despite having slept the entire day. The first clear anti-Flow state occurred when I sought to visit the offices of potential employers. I was literally shattered by my inability to navigate areas that I knew well. I remember acknowledging that I did not know what I was doing. I retreated home and blamed my failure on a lack of rest.

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October 12th Update:

In paragraph five I speak to agency and control and state that “I maintain an awareness of intent.” This was true of the sandwich making event. I retained awareness of the intent to make a sandwich (all of the apparatus was laid out before me, I stood with knife in hand) but was also aware of having become lost, or unglued from the process. I have similar experience in which I find myself staring at something, knowing I had intent to perform some act but find myself unable to remember either the intention, or the context. On rereading the text I have been left wondering if these might be two different manifestations of similar behaviour.

Further reflection leads to the belief that in the sandwich event the action context was communicated to me by the presence of bread slices, avocado, and a mayo slathered knife. I had a “white out” event but was then able to deduce my intent from the immediate context. In other “white out” cases, I am unable to make similar deduction and find myself in a setting unable to determine what it is I intended to do, but aware that I did have some form of intent.

All of this goes to show the complexity of the mind, the difficulty the brain injured have in correctly interpreting their own injury, and making accurate description.