Had a flutter in my left upper arm last night. Also pain in thigh muscle. Had an event where my right hand grip was weak to the point I thought I was about to drop a full plate of food (not sure if I recorded this previously or not). Those are physical behaviours. I am also dealing with behavioural changes.

Got up at 0730 then went back to bed and slept till 1300. Am very aware that I am falling into negative behaviours and am trying to grapple with what ails me. The balance of the day was spent trying to take stock.

My last post was over 10 days ago. In the interim I have been working hard to improve my skills so that I have a better chance of obtaining employment; I have also been working on a proposal for an organization dedicated to meeting the needs of TBI victims.

After some reflection, I think I have been attempting to apply the MUST DO – FORCED APPROACH that I learned on my various submissions to the insurance company. A description is found in this post: Les parapluies d’octobre. I am now using a similar approach to force the learning of new skills, or force completion of the rehab project proposal, or force preparations for a successful employment search.

I do not think this approach is working.

Preparing the various insurance claim submissions was very difficult. I hated the process. It forced me to confront my own inabilities. But everything depended on meeting the insurance company imposed deadline – I HAD TO DO THIS. So I forced myself to complete the submission. Despite failing to meet the insurer’s deadline (I finessed this by delivering the first half within the submission window and followed up with the balance of the document the following week) I pushed myself to complete the document. I forced myself to get up each day, confront my resistance, ignore my incompetence, and somehow plow forward.

I have been attempting to employ a similar approach in my recent attempts to upgrade my skills. This skill upgrading utilizes on-line learning materials. I continue to encounter my inadequacies and feel utterly useless as no degree of effort leads to any noticeable improvement. Regardless of how hard I try, I cannot simply force my way through to recovery. This recognition then leads to excessive sleep as an avoidance mechanism which is in turn followed by renewed effort, a reaffirmation that I MUST DO THIS.  Renewed effort follows but this again leads to the same outcome and to the same set of conclusions. In place of improvement I am forced to recognize my continued inadequacy, and my performance deficits, and this forced realization terminates with a crash into despair / depression / whatever.

Not sure how to overcome this cycle.

I do not appear to be learning more quickly. I cannot see evidence of positive behavioural change, or further improvement. With programming, I can observe my failure rate in a very direct and immediate way. Make a small error in programming and everything halts. This is very different from text operations in which a failure to perceive my own errors does not cause the document to abort.

I keep coming back to image making. With images, I appear to have achieved some degree of improvement. But, if I look honestly at that win, what I see is that I went from a detailed process, with a rigid sequence of steps, to a much more free form work environment in which the “process” was whatever delivered an acceptable result. There was no adherence to the prior rigid process, no concern with following steps in sequence, no conformance with an established work routine. I just began to  “wing it.” Each image became a fresh challenge and elicited a spontaneous response.

To phrase this another way: I simply abandoned the prior approach that I found impossible to implement and substituted a much more open, immediate, and spontaneous approach. If what I did before was “colour by numbers” and “colour within the lines” then what I now do is much more free form. The current process does not seek to meet an established pictorial standard. I think the images have improved because of this new approach. I know that I can go back into my image catalogue for the years before the accident and search for worthwhile images; I find very few that are amenable to the new approach.

To put this change in the baldest terms: I found myself incapable of following the rules so I elected to throw out the rules.

This set of behavioural changes represents an adaptation to my altered circumstance and it works. It works because the primary concern is an aesthetic one, and aesthetic decisions are left to the discretion of the individual.

This is very different situation from a work environment in which the majority of decisions are the responsibility of some level of management and my sole responsibility would be to fulfill those management directives. It is also fundamentally different from a coding environment in which the substitution of a colon for a semi-colon renders the code unworkable. In both these cases I have limited discretion. In the aesthetic sphere I have complete discretion.

What gives rise to my current set of problems is the fact that I cannot devise a set of behavioural changes that would permit me to adapt my present abilities to function well within the context of a non-discretionary framework.