I saw Dr H earlier this week. She has a number of patients suffering from brain injury. One of them reviewed this blog. This unknown reader very much appreciated the post Lost in the Woods.

I tried to write down all the positive comment Dr H provided to me. I didn’t capture everything. I was overcome by the fact that something written here had touched another human being. One comment truly stood out – the post Lost in the Woods captured some of the experience of TBI. I find great difficulty in communicating my experience to others. It is difficult to explain all my foibles to myself. I was overwhelmed that my description resonated with another brain injury victim. That we had a shared a experience and understood that experience in a similar way, difficulties, drawbacks, and all. There is something very powerful in this act of sharing.

There was more feedback. This was more critical and offered areas for improvement:

• The site needs to be more accessible
• Make the site more meaningful to persons with brain injury
• Have clear headings
• Likely greater interest if “dense material” is separated out.

I would agree with each one of these comments. And I find it very interesting that I somehow fail to completely record all the positive comment, yet manage to write detailed notes on each item of critical feedback. Part of the reason for this is that I want to improve the blog and the critique assists that goal; part of the reason was the simple joy of learning these words had touched an unknown stranger and forgetting to write anything at all.

Facticity more or less grew like topsy. There were no design parameters, no conceptual brief, no content strategy, no outline. There was in fact no proper design process, or IA work. I launched myself into the task at the suggestion of Dr H. It was very, very difficult at the start. It took three days to write a single short blog post. And it has taken weeks of review to weed out all the errors.

The “dense material” likely comes from a working hypothesis about brain function. Very early on, Dr H advised that my sense of making progress with the blog was due to the blog activity “reprogramming” my neural circuits. I believe she is correct in this. I can see a clear change in my abilities from the start of the blog, through to today. The effort expended has had positive result. Positive but heartbreakingly slow.

In essence, I am exploring my own ability to think. I am trying to turn mind on itself, to review and document the manner in which my experience comes into being. I am not explaining this very well.

If you go to a strange place, you may feel discomfort. Return to the same location again, and again, and soon it will become a place in which you are comfortable. You will know your way around. You will be able to get from here to there without great difficulty. I am attempting to push my own boundaries and learn to what degree I can push my investigations of myself, my investigations of my own thought process.

I do not do this very well. But failure is part of the process of learning. I have the sense that pushing my boundaries in this way may be very valuable and have positive therapeutic effect. Writing the blog has delivered a clear benefit. And I thank Dr H for her insight and patience and her original recommendation that I begin. I am taking that recommendation and trying to push it further. One likely outcome is that will I fail more often than I succeed. I suspect those “failures” represent some of the dense passages identified by the unknown reader.

The comment on making the blog more topical to persons with brain injury is a very good one. It is something I have been contemplating for some time. The blog started as an ad hoc response to the recommendation made by Dr H (see the menu bar above. The entries for the About and Contact menu items were never completed). But I agree that it needs to be made more accessible. I have ideas which may address that issue. See the next post.