Category Archives: Assess

WIDWID

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In IT there is a well understood acronym: WYSIWYG. Pronounced wiz-ee-wig it refers to an approximate match between what is seen on the screen display and what will be available in the final printed output. WIDWID is something different. It stands for Why I Do What I Do. This neologism is part of my attempt at self explication.

I can already hear a reader cackling “This guy is too much. Enough already with the pointless self-exposition. Have you not heard? It is time to move on. Are you unaware of life beyond narcissism?” And I would agree with that sentiment exactly.

The chief reason to continue with this WIDWID effort is that the old me had a user manual that had been revised, and perfected, and updated, for over 60 years. The new me lacks any kind of user manual at all. With the old me, I could sit down and eat dinner without any problems. It was easy. It was natural. It required no thought. Somehow, I understood the manual, and everything operated exactly as it should.

Today, I sit down to dinner and raise a fork of food to my mouth and discover I am trying to put it in my ear. Whoa Nellie! How did we manage to do that? What a dumb mistake! What was I thinking? Was that ever embarrassing! How do I get the broccoli out of my inner ear? I have pushed the boundaries on this illustration, but not by much.

You only have to put your food in your ear so many times before you are really, truly, deeply, completely, and utterly, motivated to get back to the way things were before. That is precisely the situation I am in at the moment. That is exactly the problem I face. You, dear reader, may label my WIDWID effort as narcissism. And, at first, I will agree with you. I would like nothing better than to get beyond these deficits, and problems, and return to being the person that I once was. That prior person had his warts and defects, but at least he was fully functional in a way that I am not. And he kept the broccoli out of his ears.

There is another wrinkle which adds to the complexity of the problem. I have spent hours in exhaustive web searches for information on TBI, and the means to recover from it. I have spent days diligently attempting to digest complex medical literature that would be incomprehensible to me even if I did not experience any of my current deficits.

What have I learned from my hours of research and study? That I am on my own. That contemporary medical science has an imperfect understanding of brain function. There are different models of how the brain works, different theories of how the parts interconnect. There is no complete understanding of the type that exists with regard to setting a green stick fracture. There is no repair book for the brain. Further to this, brain injury appears to express itself differently in different individuals. It is not clear if this is due to the mechanics of injury, the unique area of the brain that was injured, the age of the victim, interaction with other personal factors, or a thousand and one little gotchas and complex nagging details. In short, nobody really knows. The most widely adopted approach is to simply allow nature to take its course and give the brain time to heal itself. Everyone appears to agree that this is an extremely slow process.

So I am stuck with an injury that I do not understand, and do not know how to repair. The same injury stumps medical science. Be aware that if you suffer a brain injury, you will be on your own. And, while you are diligently trying to fix a problem that no one understands, you will likely be labelled a narcissist.

The foregoing is the primary case for WIDWID. I will attempt a more detailed examination of this topic in the following posts.

 

 

 

 

Medication

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My doctors have suggested that I go on medication. This suggestion was made previously but I refused. At the time, I was experiencing a strong impulse to self-destruction. I did not truly trust myself, or my ability to make decisions, and was concerned that any medication might further impair, or cloud, my mind. These events took place in the late spring of 2013.

In the spring of 2014, the situation is different. I still encounter mood swings. I still find myself entering depressive episodes. I still find myself wanting to retreat from the world. I still have thoughts of self destruction. I still ponder the question: is the new me the way I want to live out my life? According to actuarial tables, I have fourteen years worth of sunrises and sunsets ahead of me. Does my present quality of life make those days welcome?

In trying to answer this question, I have come to the following conclusions. These are not hard and fast, objective outcomes.  They are not final decisions. They are essays, attempts to gather my thoughts, to think things through on paper, and to see what is arrived at.

Medication – Change in Thought Style

I am not sure one can alter their thought style in the same way one alters one’s clothing fashions. I may be remiss in attempting to introduce a form of medical haute couture. But my sense is that my present day thought style is different from that of a year ago.

I am not sure what words to employ to characterize this difference. First, the difference is experiential in nature. It is my “sense of difference” rather than an objective measure. If one has experienced love then one understands immediately the failure of language to fully capture, or convey, the experience. I face a similar problem.

In 2013, I felt more overwhelmed by my thoughts, More driven by them. Perhaps more reckless and out of control. There was no fear but there was a sense of being out of touch, uncertain, confused. There was considerable experience of mistrust – mistrust of my own experience, mistrust of my perceptions, mistrust of my ability to engage in the common casual ordering of body and mind in the effortless way the uninjured so easily take for granted.

In 2014, I am less overwhelmed. There are still strong patterns of thoughts but I appear better able to surf these thought waves, to ride through the turbulence, to keep my head above water. There is less sense of being submerged, out of touch, the grasping for reality that was present in 2013.

I have more confidence in my ability to think things through. If it were possible to reduce everything in my life to a set of logical syllogisms then I would be able to operate quite happily, an imitation of Lieutenant Commander Data from Star Trek (I may mean Spock. I have no idea. I have enough trouble keeping track of my own life to worry about confusion between these characters).

Much of this confidence stems from the blog. I use the blog as external memory, as a form of “thought processor.” It forces me into an attempt to commit my thoughts, to fix them to the page, to make them discursive. I believe I am more successful in this than I was earlier and that the blog has been of significant benefit.

Medication – Self Destruction

In 2013 I experienced a strong wish to go to sleep and never wake up. This impulse was expressed in other forms. I feared medication would alter me in unknown ways, might leave me less able to avoid a destructive impulse. The medication itself might provide a means to the end.

Today, I continue to have down periods. I am not sure if these are less, or more, powerful than previously. There is a sense that these questions, questions Camus described as being central to the human experience, are by now routine, like a pair of worn shoes, well accustomed to the shape of my feet. There appears to be a quality of greater objectivity, more distance, less immediacy, less impulse. I seem better able to accommodate my deficits despite the fact that recognition of them remains a strong trigger for depressive episodes.

Medication – Self Perception

I remain concerned that through the use of mediation I might become less, rather than more, self-perceptive. I believe my ability to exercise logic, to analyze, and to write about my experience, has significant therapeutic value. Would medication impair these capacities?

If they were to be impaired, would I retain the capacity to notice?

This last item calls up memories of a stage in my accident recovery prior to the commencement of blogging. I would find myself sitting motionless, staring out into space, devoid of all thoughts and motivation. Acknowledging this vacant state as unhealthy was a key motive driving me to accept the difficulty of blogging. I am concerned medication may place me back in the twilight zone.

 

 

 

 

Feeling Very Uncomfortable

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I have been trying to develop a better understanding of the blog software. As I do so, I rapidly become overwhelmed. I attempt to read the relevant technical material and it does not click. I study the same text again, and again, and it still does not take. I begin feeling very uncomfortable and I start to back away from the work I am attempting to perform.

This worries me.

In the past, in the info-tech sphere, I would totally devour technical information, readily grok it, and have no difficulty in moving forward with the implementation. This was true back when I was teaching myself a new programming language. It was true when learning a new software application. It was true when I worked for Gargantua in the global information factory. The customer wants support on some exotic new technology? No problem! I would just dive in and solve the issue.

Now I appear to become lost, or severely challenged, when making an equivalent attempt. I am trying to interact with one of the easiest to use, most widely adopted, open source software packages available. This is software with training wheels! It is software with all the sharp edges removed! Surrounded with lots of thick padding to protect the user from his own actions. Despite working on a platform with excellent ease of use, and a clear, straightforward UI, I continue to encounter problems. When I seek out additional technical resources, I encounter a similar set of problems. I have been working on these issues for several weeks now. And I acknowledge having made the same attempt months earlier, an attempt abandoned in frustration.

The software itself readily accommodates text input. Creating a blog post is not an issue. Making a post is a very straightforward task and amounts to little more than copying in some text, and pushing a button. Voila! All is done.

But I am attempting to dive deeper into the back end, to get under the hood, so to speak, and acquire a more comprehensive technical understanding. And, when I make this attempt, I quickly hit a wall. I become overwhelmed and discouraged; this is followed by an embarrassed retreat.

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I have been mulling this issue over to get a better fix on it.

I do not believe this is due to any further deterioration in my abilities. I think it has something to do with the level of complexity involved. I have the sense that I am able to operate in a few limited areas. Within those specific contexts, I am able to perform to a reasonable standard. When I seek to extend my operational boundaries beyond a narrow comfort zone, I easily become overwhelmed.

At some level there has been an improvement. One example is found in writing. I am able to hammer out a decent batch of prose. In some instances, I surprise myself by the quality of what I have written; I have not previously engaged in producing this form of written material. I believe I can detect an improvement in my skills from the first few months of the blog, up to today.

My photography has also improved, but for a different reason. With photography, I abandoned some sophisticated techniques. These techniques were not required to produce images for the web. With photography, the improvement has come from a relaxation of standards, or from embracing standards appropriate to the output medium.

Both writing and photography are long term skill sets. If my understanding of brain injury is correct, then well adapted procedural skills are rarely impacted by brain injury.

I am going to let this issue sit for a while, and see if I develop any further insight.