During the recent tailspin my sleep schedule became completely disrupted. When I attempted to sleep, I ended up in a half asleep, half awake, questing state. I am not sure quite how to describe this experience except to say that I was attempting to grok my world.

In a prior post I used the phrase  –  the creative gestalt of expressing complex thought in words. I believe this is what I am attempting to do when lying awake at night. I am trying to process sense data, to understand and interpret the events taking place, straining to arrive at a full and complete understanding  –  grok my world.

Since I was unable to achieve such an understanding, I returned to the same topics again, and again, and again, making repeated attempts at understanding. This effort invariably continues until daybreak when I finally fall asleep.

There are a number of consistent themes. One theme deals with my failed marriage, the effects this has had on my son and my sense of having failed him despite my best efforts. This is a huge topic, one which I do not wish to address here. I do think it important to note that I have much better insight and understanding of the marriage events than I had at the time. Part of this appears to be due to the fact that I have vivid recall of distant events but unclear memory of recent events. This sounds very strange but I believe it to be the case.

A second contributing factor is that I appear to lack a strong emotional context. For whatever reason, the injury has impaired my emotional response. Not only do I appear better able to remember past events, I also appear to have less emotional attachment to those events. Because of this I can now observe and reflect on them in a very dispassionate manner. I can put the pieces of my life puzzle together in a way that was previously impossible.

A deeper understanding of my past life trajectory was one theme. Another thematic area dealt with work and my ongoing attempt to identify a way to earn an income. I am fairly certain I cannot perform in a role similar to my previous employment. I no longer have the same ability to learn, I have trouble with the mastery of details and I lack near term recall. I am also much slower and less responsive than I was. I am also more irritable, and less able to control both irritation and frustration.

If I am unable to return to my prior line of work, I need to ask what can I do? This is a very difficult question to answer. My long nights of investigation have led to the following conclusions:

I should avoid any work that involves driving. Since the accident, I have come to dislike driving. I find it to be a constant challenge. The crazed and impatient drivers frighten me.  I have a preference for standard routes and feel uncomfortable travelling outside of them. I try and avoid all rush hour travel due to the degree of decision making required. Acknowledging these concerns serves to eliminates a vast range of service and delivery occupations, all of which are dependent on driving skills.

I am very uncertain of my customer service skills. When I worked for Gargantua I was very highly rated for my ability to respond to problematic customers in an unruffled way. I doubt I would be able to maintain a similar composure today. I am also slow to respond, make errors in processing verbal information, get easily frustrated, and appear to have much lower levels of self control. If I am unable to correct these issues another vast swath of jobs lie outside my present competency.

I lack confidence. My effort to increase my self-awareness has left me with a heightened sense of my deficits. I am much more self conscious than I was, more retiring, more shy. The contrast between the person I am today versus the person I was before the accident was driven home when I located past performance evaluations. When I read these reports, I recognized the quality of work I achieved in the past. I am very conscious of my present inability to achieve the same standard.