It has been three months since my last blog post.

There are two reasons for this.

When I commenced a job search, I ceased making blog entries. A potential employer would be unlikely to hire me if they discovered a web presence providing a detailed description of each of my deficits. Posts on injury impacts and outcomes advertised my failures and therefore inhibited a successful job search. The goal of the blog, to deliver insight into the the day to day difficulties of a recovering TBI victim, was seen as incompatible with the objective of impressing a hiring manager and obtaining paid employment.

In abandoning the blog, I felt guilty. Apart from any therapeutic value, my chief motive in writing has been to make “visible” the difficulties encountered by a sector of society that is largely unnoticed and ignored. Until my own injury, I was unaware of the nature and extent of TBI. It was not until I gained an awareness of my own injury that I made the discovery that hundreds of thousands of Canadians face similar problems. I wanted to help bring this population out of the shadows, to make their issues known.

In retrospect, I see a second reason for moving away from the blog.

In August, I upgraded my cell phone and was introduced to the wonders of apps. After downloading a series of exercise monitors, pedometers, and calorie counters, it became obvious my prior exercise routine was both inefficient and ineffective. Once I gained the ability to monitor progress, I quickly improved on my exercise routine.

Until August the blog functioned as a defect list, a written record of failure. This provided insight into the injury, delivering an increased degree of self-awareness, but it did not help with self improvement. The blog functioned as a documentation vehicle not as a rehabilitation vehicle. In fact, the blog may have become counterproductive; it reinforced awareness of my injured state while failing to deliver the opportunity to transcend the injury. This is a clumsy description. I have the sense that there exist better, more precise words, to describe what I am attempting to communicate. But I am unable to summon them.

There is much public talk of how the Internet robs us of our privacy. This morning I realized the Internet also confers privacy. I am adrift on the web, a single fish consorting with more than a billion others of similar size and shape, all immersed in a dark sea of anonymity. Earlier this morning, I searched for my name via Google and came up empty handed. The blog made no appearance in any search results. There is therefore no reason to suspect an employer would be able to link this description of my injury with a submitted job application. Recognition of this implicit anonymity gave me the freedom to resume. This post represents the return of the blog.