I am building a scaffold, a framework with which I may interact. As I engage in this effort I encounter various constraints. Some of these constraints are scaffolding, aspects of the structure of the blog: developing a business strategy, defining a content strategy, identifying a nascent market, performing a calculation of the resources required versus the potential revenue (have not yet begun to address the last two items and have only just touched on items two and three). And some of these constraints are internal to me and concern the discovery of my personal limits or the limits imposed upon me by the dynamics of the injury.

The “dynamic constraints of the injury” is a fascinating phrase. It speaks to much of what I have learned of the nature of my affliction. The injury is not a mechanical crippling such as the loss of a leg, or an arm. It is much more subtle. It is a problem set that is not immediately visible to others, or to the self. It is an unseen and largely unrecognized form of hurt. But it is real. Science is only beginning to uncover that fact.

Second, because the injury concerns the mind it is only revealed by means of a dynamic. Immediately after the injury I entered a phase in which my actions were restricted due to the economic pressures of job loss. My response was a highly routinized focus on job search. Apart from cooking meals and sleeping, all I did was to search on the Internet, write letters of application (one letter was a week’s work; after five or six hours of writing, I was overcome by fatigue but I did not understand this to be due to an injury. I associated this fatigue with the fact that I was waking at 0330 in order to commence my job search. Such early waking is itself understood to be an aspect of the injury. As is the heavy routinization.).

What is very powerful about this blog project is that the attempt to implement it, the body of effort that surrounds it, creates a need for performance that results in my encountering the injury, a setting in which I am forced to confront myself and my current limitations. This performance dynamic serves to make the injury visible to me; the injury becomes comprehensible as a set of limitations.

Because the injury is now comprehensible as a set of limitations I have the option of: 1) attempting to resolve the issue through skills upgrading of some kind; or 2) redesigning the project in a way that compensates for the nature of the injury. So this blog project is assisting me in developing self awareness about my own injury. It is situating the injury within a context that is understandable to me (What is D.A.I. anyway?) and it provides a framework by which I can encounter the injury and gauge its effects.

I am not sure that I have expressed this realization correctly but I am confident that what I am attempting to describe is a genuine dynamic. And the key word is “dynamic.” The injury is not a mechanical obstacle but a dynamic one. Since the brain is extremely plastic it has the means to effect recovery through a reshaping of its own processes. I have very limited knowledge of this plasticity other than having learned of it through my attempts to understand the nature of my own problem. But I suspect what I am attempting to describe here is my personal encounter with that plasticity within the context of the attempt to generate this blog. And in truth it goes back to before this blog; I can identify elements of it in my forced attempt to file an insurance appeal. That was a huge undertaking. It was an exhausting effort to the point of being completely shattering. I got up each day and threw myself into an impossible task, one that I felt completely incapable of performing. But I had to do it as my survival was in some way dependent on the outcome. And that immense effort somehow created the basis for what I am doing at present.

There is another dynamic here. And that is the positive feedback, the consequence of this effort as a process of self-learning, or self-discovery, or self-reinforcement, a process which has an immediate and direct positive impact and a much different characteristic than having to negotiate with a medical bureaucracy uninformed in regard to the nature of traumatic brain injury. The interaction with the medical bureaucracy has results that I find to be entirely negative. It is worse than negative, it is hugely destructive. And that from a profession which claims as its cornerstone “Do no harm.” I find myself dealing with persons who claim to be knowledgeable professionals when in reality they are totally ignorant of the subject they profess to treat. I have had to confront this problem again in the past week and it is hugely frustrating. It is more than that. It is soul destroying.

The next question has to be something along the lines of the following. Are these benefits I have identified genuine or are they some personal artifact of the injury? If these are genuine benefits what metrics may be employed to further characterize them? And if we can measure and characterize the benefits, is it possible to determine if this process may be generalizable to a larger population, a larger cohort who share a similar injury? Would it deliver benefit to them?

These are questions I am able to ask but not answer. If the answer to each question is positive then there exists the possibility that what I am doing may have the potential to be scaled up and developed into a means of delivering a form of rehabilitation that, to the best of my limited knowledge of the field, does not yet exist.