It is taking me a long time to return to my prior level of project involvement. I recognize that I am working on “edge activity” rather than on priority tasks. I know what I need to do yet I am shying away from it.

This comes from a lack of confidence in my own ability. It is due to mistrust of what I can accomplish.

I recognize it has taken me over three months to complete work my uninjured self would have completed in three weeks maximum. Work that a reasonably competent web developer would handle within a week. There is this expectation on my part that if I continue to exert myself I will somehow “snap into” the task, that there will be a moment of revelation and I will simply resume my normal self and reacquire all my prior associated skills. I recognize that this is a fairy tale belief.

The immediate outcome is that I seek to avoid confrontation with the injured self. I wish to prevent acknowledging my deficits. I am playing a game of hide and seek with myself. I do not directly engage in the project as this will undermine my positive self image, my internalized beliefs about myself. Avoidance maintains my illusions. It means I may continue to embrace unreasonable and unrealistic hopes. So I avoid tackling any major task and sort of snoop around my own project, nibbling at the small items, performing useful, but quite irrelevant, minor housekeeping tasks.

In part this is self-protective. During the past week I entered a self-protective phase. I realize I am working to rebuild myself, to once more feel a measure of strength and confidence. I do not want to risk any action that represents a further psychic threat. The forced rediscovery and acknowledgement of my incompetence would be exactly that. So I avoid any confrontation with my present self and I putter.

If I were to identify my present weaknesses they would be these:

Learning

Slow learner. In some respects incapable of learning. Nothing at all like the prior speed of absorption and pick-up of new fact. Difficult even to implement things of which I should have fluent knowledge.

Frustration

Easily frustrated especially when tired. In confrontations with my damaged self, I react with antagonism toward the fact that I cannot perform as I once did. There is a sense of inability to control, that my body operates apart from my mind. I know what I wish to accomplish, but my body betrays me and introduces error and confusion.

Tacit Knowledge and Skills

Loss of tacit knowledge. Much of the knowledge I utilized with Gargantua is gone. I also have this sense of my social skills being deficient. I attempt to be normal, jocular, amazing, and the attempt falls flat on its face.

Fatigue

A big problem is the need for cognitive naps, or breaks. I am unable to work for more than four or five hours before the onset of fatigue, and then headache. This is true even for highly routinized tasks. I may be able to engage in routine for slightly longer but my error rate still increases.

Memory Blanks

Cognitive blanks. I am engaged in some task and experience a sudden mental blank. I know I have the intent to do something but I lack awareness of exactly what it is I intend to do. I can sit quietly and attempt to recover the missing information but that rarely seems to help. Something similar occurs with word recall, and event recall. There are little vacancies erupting within my cognitive process, bubbles of vacuum. I encounter one and I come to a frozen stop.

At times the lost information suddenly reveals itself to me at a later date. It is as if the brain initiates some form of recall activity but that recall becomes delayed in its execution. The request goes out but the responsive information never returns. At a much later date, the requested information unaccountably surfaces in the midst of another other situation, like a submarine suddenly bursting unwelcome from the depths of memory.

When the submarine surfaces I have the opposite problem. I am now aware of the missing fact. I know that it has some import, that I was searching for it previously. But I have difficulty remembering the original context in which the newly surfaced information was to be utilized.

In summary

Cognitive fatigue, loss of tacit knowledge, slow learning and impediments to recall all make task performance difficult. Dr H wants me to go on disability. I have grave doubts the gouvernment de Québec will allow that.

Plus, I am not sure I want to attempt to survive on $1,000 a month. In Québec, surviving a rear end collision means a fate worse than death.