Brain blame games, part two.

So what changed? I learned where else to place the blame. Oh, not what you were expecting to hear?

I slowly began to learn that blaming my brain was simply too broad a complaint, and that it (ironically) limited my ability to be hopeful about recovery. The biggest steps forward came from understanding how injuring my brain affects my eyes. Eye dysfunction can have a huge impact in life overall! If my eyes are sending completely different reports to my brain, my poor brain is having to work so much harder, as it now has to decode the messages and figure out what is actually going on; this, in turn, has a significant impact on cognition. If my brain is having to put so much work into figuring out what I am seeing, it’s that much harder for it to do other things. For example, if my brain is fighting just to figure out which line I am trying to read in a paragraph, of course it is going to be more difficult to actually remember what was written in that line.

This was a massive game-changer! I cannot express what a difference it made to reframe the thought “I can’t remember anything I read because my stupid brain is broken” to “OT will help my eyes do their job better, so my brain can do it’s job better; maybe then I’ll be able to curl up with a book again!”. I began to feel so much less helpless and frustrated; I finally felt like I was no longer hijacked by a broken brain, and had renewed faith in all the various rehab exercises I was doing. I could now face each new concussion with the thought “such-and-such is on the fritz, so I need to check in with so-and-so (OT, PT, SP) to get a tune-up” rather than “oh great – I just screwed everything up even more, and now my brain is that much more useless”. I cannot emphasize how important this has been: when you’re dealing with injuries that already have issues like anxiety and depression as symptoms, knowing that not all is lost can make all the difference in the world. Now, when I whack my head and find that the carpet appears to be rolling like the ocean, I remind myself that I have a super awesome OT and Neuro-Optometrist, and that we will work together to make the carpet stop moving.

Does this mean everything is rainbows and roses now? No. There are still things my brain cannot do that it used to be able to…but I’ve learned to accept that, and put my energy into fixing what I can and adapting to what I cannot. It’s a process, and I still have to remind myself to choose to embrace this perspective, but it has made such a profound difference already, and I’m looking forward to seeing the impact in the future as well.

Brain blame games, part one.

If we go back about three years/nine concussions ago, we would find a very different version of concussed me. EVERYTHING was frustrating and disheartening. Occupational Therapy made me want to cry: how can a string with some beads on it make me feel so broken?! Speech Therapy was soul-crushing: no, I really don’t remember the string of words you just read to me. The list of frustrations, “setbacks”, and deficits seemed utterly insurmountable most days…and it was just the beginning.

A couple concussions later found me in an even darker place. At one point, I was seeing four PT’s, one OT, one SP, one Neuro-Optometrist, and four MD specialists. When I would check in at the rehab desk, they no longer asked my name – they’d ask which therapist I was there to see (or, on bad days, tell me which therapist I was there to see). Life outside rehab wasn’t any easier. I couldn’t drive, so I would often take the bus everywhere. I couldn’t walk a straight line so I was often mistaken as being drunk; this led to some pretty unsettling interactions with strange men at bus stops (bonus: since it was early spring, it would get dark quite early, which really adds a special something to interactions with skeevy individuals). It was ~3 months before I was cleared to return back to work, so I was bored out of my mind. I tried to find things to occupy my time; for example, I tried to learn to knit. Despite learning the absolute easiest, three-step knitting technique, I would get stuck every few minutes, and have to ask my endlessly-patient friend where I was at in the process, and how to continue. I was in my early-thirties, failing at tasks demented senior citizens could do; I was despondent.

Since my brain was what had been injured, all of this fall-out must be my brain’s fault, right? At some point, it had all become clear to me: my brain was public enemy number one, and all hope was officially lost. What I failed to realize at the time was that my biggest challenge wasn’t my brain – it was my attitude. I had no idea how to move forward, what hopes or plans for the future seemed feasible; I had no idea how to go back to simply living life.

*Stay tuned for part two.*

Redefining the win.

We live in a world obsessed with numbers and results. We want quantifiable data and concrete feedback. We want to know how we measure up – we want the win.

“Focus on the positive”, “be patient with yourself”, “give yourself time”…when you’re fighting through recovery, phrases such as these can seem trite. When your brain is struggling with even the most simple, straight-forward things, how do you take a concept like patience/positive outlook and figure out how to apply it to your frustrating situation?

Reframe your situation by redefining the win, and start with the small, easy things. One task where I’ve seen this concept make a big difference is changing my sheets. I always buy my bed sheets from the same place, because they are amazing: on the inside of the bottom sheet, they have tags telling you which are the sides and which are the ends. Initially, I could only view my reliance on those tags as one more sign of my brain’s brokenness. I chose to let my frustration drain me; all I could see was how hard something “easy” had become.

Slowly, I began to break this negative pattern. Instead of being short-sighted and focusing solely on that single task, I fought to broaden my perspective. Rather than looking at the tags as reminders of what had been “taken” from me, I began to focus on what those tags could give back to me. Objects are only negative or positive if we assign them a value. It became so much easier to view them positively once I began to ask myself “what can I do with the mental/physical energy these tags save me?” An extra chapter read, a sink absent dirty dishes, time for an extra-long shower – these things feel a lot like winning!

This perspective shift may not come easily; I certainly found it to be a struggle! You may find it is not an innate perspective; for me, it is definitely a way of thinking I have to choose to have. It is so worth it, though: in the world of recovery, where control and wins seem so few and far between, why not seize them at every opportunity?