Archives for category: Brain Injury
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Being and Yearning

March 8, 2024 //
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As I came around the last bend in the road before I reached the city, the sunrise greeted me with a messy smudge of coral and orange, like badly applied lipstick. I so earnestly wished to make a right turn and chase that sunrise to wherever the day might take me…

The yearning hit me hard. I don’t find myself wanting to chase things like a bigger house, a more exotic car, Birkin bags, or Louboutin shoes. Sufficiency is generally quite enough for me, and I’m content with the occasional excesses of more modest scale, like garden seeds, or art supplies, or a new keyboard…but… I sometimes find myself faced with a very peculiar moment of yearning and discontent that is very much part of “who I am” (and has been for as much of my life as I can recall)… I sometimes earnestly and deeply want to be free of everything that defines my life – however it is presently defined. As though the constraints of habit and routine, and requirements and expectations, just get to be too much, and something within me spills out and I just want to… go. Somewhere. Somewhere else than wherever I am. I want to “chase that sunrise”. I want to sleep in and when I wake wander to some previously unvisited delightful breakfast spot and linger into the day over my coffee. I want to wander a beach or a forest trail, listening to the birds and the breezes. I want to be… untethered. I doubt this experience is unique to me, and it seems generally very human.

This morning, once my commute carried me to the city, and the car was parked in the usual place, and I frowned at the thermostat in the office on my way past it, as I often do, and made a cup of coffee (that has already gone cold), I sat down and did the payday stuff and the budgeting, like a proper grownup. No tears or terror, no stress, just regular adult shit that has to get done regardless of how lovely the sunrise may be. I’m okay with it. I don’t really need to drop everything and escape my existence, I’ve got a pretty comfortable life that I enjoy very much, and I’m fortunate to share it with a partner I love deeply, and who loves me back so wonderfully. Life is pretty good right now. I’m not objecting to that, or craving change – just acknowledging my restless nature, and maybe wishing it were already “camping season” (too chilly yet for me, personally). lol Funny creatures, human primates – give them everything they want and need in life, and still they find their way to discontentedness, wanting either more, or less. LOL

I sip my tepid coffee, unbothered by any detail of the morning, thus far. I’m okay. I breathe. Exhale. Relax. (Mutter something cranky about the broken heat in this office.) I stretch, and check my calendar. Set up my work day. Email the budget details to my Traveling Partner. There’s no particular stress to the day, so far. Hell, I’m not even in much pain; it seems very manageable so far. The sun continues to rise, and the buildings beyond the office reflect the golden glow and hints of orange and pink. Beautiful. I take a minute to enjoy it, before I sit down to write a few words.

It’s a Friday. I find myself missing my Traveling Partner greatly this morning, and wishing perhaps that I’d worked from home, but we’d discussed that yesterday evening, and he expressed a desire to make the day a quiet one, healing and resting, and to support that endeavor, I committed to the commute and the day in the office. Maybe a short one? I’d love to get the weekend started and get out in the garden again, or try a trail I’ve never walked before, or just… drive somewhere far. lol That restless nature nagging at me in the background almost makes me giggle – I’d be satisfied to spend the day in my studio, on an artistic journey, and as that thought crosses my mind, I realize that this is what I’m yearning for – some creative time in my own head, whether writing, or painting, or in the garden. Well, the weekend is here, and that’s easily done. I just have to begin again. 😀

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Categories Allegories, art and the artist, Brain Injury, breathe, Free Will, gardening, gratitude, health, Healthy Living, inspiration, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Oregon Trails, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, Roses, solo hiking, Spring, The Art of Being, turning 60, weight loss secrets, winter

Sitting Where I Am

February 26, 2024 //
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I’m sitting quietly in my hotel room. It’s well-past any sort of reasonable time (for me) to have a cup of coffee. So… I make a cup of tea. I sip it slowly, hoping it doesn’t cause a restless night, enjoying the warmth of it in my hands, anyway. I breathe, exhale, relax, and wonder how things are over at the hospital? It’s past visiting hours. I stayed with my dear friend for much of the day, after arriving shortly after visiting hours began. It was a good day for both of us, relative to where we each are in our life and circumstances. I took a break at one point to make room for the painful intimacy of important conversations about where and when and things of that sort. I’m not “decision-making family”, so excusing myself seemed the most appropriate way to proceed. Aside from that, we spent the day together, my dear friend and I, while family and her bestie came and went, and even as my dear friend napped, finally getting some restful sleep (she’d been complaining about the sleep deprivation practices that are not uncommon in hospitals and suffering from a lack of healthy deep sleep for some days). Eventually, family and my dear friend’s bestie returned from errands and things that could not be put off for later, and visiting hours began to wind down. I made my goodbye’s all around, and headed back to the hotel.

…I think about something my Traveling Partner said to me in a message earlier today, in response to my bitching about the bare bland beige hospital decor, “Hospitals treat diseases, not people.” I considered the small things I saw not being done (that surely could have created a more healing environment…) the lack of windows with views in patient rooms, the lack of art on the walls, the lack of anything at all to do while… waiting. People in hospitals do a lot of fucking waiting around. People – patients – in hospitals are often incredibly bored. That’s so unhealthy for human wellness, particularly when there is no way to alleviate it. Nothing to do. I remember it from being in the hospital, myself; the endless maddening boredom. Then there’s something hospitals could do without… the fucking endless beeping of various monitors and machinery. G’damn, it was bad. Ceaseless. Inescapable. Nerve-wracking. Through cat-nap after cat-nap, and wrecking every opportunity for deep sleep, I saw my dear friend’s brow furrow with irritation when yet another round of beeping commenced, often in some room several doors down the corridor. Oh sure, those alarms are intended to get attention, but the nurses are human, too, and eventually they tune out the beeping, especially the commonplace beeps that indicate something, but not something urgent. They can tune them out, over time, but how many patients can? The patients haven’t been forced to listen to it long enough to learn to ignore it. If it’s going to get ignored anyway, why the fuck is it being permitted to continue to destroy the rest that vulnerable ill or injured people need so very much?? I admit it – I just don’t get it. It’s fucking dumb, and it’s also rude. While I’m on about this shit, for fucks’ sake don’t let people’s minds just atrophy while they’re struggling with their health! Make a point to engage their minds, and give them a way to entertain themselves! Be patient enough to wait around for the answer to a question you’ve asked, yes even if that patient has trouble speaking or expressing themselves! Wouldn’t you want that? Oh, and also? Fucking let people sleep. I can’t stress enough how fucking annoying it is to finally fall asleep in spite of pain or discomfort to be wakened by a cheery loud voice seeking to take vital signs or worse – to ask if you’re sleeping. Hospitals are not helping with that shit. Good grief.

I’m cross on my dear friend’s behalf. I sip my tea, and think awhile. I breathe, exhale, relax, and then let that go. It’s evening now, and soon enough I’ll be getting packed to the trip home. My dear friend is in the care of family and friends who love her greatly. She is so very loved.

I sit quietly, listening to my tinnitus. My Traveling Partner and I exchange “stickers” back and forth in messages: kisses, hugs, hearts, fun little animated characters showing affection . It delights me, and I feel loved. I’m eager to be home, and back in his arms. Unexpectedly, I noticed how much pain I’m in. The weather turned rainy this morning, and my arthritis flared up. I’ve stay caught up on my Rx’s this entire detour from the routine, which is not always the case when my routine is broken. Health-wise, I’m feeling pretty good, generally, so the pain caught me a bit by surprise (though it isn’t truly surprising). I sit with that awareness for a moment thinking back over the day; did I take my pain meds? Those are not “on a schedule”, and keeping track is very important. I look in my pillbox. Huh. I find myself surprised to see that I hadn’t found it necessary to manage my pain earlier today, at all. I fix that, hoping I got to it early enough to avoid fucking with my sleep. It’s been a long day, filled with “emotional labor”. I’m tired, and it seems likely I’ll sleep just fine, particularly if I don’t let myself get spun up over “what if I don’t sleep?”. lol

I take a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. Actually? I’m already tired, it’s just too early to go to bed. I send more kisses to my Traveling Partner and pick up the book I’m reading… seems like a pleasant evening to read awhile, before calling it night. Tomorrow will be soon enough to begin again. 😀

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Categories Allegories, Brain Injury, breathe, Free Will, gratitude, grief, health, Healthy Living, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, pain, Perspective, Practices, Relationships, The Art of Being, women

Humans Are the F*ing Worst

February 14, 2024 //
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I glare at my iced coffee for a moment. It’s a half-assed attempt at iced coffee, really, and I’ve already had enough coffee this morning. Still, I had a full cup of still very frozen ice, so I made a cup of strong coffee, let it stand until it was lukewarm, and then poured it over the ice. Simple enough. I haven’t even taken a sip of it yet, so I’m not sure why I made it.

The commute in was… fine. Traffic was light. Most of the people on the road drove safely, purposefully, and at the posted speed limit (maybe a couple miles per hour over it). It was fine. The few exceptions tended to be timid drivers staying in the right lane of two available lanes, and the occasional agro ass-clown driving so significantly over the speed limit as to be setting themselves up as “jack rabbits” – targets of attention making it possible for everyone else to just relax and drive knowing that asshole will be the one getting the ticket, if anyone does. Humans being human.

Human beings lie. Human beings cheat. Human beings act based on greed and entitlement. Human beings lash out violently in anger or based on a subjective feeling of having been transgressed upon. Human beings abandon children. Human beings bomb civilians. Human beings commit acts of violence against other human beings they claim to love. Human beings steal. Human beings attempt to stack the deck in their own favor without regard to the consequences to other human beings. Human beings rationalize and justify their worst behavior with convenient half-truths and bullshit. Human beings are too stupid to refrain from destroying the one planet they live on.

…Human beings are the fucking worst…

We could each (and all) do so much better than we commonly do. Just saying. Do better.

Yes, me too. Yes, you too. Yes, them over there? Them too. 100% of everyone could do better, I feel fairly certain, with the one possible exception of… babies. They’re doing their best every day just developing their cognitive skills, their sense of self and place in the world, and their ability to communicate – maybe help them out with that, and while you’re at it? Teach them ethics and critical thinking skills. Help them growing up knowing to do better – and knowing how.

…I make that sound so easy, right? lol I know, I know – how the fuck do we teach what we clearly don’t know? Tough one. Good luck. I know you’ll do your best, if it matters to you at all. Maybe it doesn’t matter to you? (See “human beings are the fucking worst”, above – I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t matter to you.)

G’damn that cup of iced coffee seems so unappealing now. Why did I even make that? I sigh out loud and wonder why I am in such an irritable mood? Decent commute. Even got to see my Traveling Partner (awake, I mean) and say good morning, and enjoy a kiss before I left for work. I’ve got this quiet, pleasant, comfortable space to work in, that even has a pleasing view of the park on the other side of the street. I’ve got a lot to be grateful for. I drive a car I like. The bills are paid. I have a job I enjoy and coworkers who are skilled and pleasant to work with. The weather has been mild. I’m not in too much pain to manage it today. So… wtf? Why this sour mood? 

I watch the sky slowly changing from the dark of night to the paler, bluer shades of morning-yet-to-come. All the ingredients of a lovely morning, but… here I am. My tinnitus is crazy loud this morning. My headache is… bad. Could be enough to wreck my generally jovial outlook, I suppose.

…On the other hand, human beings actually are the fucking worst, and isn’t that enough to make anyone irritable?

I finally take a sip of my coffee. It’s cold. It’s… coffee. It’s fine. I mean… it’s bitter, and not a great cup of coffee, but if it were my first, I’d be totally okay with it and probably find it entirely unremarkable, mostly. Probably wouldn’t complain about it at all. The complaining isn’t to do with the coffee, I recognize, it’s to do with the complainer – me. The human in the room. Like I said, we’re the fucking worst. lol It’s kind of a shame we’re what became the species acting as steward of this planet. We’re not very good at it, and we bitch about dumb shit way too fucking much.

I didn’t sleep well. Weird dreams. I went to bed at more or less my usual time, and woke shortly afterward from a nightmare that there was a spider in my CPAP mask (there wasn’t, but I did have to wake up and actually check). Later I had a nightmare that I’d forgotten all my passwords and none of them were saved. Later still, I had a nightmare that my Traveling Partner was… gone… and I was alone, penniless, unemployed, and quite old. I woke feeling chills all over, tears pouring down my face, and shivering from imagined cold in a room that was quite a comfortable temperature. (I was super glad to see my Traveling Partner awake in the living room when I got up!) Maybe the difficult night is the source of my poor mood? I guess that makes some sense.

Dreams are dreams, and emotions are not realities. I breathe, exhale, and relax, and work on letting all that go. It’s a new day. There were no spiders in my CPAP mask. My passwords are saved and I do remember those that I need most often, without difficulty. My Traveling Partner is very much a part of my life and I’m eager to see him at the end of the day. I’m alone, for now, but only because I am in this quiet work space, quite a bit earlier than my colleagues tend to start their days. As for being “old”, that’s pretty fucking subjective; I am the age I am. I don’t feel particularly young, but neither do I feel “old”. I’m somewhere in the middle. You know, like… literally “middle-aged”. LOL I shrug off the lingering affect of my poor night’s sleep… and begin again. 😀

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, Brain Injury, breathe, Despair, Fiction, gratitude, health, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, loneliness, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, The Art of Being, turning 60, War and News of War, winter

So It’s Murder, Then?

February 13, 2024 //
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I’m sipping my coffee contentedly and watching daybreak slowly develop from the foggy night.

The fog adds a hint of mystery to a familiar view.

The sky is suddenly filled with bodies; a murder of crows rising from the trees, forming a vast murmuration that swirls betwixt and around the buildings that surround the park just beyond the window. Their cacophony fills the air, and I find myself wondering what they are saying about the morning. It’s a chilly one. Exceptionally cold compared to most Winter mornings this year at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, but still, just barely freezing. I’m comfortable and warm, and grateful for it.

I smile and sip my coffee. I think about words and language and why a flock of crows is called a “murder”? It’s a lovely quiet morning in most respects. It’s a pleasant one, too, and yesterday’s difficulties seem distant and mostly forgotten. Very human. So often whatever is “now” seems mostly to have “always been this way” – it’s a most peculiar cognitive error. I find myself wondering what purpose it serves (or once served a more primitive version of this human experience)?

My calendar is quite full today. I face it without any particular stress. It’s been a week of doctor’s appointments (largely a byproduct of once again having medical coverage through my employer – I’m catching up on things health-wise), but today is free of that “planned chaos”. I sigh quietly. I appreciate myself for having avoided scheduling something into every single day of this week. lol “Way to do the self-care thing properly!” I think to myself, encouragingly. (I’ve been working on taking a kinder tone with myself, and making a point of ensuring my internal monologue is more positive than it has tended to be, historically.)

The sky continues to lighten. The crows have settled into the trees once more – or moved on to parts unknown to do whatever it is that crows do at this hour of the morning. I wonder about that for a moment before moving on, myself.

I run my fingers through my hair and feel the softness of it. The sensation is a pleasant one, but reminds me that I’m overdue to get my hair cut. My bangs are all but gone, and my layers are growing out. lol Funny bit of vanity. I catch myself enthusiastically thinking about getting it cut today, then pull myself back and remind myself of the busy calendar I just reviewed. lol It would not go well for my planning if I squeezed a hair cut into the day – or week. Too much already planned. I think ahead to next week, and chuckle; I’ll likely forget all about it until the week is underway and already planned. It’s just not that important to me. I let it go; it’s something to deal with some other time.

What matters most? I sip my coffee and think ahead to Spring and hiking and camping and getting away out in the trees or on the high desert somewhere under a big sky. When? The weather has been rather mild (locally) this Winter. I wonder when Spring temperatures will be steadily above 50 at night and above 70 in the daytime? I sit thinking about it, eager to begin planning… The time is not now. Not because it’s too soon to plan, but because the sky reminds me that it is a new day. Somewhere beyond the fog the sun has risen, or soon will. The smooth homogenous gray of the sky beyond the windows reminds me that the work day has begun. Planning for another day, another adventure, can wait awhile; it’s already time to begin again.

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Categories Allegories, Brain Injury, breathe, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, inspiration, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Practices, solo hiking, The Art of Being, winter

The Emotional Rug-pull

February 12, 2024 //
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The day got off to a challenging start. Lab work needing to be done had already thrown my routine off more than a little bit, and that seemed fine and accounted for, but real life is not exclusively dependent on my own lived experience of it. Ever. An absolutely reasonable request by my Traveling Partner (more of a wish or hope than a request, actually) that we find somewhere closer to do this sort of thing added a layer of complexity and an opportunity for miscommunication. That didn’t have to be “a thing”, but eventually became one, simply by being one of many details weighing on me.

I rolled with the changes best I could, and even found myself feeling a moment of real satisfaction and delight with a work call that went exceptionally smoothly with great positive outcomes (happy boss, happy customer, happy me)… then… the “rug pull”.

Look, this is a thing probably everyone experiences now and then, I was riding high on a great feeling, and then, suddenly, that was gone in a moment of… something else much less pleasant or satisfying; my partner’s discontent. It happens. There I was feeling good, and then there he was, not feeling so good himself at all. He shared that experience with me, because as it happened, I was the driver of his poor experience (loud conference calls are annoying to have to overhear, successful or not). My mood was immediately wrecked, not because he did anything “wrong” and not because the moment required it, but just because – no bullshit – I’ve got mental health issues, and one of those is that I struggle to maintain perspective, to refrain from fusing with my partner’s emotional experience, and I take shit personally far far too often. Bouncing back is hard for me (the biochemistry of my emotional experience doesn’t resolve quickly) – thus my rather constant harping on resilience and practices associated with it. I need that practice, badly, and even with all the practicing? My results vary.

After the lab work, and getting my Traveling Partner back home, and doing what I could to set him up for comfort for the day, and getting on the road to head to the office to finish work (because rather stupidly I’d also managed to schedule an afternoon doctor’s appointment on this very same f*ing day, with limited room to maneuver or adapt and basically had to go into the city just to get to that appointment later on) – I finally had a chance to get a cup of coffee. It was almost 11:00 by that point, and I was developing a splitting (caffeine) headache, on top of my usual headache. Fuuuuuuuck. Still, 4 shots of espresso shaken with ice goes a long way toward dealing with a caffeine headache. My blood sugar was dipping by the time I reached the office, and I was a seething mess of vague fury and aggravation that extended well beyond any association with the day’s events thus far. I mostly managed to avoid snarling at any hapless humans to cross my path, and got logged in and head-down in the spreadsheets with a quickness. Maybe that’ll be enough?

…It wasn’t, really…

Breathe. Exhale. Relax. Try to remember this shit isn’t personal, it’s just random human bullshit and temper. Let it go. Let it go. Let. It. Go. It’s hard sometimes. I wanted to enjoy that feeling of pride in my work and that sense of accomplishment, and savor a job well done. I didn’t get to do that, even a little bit, and it was less because my Traveling Partner was irked over my loud talking so much as how much it stung to hear about it right then. Like it or not, generally the things my partner has to say just “hit my consciousness harder” – regardless how meaningful, significant, trivial, urgent, heartfelt, or true (or the opposites of any of those things) they may happen to be. The smallest moment of irritation from him is enough to sadden me for at least a moment, and even more so (and for longer) when it’s legit something I’ve done or not done, or something I’ve fucked up for him. That’s a fucking mess right there, I get it. Not super healthy – but refusing to acknowledge my baggage on this doesn’t let me unpack that baggage. The way out is through. So I put myself through the exercise of reflecting on it, asking some hard questions of myself, and weeding out my bullshit from what matters most.

Once I had a minute to think about things more clearly (after some coffee, after some calories), I realized I could not realistically work efficiently and complete the tasks I had in front of me, and also go to that afternoon appointment that was scheduled for a in-office visit (could have maybe made it work for a virtual appointment). So I canceled and requested a reschedule. I tried like hell to pick a date that wasn’t already scheduled for some other appointment (mine or my Traveling Partner’s), and tried to pick a week that wasn’t so overloaded with obvious meetings and calendared workload that it would be a poor fit in general. Once I’d done so, a lot of the stress was gone (although I also miss doing this appointment, which is already overdue).

…You know what wasn’t gone? My shitty mood. I keep finding myself on the edge of tears, and it’s 100% fragility and bullshit and I’m as annoyed with myself over that as over any other detail of the day so far. I think what gets me most about the “emotional rug-pull” as an experience, is how poorly I’m able to bounce back from one of these, and how fucking common they are for me personally. Like… my implicit sense of things is that “the better I am feeling in a given moment, the more likely an emotional rug-pull from some source will be”. The common factor isn’t at all where that might come from, and 100% is simply “me”. I feel relatively confident that both the high likelihood of an emotional rug-pull developing, and how hard it is to bounce back, are “me things”. This stings. Like, a lot. I mean, on the one hand, if it’s me – surely I can work on that, yeah? …My results vary. I keep practicing practices. I keep working on building emotional resilience – and counting on it. I keep failing in this very specific peculiar way (that is not at all unique to me). Frustrating. I stay angry because I’m angry at myself as much as anything else. Angry that it matters enough to fuck with me like this. Angry that “my results vary” as I work to sort this out, over time. Angry, even, that “people” don’t bother to just reality check the likely outcome of sharing negative feedback with others to maybe, just maybe, avoid wrecking a lovely moment. (Note: that’s definitely too much to ask of human beings generally; we are centered in our own experience much of the time, and how the hell would a person even determine reliably how someone else is feeling without asking first, which would become a completely different conversation?)

A lot of people with trauma histories struggle with the “emotional rug-pull” and with a sense of “waiting for the other shoe to drop” any time things seem to be going well. That’s a thing to work on… it’s not easy, and it takes a ton of practice (and many practices). It gets better. It’s not as bad as it once was (for me), I just still deal with it, and when I do it still reliably sucks, and I definitely don’t like the experience at all, nor do I find any value in it. It’s just a shard of chaos and damage – a metaphorical splinter in my paw that I’d like to figure out how to remove.

I take another breath and refrain from having still more coffee (there’d be comfort in that, but also caffeine, and I’ve had mine for the day). I open a bottle of water. I make an effort to begin again.

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Categories Allegories, anger, Anxiety, Brain Injury, breathe, Despair, forgiveness, Free Will, Frustration, grief, health, Healthy Living, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, winter, women
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