I woke with a pounding headache this morning, and thinking fretfully of subtly out-of-reach goals. My dreams are gone and forgotten, leaving only hints that they were uneasy. I feel well-rested, but there’s this headache.
Do fish get headaches?
The workday begins. I feel distracted and disconnected, thinking more of the evening to come, and the homecoming of a partner who has been away for many days and returns with a travelers tales of adventure, misadventure, and love. Exciting!
There’s little enough to say until after the stories are told, shared, savored, and stored away for another day. Then next week, I travel, myself. It is a busy spring.
I have the sense there is more to say, that there was something queued up in my consciousness that needed some time, some consideration, some words… gone now, if it ever really was. Two oddities of my TBI are the way it affects my sense of ‘novelty’ and ‘completion’. I sometimes struggle for hours trying to remember “that important thing/idea I was in the middle of before I got interrupted” – it often turns out that it was simply something momentarily engaging like a commercial, or a slogan, or a phrase of poetry in my head that was stuck on a sort of loop, and when I finally do recall whatever it was, it not only isn’t ‘important’ – it isn’t relevant or even slightly interesting. The novelty thing is different, equally ‘quirky’ and annoying. I sometimes experience things as novel that I’ve known or been doing for a long while, or used to do a lot and gave up, then returning to it find it feeling completely new. I get the reverse, too, where I don’t at all recognize something as entirely new, and never-before-experienced. That has some problematic moments, since it can occasionally result in having the perception that I know someone and just don’t remember their name, when actually we’ve never met at all and they are an un-vetted stranger. Having a brain injury results in some peculiar vulnerabilities.
In the news, I found some amusement – and offense, let’s be honest – in stories about Karl Rove doing old-fashioned bias-based mudslinging, using the potential for having had a brain injury as an insult. I almost missed the open insensitivity and contempt it indicated for the wide variety of talented people who do live as survivors of brain trauma, I was laughing so hard. Seriously? How is brain damage – with no other information – even an issue? Will candidates now have to have scans to prove their brain is fully healthy and intact? What will happen to congress then? (You should be able to hear my eyes rolling from where you’re sitting, if you’re quiet. lol) It’s been clear for a very long time that critical thinking, a good education, and the will to serve the people of this country are not common characteristics of politicians, and as with the rest of the population, the intellectual and cognitive gifts of legislators are not evenly distributed. lol
Brain injuries aren’t actually uncommon, according to my reading. Very serious ones are less common, but how many people get through childhood without banging their head badly enough to get a concussion? Turns out that’s a bigger deal than we knew. Football players – there are a few there – boxers, really any contact sport has the potential – and how many jobs are out there where a blow to the skull is a known potential risk? Soldiers surely come to mind, so many come home with a TBI, that ‘TBI’ is now a pretty commonly known acronym; it wasn’t before the modern wars in the Middle East. So, if a TBI isn’t particularly uncommon, in one form or another, how is it okay to use that as an insult? It isn’t.
“Brain damage” isn’t actually a joke.
A good day for exploring the possibilities, and looking at things from a new perspective.
Today is a good day for compassion. Today is a good day to welcome someone home. Today is a good day to accept differences and commonalities. Today is a good day to understand that we are each having our own experience. Today is a good day to love.
