I left my notes for blog ideas at home. This, of course, isn’t surprising, just another part of my life.
Today I’m at the place I go on Fridays. It’s nice, relaxed, and the place to see some now familiar people.
It’s not always the easiest place to be (though by no means a bad place to be). The day program itself is more geared toward seniors, so I’m a little young for it. But, it helps my husband for me to come here, so I do.
It’s honestly not all that fun to know that you are a bit of a problem for someone. I don’t mean I cause trouble on purpose, because I don’t. I’ve only really gotten myself into an issue once, way back when I first got home, and decided to try to find free things on the internet. Oh, the spam. The spam! It’s tapered off over the past couple years, finally. I know better than to do it now. I knew better than to do it then, too, but I didn’t have much self control. It was at the beginning, we were still getting used to how I am now, and we hadn’t yet realized that my ADHD was back in the moderate+ category.
So, I screwed up my email for about 2 years. Like I said, it’s gotten better, which is good. I didn’t put my phone number on anything, so I didn’t have to fix that, which is better. And, perhaps best of all, I didn’t buy anything. Complete win on that!
No, I’m not some kind of compulsive spender. I am a compulsive online window shopper, but I really like looking at things, putting them into a cart, and then just deleting them after an hour. So, I get the fun of shopping, and of finding things, but then I don’t have to purchase things.
This has been a huge source of comfort, in a way, as it’s a way to exert some control on my circumstances. If I find something I really do want, I keep it in the cart and send a text to my husband, who will ask me to see the item when he gets home. Or when I get home. Whichever. Maybe we’ll buy it, maybe find it cheaper somewhere else, or maybe not buy it, whatever works with our finances at the time.
This likely sounds like I’m being a bit controlled, and I am, but not in a bad way. What I really am, though, is impulsive, and this is not a good adult trait. So we’ve figured out workarounds. This way, I don’t look for free things on the internet, I don’t overspend, and I still occasionally get things I want.
I pretty much always have the things I need. We’re old hands at not having quite enough money on a regular basis, so this is no different. And I do have a say in household finances, things we buy, things we want, and things we need. We’re going to get another car kind of soonish, and I have a say in that, too, even though I won’t be driving it, as I can’t drive anymore.
I’m only semi-OK with that part.
However, when I think about it clearly and not just stew on it all angry, it makes a lot of sense. Driving would be a Really Bad Idea. I don’t have a great short term memory. I have very little concept of actual time passing–I’m not time blind, but I don’t always have a good sense of when something happened. For instance, I can’t quite remember the time between getting home from rehab and now. I know a few events that I can place by where I was at the time, but most of it’s just a blur.
“But Nocturne,” I hear you saying, “I can’t remember all of the past either. Surely that’s not a result of your brain injury.”
Oh, but it is. I’ve been a bit of a memory keeper for most of my life. It’s honestly caused a few problems here and there. Now, I don’t really have to worry about it. If something upsets me, it’s over and then poof, gone. This actually fits in with how I was before my stroke, to an extent. The things that truly upset me, or truly hurt me, I would kind of file away. My husband often has to remind me when I’m extremely angry with someone, because I would just forget. This has been a thing with us for years, though, because as a sanity saving measure, I asked him to. If I hung on to something, I would end up obsessing on it–not on the person responsible, just the memory itself. My husband never made a big deal of it, just said something like “you’re really not happy with that person, and you were avoiding them for a reason.”
It’s been tough to get used to just forgetting all of the things, however. I used to be a walking rolodex for all family phone numbers, all doctor phone numbers, all work numbers, all bill collector phone numbers. Not anymore. I have to look most of them up. I can recall a few, but not all. I used to remember recipes off the top of my head, and I can still recall a few, but I have to write the rest down, or I’ll forget I even made it in the first place. I used to know all the birthdays, and now I can only remember the ones in November (everyone has a heavy birthday month, that’s ours). And then there’s the most infuriating thing: We play Minecraft as a family, for fun. I have certain things that I like to do, mainly just mine all I can. Now, though, if I’m mining and I get blown up by a creeper or something, I won’t be able to remember what I was doing before the creeper blew me up. So, all of my stuff is just poof, gone.
I realize this isn’t the biggest issue in my life, but it’s still aggravating.
Actually, many things that have to do with my lack of memory are aggravating, as I’m sure you can imagine.
Some aren’t. I can sometimes completely forget I’ve watched a tv show, or listened to a podcast, or read a book. I actually freaked myself out a bit over a year ago (or so, it’s honestly just a guess on the time frame). I’d been avoiding reading books for the entirety of the time since the stroke, as at first I couldn’t really get my brain to actually understand what I was reading, or I would forget where I was in the book. One day, I apparently just really got into a book and read it for hours on end. I put it down, and then picked it up the next day, completely forgetting that I’d read it the day before. As I started reading it, I already knew the plot…and kind of lost it. I didn’t remember reading the book the day before, I knew I hadn’t read it before having the stroke, and yet I knew the plot and what was going to happen. I stopped reading it pretty quickly, feeling like an extra in The Twilight Zone. I told my husband about what I was feeling, and he told me I’d read it the day before for several hours.
That freaked me out so much I didn’t try to read anything again for another 10 months. I switched to strictly listening to podcasts and listening to books. I seem to do better hearing and remembering than reading and remembering. I have a book now that I started, and remember starting. I want to read more of it, but I need a certain type of environment to do so, and spring is not that time, unfortunately. Too much going on. I’ll revisit when things are less…springy.
At this point, I’ll let you in on a little plot twist: I had been explicitly told to read a book I had already read as my first book after the stroke. I can’t remember who told me this (surprise, right), but I know it was one of my therapists, likely either Speech or OT (both help with coping mechanisms, in the programs I’ve been in, anyway). So, I’d been told, and likely thought “Eh, I’ll be fine,” freaked myself out, and didn’t try reading again for almost a year.
Bit of advice: don’t do that. If someone tells you to do something a little differently after a brain injury, maybe at least try it their way first, you know? I mean, at that point they will likely have gotten to be a trusted source of info in your life, and with good reason, usually an entire degree or several. What they say could really make your life easier, and maybe even less creepy.
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