On to other topics

 I kind of got what I wanted to say out there with the last few posts. I hope they were helpful, maybe even informative.

Where do I go from here? I have no actual formulated plan. There are many things I could talk about, but most of them are only interesting to me, to be honest. 

Ah, I have one. Fun, from before to after.

I've mentioned fun in previous posts, mostly under the topic of we need to have fun, it's important. I'd like to reiterate that: Fun is really important.

When you spend most of your time rebuilding yourself, your skills and your life, you most definitely need a break. Figuring out what you can handle with your "new" brain can be difficult.

Why would it be difficult to figure out what's fun? How is that an issue?

Well, what you previously did for fun might not be an option for you. For instance, if you can't walk well, running is not likely your thing anymore. If you liked wine tastings, brain injury kinda puts the kibosh on drinking alcohol. If cooking was fun for you, you might be relearning how to sequence the steps properly and multitask in order to get the job done. 

So the fun from before might not be fun after. What can you do?

I've found I have an interest in some sports. I wasn't any type of athlete before, but now, I really enjoy practicing golf, as well as practicing skills for softball. Anyone who knew me before this would tell you me liking participating in any sport was a bit out there. 

Not only that, I'm actually doing pretty well with both. 

Of course, sports are not just good for fun; they also allow for a lot of use of relearned or newly learned skills. I work on many things when doing these activities, but I don't get annoyed, because it's fun.

Hobbies can change over our lifetimes, even without a brain injury or bodily injury. We can take up painting or knitting, hiking or reading, writing or cooking. Everyone changes things up every once in a while. However, hobbies are pretty important across the board, aren't they? They give us things to keep our minds occupied, new things to learn, something to do. Just because we can't think as clearly as we once did doesn't change that.

It might even help some of us. I know it has helped me. I've done a ton of activities in my therapy program, some I wasn't interested in, but most have not only been interesting, they've spurred new hobbies for me.

Even though we've broken our brains, for many of us, we can still find happiness in learning new things. Some of us even get to relearn old things we loved to do and reintegrate them into our lives. If you have ideas of things you might want to do, or ideas of what your loved one with a brain injury might find interesting, give it a try. Don't be too hard on yourself or them about it, but set up a new activity time. Even though so much changes for us in such a short amount of time, there are still important parts of living we need, like fun.

“Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” – A.A. Milne (Christopher Robin to Pooh)

You don't have to say this, necessarily, but it's a good quote to pass on to someone navigating a great difficulty. 

With brain injury, we really are braver than we believe, stronger than we seem, and smarter than we think. If I hadn't believed this, I would have quit years ago. This stuff is difficult! The work never goes away completely, though the amount of it does decrease over time. 

There's always one more new thing to work on, or one more thing that needs doing. Even though we’ve reacquired the tools to get these things done, it doesn't always seem to be a, we, no-brainer. 

There aren't anymore no-brainers for us. As many things that we are able to do, seemingly without thought, don't happen without thought anymore. So much goes into every task we do, from planning to doing to finishing. 

For instance, I have to change GPs, again. It's the third time this year, and the fourth time since the stroke. In order to do this successfully and with a minimal loss of time and effort that has been put in already, I have to hash things out with doctor's office admin departments. I handled changing doctors pretty well in the past, but now the task seems insurmountable. 

I worked with my speech pathologist to figure out who I needed to talk to and what I needed to say, and then part of my health insurance decided I didn't need it. I got that back online, but not before losing an entire week of therapies. Of course, then I forgot I lost the week, and now I'm back at square one, waiting for a call back. 

It's an avalanche of crap I don't need to deal with (because who does, really), and I am more than overwhelmed. Yet here I am, dealing with it. 

Whatever the case, here we are: I’ve made my phone calls, left my messages, made my calendar alarms to remind me to call if they don't get back to me. I’ve done everything on my end that I can until next week, when I hopefully won't forget I need to do all of this. 

This isn't the only circuitous part of my life. It's not the only circuitous part of anyone's life, is it? We all get tackled with any number of strange scenarios at inconvenient times. By God though, I can't get through this nonsense on my own. 

It's always good to get encouragement. This stuff is hard.

Life is hard. We can help each other out in different ways, though. Sometimes all it takes is reminding someone that they are definitely doing better than they think. Not perfectly, but better. 

Don't Jump Topics

OK, hear me out here.

This sounds ridiculous to me. I am the worst about jumping topics. I regularly drive people crazy with my seemingly random rambling. It’s definitely worse since the stroke, of course. Here’s the thing, though: It can get even worse than that when other people do the same thing.

It may not seem fair to say “don’t jump around” when we, ourselves, are treating every new sentence like a springboard to a different idea. I know it’s confusing to keep up with, but we don’t always think in a linear manner. 

There are other reasons, too. Your point, whichever one you’re trying to make, might get totally lost in that mire of messed up thinking called Executive Dysfunction.

What the heck is executive dysfunction, you may ask? Well, it’s a problem with some types of thinking. To quote https://www.flintrehab.com/ :

“Executive functions are skills that allow us to learn new things and manage daily life activities. This can include activities like planning, organizing, and multitasking. It also includes high-level skills such as self-awareness, making decisions with good judgment, and understanding social cues.”

What I’m referring to in particular is that when you constantly change the tack of your conversation, we can get lost. Sometimes slightly lost, sometimes incredibly lost. The weird part is, we might not even realize we’re lost. I’ve found that my brain just wanders off with no regard for what I’m supposed to be listening to.

I hear some of you thinking, “But everyone daydreams! Everyone loses track of conversations! This isn’t brain injury specific!”

This is true. I’m not saying everyone is 100% tuned in all the time. We all have side excursions in our thoughts. We all have those little things we’re thinking of that have nothing to do with what someone is saying and everything to do with, say, dinner, or what I should make for dinner. “Hey, I think I’m out of ketchup. I should get that if we want to have fries tonight. Oh, wait, we have potato chips, don’t need ketchup for those, good!”

With us it can be like that, or it can be “Wow. I’m not sure where they’re going with this. Oh hey! I forgot about those flowers! They’re totally done for. I need to go get new flowers for the table.” And the next thing you know, we’re out the door to get flowers from the garden to put on the table and you’re left talking to the comics-like puff of air in our place.

That would upset anyone, I imagine. It might also make them feel under- or unvalued by the person getting the flowers. It may seem rude to you, as if the person doesn’t care about what you’re saying. It doesn’t mean any of that. 

We could also interrupt while you’re talking, more than usual, even. One of your tangents could lead to us saying, apropos of nothing, “I remember when my dog ran away when I was 7. I was so upset! My dad had to go and look for him all night. Then when he finally brought him home, he was covered in mustard and we didn’t even find out why!” Then, we might look at you like the thought was somehow connected to you talking about how your car broke down on I 97 during October when you were trying to get supplies for your Halloween party, the sequel of which you’re throwing this year, just for family, though. Anyway, you have to run because you have to buy ham on your way home.

See what I mean? By the way, the connection would be the ham, in case you were wondering.

Granted, this is all filtered through my own messed up brain that also has ADHD-like symptoms, but don’t worry. In my mind, I can see my husband nodding his head while reading this, smiling, and thinking, “that’s about right, yeah.” So I’m reasonably confident in my description.

We all have times where our thought processes don’t work well. Minds wander, sometimes farther than we really want them to. It’s not really a conversation ender for most cases. In our case, though, it could earn us The Dreaded Side-eye.

We can get a lot of those. They’re a social cue, like any other. They can make us feel crazy though, and trust me when I say, we feel crazy enough as it is.

For my own part, I do try not to get lost in conversations. I try not to get distracted during explanations. I also try not to daydream during descriptions. It’s really hard, though. Sometimes we’re talking Herculean effort, even.

Staying generally on topic can help us be more attentive to what you want us to know. When we can follow the conversation, we can keep our input a lot more related to the topic at hand. Plus, we’re more likely to stay engaged. As for how to do it, I’m not sure, particularly not at this point in my life, if I’m being honest. It likely involves planning ahead and practice, though. So, not really anything I’m not working on myself, I promise.