It’s often said that no one can know or understand what it’s like to have a brain injury until you are that person. But Mike Strand’s book, Expanded Consciousness, goes a long way toward revealing what it’s really like to be a survivor. Using his format of short essays, he delves into the frustrations, challenges, rewards and disappointments that he – and many other survivors – experience. He takes you into the world and mind of brain injury and you will find his book engaging and revealing whether you are a survivor, family members, caregiver or professional.
Details
|
|
Item | EXCO |
ISBN# | 9781931117654 |
Pages | 100 |
Year | 2013 |
Introduction
Acknowledgements
Routine Reality
Wrapping Your Mind Around It
Meditations on Purpose
Traveling and Brain Injury
Asking is not Begging
Ego and Confidence
On Making Friends
Dating and Brain Injury
Visual Noise
Recovery?
Brain Injury and the Last Days of Pompeii
Deconstructing Happiness
Digesting Grief
The Four Things
Making Assumptions
Lack of Occurrence
Stairs
Brain Injury and Marriage
Learning to Trust My Senses
The Pilgrim
Helping Others
Your True Self
Eye of the Storm
Rational Expectations
Ambushing Myself
Stress Management
Conspiracy
The Diving Bell
More Notes from the Diving Bell
Hard to Know
The Imposter
Dancing
Brain Injury is Too Convenient
A Balance of Humor
Just Kinda Goin’ With It
The Good in Looking Back
My New Superpowers
The Infinite Strength of Compassion
Attitude
Getting Cable
Visualizing Wellness
Friends and Caregivers
My Brain Injury Stream of Thought
A Waking Dream
Explaining Cognitive Deficits
Loss of Ability
Multi-Tasking
The Edge
Wrapping Your Mind Around It
“What is it like to have a brain injury?” If you haven’t actually been asked this, you know that people are wondering it. The only thing harder than trying to understand brain injury if you’ve never had one, is trying to explain it if you have.
Nothing makes you feel more isolated than when someone tells you that they know just how you feel. That they too have a terrible memory, or that they too get confused. The fact that they think they know how you feel only underscores how far they are from that fact. The next time someone tells you that they have the same problems you do, earnestly suggest to them that they get a neuropsychological evaluation so that they can identify their disability and get correct medical help. They will laugh it off of course, and joke that perhaps they ought to. Then you can tell them THAT is the difference between you and them.
I’m not seriously suggesting that you do that. They are just trying to be polite and offer solace. No point in throwing it back in their face.
Every once in a while, a situation or example occurs to me that brings to light some aspect of brain injury that most people can identify with from their own experience. One of these is the concept of “wrapping your mind around a concept.”
Everyone has these moments; times when you’re so tired and worn out that you just can’t grasp the situation. The time and place when you know that if you just walk away, maybe get some rest and come back fresh, that you will be able to handle it. That in the morning the answer will seem so obvious that it is hard to believe that you couldn’t see it last night.
That is what brain injury is like. All you know is that constant nagging feeling that the answer is right there, but you just can’t see it. Except there is no walking away from it; no coming back fresh. Day after day, month after month, year after year, all you know is this constant off-center feeling. This unbearable maddening certainty that the obvious is staring you right in the face only you just aren’t seeing it, and more than likely, you never will.
Even after fifteen years I still feel this way. I definitely have a much better grasp of the obvious than I used to, but it happens often enough that I miss something, or totally misread a situation, that I realize I’m not out of the woods yet.
It is not easy for me to accept that I need the help of others. It does not sit comfortably in my self-image that I cannot always trust what my senses are telling me, or more accurately, what my brain is telling me my senses are telling me.
I will look to my sense of compassion for my sense of worth.