He’s no different from most of us.

And neither am I.

I’ve long battled my weight.  When I was an athlete and then when I worked eighty to a hundred hours a week, I was strong and active and I kept the weight at bay.   When I suffered my TBI and everything in my life came to a screeching halt, however, the weight piled on.  Sudden, complete and utter inactivity.   Loss of balance and the control of my legs.   Medications.   Comfort eating.   Not having to zip up skirts every day.   Laying on my couch waiting for my injury to heal and for my life to return….

The numbers soared.

Lord knows I’ve tried to get it off.  I’ve jumped on more bandwagons than I could ever count.   There was the no carb diet and the sauerkraut diet.   The Cabbage Soup and the Fit For Life.   There was the fruit and oatmeal and the no eating after 7pm.   There was the chicken and broccoli and the no sweets.

I’ve counted this and eliminated that.   Someone would call and I’d be putting drops of this under my tongue.   Another friend would email and I’d be ordering up this type of vitamin.    Lemon water  and digestive enzymes and self-hypnotizing…

There’s been researching body types and blood types and family history and food color.  Endless Internet searches and retold accounts of how the neighbor of a friend’s sister’s boyfriend lost sixty-two pounds eating only apples and rice….

There have been treadmills and Pilates.   Yoga and the elliptical.   Weight lifting.  Karate.   Dancing.  Zumba for beginners.

Currently it’s kale and coconut oil.   The battle wages on.  The search for the magic bullet continues.

It’s more fun than the truth.

The truth is that, when I have eaten sensibly, cut out the white sugars and starches, consumed some water, worked out regularly and gotten good sleep, I lose weight.

No magic bullets.  No gadgets.   No battery-operated belts which simulate sit-ups.   No plastic pants and no non-invasive body sculpting.  No lipo and no heat-activated laser fat melting.   No fat cell cream and no spells cast by the notoriously trusted fat ninja from a small band of thin warriors in the jungles of the Amazon.

Damn.  I loved their outfits.

Too many times we, as TBI survivors, want the magic bullet.   We want the infomercial that tells us in thirty minutes how we can have a new, better, happier life if we just grab our credit card and call this number in the next ten minutes.   Shipping and handling, free.

But wait!  Call now and receive TWO new brain-healthy lives for the price of one PLUS the never-before-available egg boiler that doubles as a hair straightener and tire inflator.

The facts don’t change just because we don’t like the facts.

The facts don’t change just because we choose to ignore them.

It is another New Year and thank God we are all still here with another kick at the can.  To start over again.  To crack open a sparkling fresh calendar and resolve to change our bodies, our health, our relationships, our financial situations.

And in the silence of our thoughts.  In the quiet of our hearts.  When we turn off the infomercials and power down the computer….

We know that the only way he or she will never hit us again or abuse us again is if we terminate the relationship and move out, once and for all.   We know that the only way we will get better at shooting freethrows is if we practice shooting freethrows.   We know that the only way we will get better grades is if we actually go to class and study more.   And the only way we are going to lose weight is if we eat less, eat better and move more.

Dammit.

For those of us hoping to live lives this New Year which are less consumed with brain injury, there is the simple truth that we must then begin to live lives which are less consumed with brain injury.  We must, every day, step over the ruins of a life that no longer exists and keep walking towards a new one.  Despite the problems thinking.  Despite the legs that don’t work right.  Despite the headaches.   Despite the messed up words.  Despite everything.

Not unlike any change.   Not unlike any new.

It is a one-day-at-a-time proposition.

Like the billions who, today, will wake up and try not to have a drink, light a smoke, go back to him/her, skip class, reach for that pill bottle…we must wake up each and every day and don the armor of the determined.   To battle the sneaking, stenching, daring, taunting doubts which nip at our heels and tell us we simply are not good enough, strong enough, worthy enough to enjoy success and happiness.

It is in the promise that, each morning, we will begin it believing that we are.

One of the biggest challenges for me in my weight loss battle is to not let one bad day last for three months.   To not have brownies for my birthday Sunday and then wake up in August twenty pounds heavier wondering what the fu&k happened to my New Year’s weight loss resolution.   LOL.

We have to remind ourselves enough and love ourselves enough to try again every day.

Let’s be kind to ourselves.  Let’s forgive ourselves the stumbles and bumbles and mumbles.   Let’s do something today to move toward our version of happiness.   And then let’s do it again tomorrow.

Successful recovery after brain injury has little to do with lingering symptoms.   It has a whole lot more to do with lingering broken hearts and forfeited dreams and the bitter nasties of feeling cheated of a life we had chosen.

Let’s choose a new one.

Let’s choose a great one.

The facts do not change until we change them.   Let’s change them for the better, beginning today.

I wish all of you the good health and happiness that you strive for this New Year.   The wonderfully warm waves of personal victory and success washing over you time and time again.  Whatever your struggle, your challenge, your mountain, I wish you strength in easing it, solving it, climbing it, beating it.

Let’s be happy.   Let’s find happy.   Let’s create it and protect it and prioritize it and relish it.

Happy New Year to all of you.   I’m cheering for you.

It’s been a long time now but I can recall participating in a Christmas show at church where I delivered the miraculous story of the birth of baby Jesus.  I wore patent leather shoes and lacy socks and a red velvet dress that itched at the collar.  I stood up in front of that tiny church with all the candles glowing and the twenty-foot-high Christmas tree up near the altar all decorated with ornaments made by our Sunday School classes.

The windows were frosted and we wrote our names in the condensation.  It smelled like candle wax and too much perfume.  We were late and had to sit in the folding chairs in the back.  My mom took a picture of the inside of her purse.  The man in front of me who smelled like liquor nodded off three verses into Oh Come, All Ye Faithful. And I had no idea what frankincense and mur were.  Does anyone know what mur is?

Now, my memory may be forty years older and brain injured and racing towards menopausal memory melt, but I sure don’t recall the story of Jesus’ birth having anything to do with people stomping over a dead body in Target to get a Black Friday deal on a flat screen TV.   I may have forgotten most of my lines but I know they didn’t mention pepper spraying fellow shoppers in order to gain a competitive edge.

Maybe we’ve lost Christmas.

I can go through my list of addresses to send Christmas greetings to and most have a change, a loss, a diagnosis, a twist of fate, a broken heart…

We keep losing what we grew up with and have always known.  They predict soon newspapers and writing checks will be a thing of the past.

We’re all so busy and so much has changed in our lives.  People die and traditions die, too.  Homesteads where our first Christmases were born are lost and left.  There are so many obligations that we have to reschedule Christmas, split it, fit it in somewhere.

Seems maybe we’ve strayed from Christmas.  So far that we’ve forgotten that miracles do happen.  So far that we no longer hope and dream.  So far from when we couldn’t wait for morning.  The sheer promise of good.  The anticipation of pure happiness.

So this year I wish you Christmas for Christmas.  I wish you that special something that has long meant Christmas to you.  That brings you back to a time when we didn’t know any better than believing in magic, in the miracle of one most glorious day.

Maybe it’s an ornament your mother’s mother made.  Maybe it’s a special cookie recipe you haven’t enjoyed in years.  A quiet evening by the fire in front of the Christmas tree lights.  The sounds and songs of carolers by moonlight.  The candlelit midnight service singing Silent Night.

However Christmas comes back, that’s what I wish for you.  When all the craziness we’ve created has run out of time, I wish you moments of peace.  Perfect strolls down Memory Lane.  Hope for a wonderful new year.

Maybe we can all simply wish well for each other.  That never goes out of style.  That never runs out of stock or is back-ordered.  To shake hands, to hug and to hold.  To really wish each other well.  Perhaps that is the greatest gift.  One not found on any store shelves.  No sales.  No deals.  It costs us only a sincere heart.  A moment’s grace. A warmth that is more powerful than grudge and greed, hatred and pettiness.

I wish you Christmas.  I wish you good health and true happiness on the path that you are on.  I wish you healing for every part of you.  To forgive and be forgiven.  I wish you moments of the season that fill your heart with joy, with music, with quiet tears of thanksgiving for all that we are blessed with.

Today and every day, I wish you Christmas.

Kara

Shamelessly sentimental. 

I was thinking about Rudolph and how far that simple, sweet message reaches.   As brain injury survivors, a lot of us feel like Rudolph at one time or another.  Set aside.  Left out.  Without a place.   Like the forgotten souls on the Island of Misfit Toys. 

There’s no way around it.  Some of our trains have square wheels now.   We are spotted elephants and Charlies in the Box and fish that swim and cowboys that ride ostriches.

And a lot of us feel like Rudolph did when he and his buddy were horsing around and having fun and then his black fake nose popped off.    You catch their reactions.  Those first facial expressions.   That shocked look in the eyes.  That moment before they hide their reactions to us speaking or stumbling or any number of things that make us the ones who don’t get picked for reindeer games….

But the message that rings out louder than any ridicule, any laughing, any mocking…is the one that says:   Make it your strength.

Take that bad luck, that horrific moment, that twist of fate, that flippin’ blinking nose of yours and MAKE IT YOUR STRENGTH!!!

Recognize what it took to survive it.   Summon the courage and the determination that it took to mount a recovery.   Gather about you all that is good and right about you and the people you consider loved ones. 

And soar.

Santa went back to the Island of Misfit Toys and he gathered up ALL the toys because he knew they are all loveable.  WE are all loveable.  There is a place, a waiting and welcoming place, for every square-wheeled one of us.

And I will never believe any different for you.  For me.    For all of us.

The Whos in Whoville knew that it didn’t take fancy boxes and bows, blinking lights and ribboned wreaths to make Christmas.   What is worth and worthy and worthwhile….will never be found in what you lost.   But instead, in what you found.  In what you realize.  In what you recognize and determine important.  In what cannot come and go.  Cannot be stolen.  Cannot be taken.

It is an unshakeable strength.  An unwavering understanding that we deserve love and happiness and success.

Surely every one of us will have those moments when people shy from us and, worse, pity us.  When they are ashamed of us, embarrassed for us, maybe mock us.

But when that happens, you remember where Rudolph ended up.  Rudolph’s nose saved Christmas!!!   In that last scene Rudolph is leading the team, soaring.   Off into the night, leading the way.   Needed, necessary.   Not in spite of his nose.  BECAUSE of it. 

Don’t you ever forget that Rudolph rocks that kick-ass blinking nose of his.   Know it and own it.  Know it and embrace it.  Know it and positively soar.

Merry Christmas, my fellow misfit toys.   I love you guys.

Are you going to wear your stretchy pants?   Take that second helping of stuffing?  Save room for the pumpkin pie? 

Are you going to burn those biscuit bottoms again?   How ’bout those potatoes?   Lumpy?   Are you going to nail the turkey this time or is it going to be dry again?  Are you going with the canned cranberry gel or the real cranberries?

What are YOU doing this Thursday?  

Are you going to dread seeing your relatives?  Dread spending time with the parents?  Are you going to wish you were somewhere else or with someone else?   Maybe sit and slouch and pout in the corner and text all day?

Are you going to hate having to cook and clean up for fifteen unappreciative guests who come early and fall asleep on your couch late?  Are you going to pretend to get along with your spouse so that nobody knows you are divorcing?   Are you going to privately resent going to his side of the family or her side of the family because their stuffing is god-awful…

What are YOU doing this Thursday?  What are you choosing to do this Thanksgiving?

Are you going to hate?  Bitch?  Criticize?  Lament?  Dread?  Rage?  Lose your patience?  Fail to appreciate? 

What are YOU going to do this holiday?  How are YOU going to recognize this holiday of Thanksgiving?

I know what some people will be doing this Thanksgiving. 

This Thursday eleven people are going to die from asthma.   Fifteen hundred will die of cancer while another 3400 will be diagnosed.

Although Michigan isn’t scheduled until 3:30 today, I was up and interested to tune in to the Penn State/Nebraska kickoff at noon.   Most of the world knows what has happened at Penn State in the last week.   When news of a scandal involving a former assistant coach allegedly engaging in sexual acts with young boys broke last Saturday, it took less than a week to topple the career of one of the most beloved and successful coaches in the game, as well as ending the careers of several high-ranking officials deemed culpable in the scandal’s cover up.  The fallout is far-reaching and it promises to continue for months and, more likely, years to come.

I watched last night as ten thousand people from the Penn State community held a candle light vigil for the young victims, now in their early twenties.  I watched today, prior to kickoff, when an entire stadium fell silent as both teams kneeled at midfield in silent prayer.

I wept.

The images were touching, absolutely.   But I couldn’t help thinking to myself….

Stop the silence. 

Stop moments of silence and vigils of silence.  Stop bowing your heads and stop closing your eyes.  

I wish they would have had a moment of screaming.  Of noise.  Of punching their fists in the air and stomping.

I wish the band would have played a hundred different songs at the same time.  I wish the fans would have jumped up and down in the bleachers until it registered on the Richter Scale.

Because silence is what got us to this place to begin with.

It was silence along too many disturbing links up the chain of command that failed to save, not only the child in the shower with the sixty year old man, but every boy molested by that man afterward.

In disturbing and criminal moments of silence all over the world, people choose to turn the other way, to not make waves, to not create awkwardness, to mind their own business, to keep peace in the family, to keep their jobs, to keep things simpler, to pretend it didn’t happen…

And the sounds of silence, of all that screaming silence, has been the graveyard for countless dreams, for future healthy relationships, for wonderful self-esteem and all the other facets of life stolen from young victims everywhere.

I was seven when I was first molested.   Seven.

Seven is for snow pants and construction paper turkeys for Thanksgiving.   Seven is for flag football and dance recitals and patent leather shoes.    For swim lessons and cursive writing and licking the mixer of cake batter.  Seven is for dressing up and dancing around and singing freely and watching cartoons.

I was seven and enduring the sickness of a man, my uncle,  probably forty years my senior.   His words.   His whispers.  His mouth.  His hands.   His body.

It went on for five years.   And, in that time, there were some before me and some after me who suffered as well.    And the sounds of silence saved none of us.  

There were people who knew and people who suspected and none stepped in, stepped up or stepped across that line where doing right means more than anything.  

None barged in and threw him off me.   None grabbed those huge hands from the teeny nipples of a seven year old and beat the shit out of him for me.   No one called the police.   No one did anything.

And I found out about the sounds of silence.    Silence only pierced by the sound of young tears wondering why…..

I am a healthy 46-year-old who has put in the time and done the painstaking work of sexual abuse recovery.    In therapy.  In my heart.  In my body.  In my mind.   In my soul.    I know healthy love and I enjoy healthy love.  I have self-esteem and confidence and pride.   I will look you in the eye and I will shake your hand.   I will stand up for me.   I am not ashamed of what I experienced, nor do I feel complicit in it.  

I am well.  

But I weep for the little girl who knew what a French Kiss was by the second grade.   I weep for the teenager who, when other girls were all giggling about their first kisses and first touches, knew my first kiss was not one to be celebrated.  Knew that it was dark and secretive and there was nothing innocent or sweet about it.

The last thing those young boys from the Penn State sexual abuse scandal need are more moments of silence.   They’ve endured enough silence to last a lifetime.

If anything good comes out of the wreckage that, one week ago, appeared to be one of the finest institutions in America, let it be the determination of the countless who may one day have the chance to really make some noise.  To stop bowing their heads in silence and, instead, to raise up and scream their bloody heads off in order to stop child sexual abuse.

Make the waves.  Suffer the awkwardness.  Stand up to the pressure.  Be strong in the face of what is simply right.    Be determined and resolute in the mission to save our kids.   To keep them precious and innocent for as long as THEY choose. 

Save the sounds of silence for the dead.   Leave the bowed heads and the closed eyes for those whose futures are already lost.  

Let’s do something while we’re living that actually saves the living.  Celebrates, protects and cherishes the living.    Let’s give them the futures they deserve.    Let’s preserve them the innocence they were gifted. 

Make some noise.    They’re counting on us.

Traumatic brain injury is the most clever of masks.   It parades us out there as normal people.   Many of us look no different than we did before we were hurt.  We keep hearing, “You look great!”

But it hides a darker reality. 

Most of the masks you see on Halloween are just the opposite.  They ARE the darker reality.  Vampires and ghouls and witches concealing the innocent young faces of our excited youngsters wound up on pillow cases full of sugar.

But, make no mistake, most of us are hiding.   We are trying not to be seen, to be caught, to be recognized, to be revealed, to be uncovered. 

For the brain injured, we hide symptoms which Society frowns upon.   Which our employers and friends, neighbors and family members all whisper about.   We are a handful of not-so-pleasant things that people without injuries keep forgetting are caused by injury and not the fault of failed characters.

Endless comparisons of who we were and how we were and, in most instances, we now fail to pass muster.  Sometimes we feel like we should be on the Island of Misfit Toys.

But I took off my mask years ago.   I was exhausted by it.   I had lied and covered up for a long time early on.   Months, maybe a year even, after I was hurt.  

I didn’t want people to know I had lost track of what they were saying.  I didn’t want them to know I had just fallen in their bathroom.  I didn’t want them to know I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember their name.

I didn’t report when I’d get lost or when I’d become confused or frustrated or scared.   It was easier to wear the mask then.  Easier not to alarm them or embarrass them or disturb them or make them uncomfortable.  

But, like the mask I wore when I was six, it gets hot under there.  Sweaty.  You can’t see well.  The elastic gets caught in your hair.  The plastic cracks.

At some point you just can’t wait to take it off.

And so I did.

It was reported this past week that hundreds of millions of tons of garbage from Japan’s tsunami and earthquake last March are slowly floating towards our shores.   All the remnants of a disaster.  From refrigerators to flip flops and plastic bottles and anything else that can float. 

It all comes ashore eventually.  All the remnants of disaster.

When I was a kid, I would come home and dump out all my candy and separate it into piles.   I kept the good stuff.  Milk Duds and Fudgies and caramels…

 The broken Pixie Stix and all the colored powder went in another pile.   The awful Black Crows, Clark Bars, black Chuckles and things I didn’t like went into a pile for my parents.

I took off my mask back then and made piles out of all that I had.  I separated them into things I liked and wanted to keep and things I didn’t like and wanted to give away.

Maybe we were all smarter at six.

After brain injury, our lives…our debris….comes crashing into shore inevitably.    It’s out there all right.  Out there, sure enough.  

It’s coming.  The remnants of disaster.

At some point we have to deal with the debris.  To go through it and find anything left to save.  Anything worth salvaging. 

But then, like black Chuckles and Black Crows, we have to give away what we no longer want and can no longer use.    If you leave the broken Pixie Stix in there, everything will be covered in sticky powder. 

We gotta look at the remnants of our lives before we were hurt.   We have to realize what we don’t even miss, what we have already replaced, what, perhaps, we have grown out of.

Often we are surprised to find that we have already moved on in more ways than we feared we might have to.

Monday I’m going to go and celebrate Halloween with my nephew and niece who are now seven and almost five.   I can’t wait to see how delighted and excited they are by the holiday.

But I won’t wear a mask Monday.   Never again.   It’s hot and sticky and the elastic gets caught in my hair. 

I’ll be me.   With all my stumbles and mumbles and bumbles, I’ll just be me.  That’s going to have to be good enough and, thank God, I’ve realized it already is.

But it’s 9-11 and, like so many, I have been returned to an event which, even ten years later, remains too big to hold all at once.   So many of the images are the same and yet, now that the shock has worn off, I think I feel them more.  

I cried a lot tonight.

A dear friend of mine is a breast cancer survivor who now works with Stage Four breast cancer fighters.  Too many are, sadly, not likely to live much longer and many are running out of fight to fight.

She shared with me an interesting perspective from some of those women.  A truth that I had never considered.  One that I have no perspective to imagine.  

She told me that they hate the pink ribbon.  Everything about it.  That it feels like the happy pink hopeful walks and ribbons and tee shirts and hats and posters and all that is pink ribbon stuff in this world is not meant for them.  That they stand aside from that, in a darker place where hope will not reach back for them.  In a walk where they cannot catch up to the place where people are talking cure.

That really struck me.

Tonight I was thinking about all the beautiful tributes to the thousands of lives lost on 9-11.  I am, admittedly, a sucker for crisp uniforms and white gloves and chills-bringing trumpets playing Taps.  I love seeing an entire crowd singing,  “God Bless America” with their hands over their hearts.   I love those field-size flags they showed at all the football fields and baseball stadiums.

It’s all really big and maybe better that way.  Easier to take.  Softer, maybe.   Softer, yes.   Smiling women in pink ribbons holding hands as they cross the finish line of the 3 Day Walk for Breast Cancer.   Angelic-voiced children singing patriotic songs at a breath-taking 9-11 National Memorial.

It takes the ugly out of it a little, I think.  It makes it more palatable.  Gives us something nice and soft and pretty that we can use as a symbol for a more hideous truth.  Put on a yellow “Live Strong” rubber wristband.  Wear a puzzle Autism pin.  Get a calendar and a hoodie when you donate to animal cruelty organizations.

Gussy up the truth.  It’s better than seeing a picture of a cat after someone has cooked him in the microwave.

And then I watched a special tonight on 9-11 and they showed this huge metal beam that had been curled around into a circle in such an unnatural way that I couldn’t lose myself in the pretty anymore. 

And I wept.

Real people were blown away by the same force capable of bending and twisting a huge, thick steel beam into a circle.    I thought of our skin.   The pretty skin of young women or the clean-shaven skin of young men-all these beautifully-young and bright and talented and valuable and wonderful people at work on a  gorgeous Tuesday morning in September.  And how our utterly mortal bodies could possibly stand up to such a force…

They didn’t stand a chance.

There was a chunk of debris, round and thick, tangled…Like a big disk in a way.  Kind of like a rock.   It was four FLOORS of the building smashed and compressed so completely and impossibly that they could only assume bodies were flattened in it and so they treat it as sacred…

It is hard to know the truth.

The documentary described the smoke that first responders, civilians and site workers breathed in for days and weeks and months after the Twin Towers collapsed.  Inside that dust was the remnants of millions of light bulbs.  Think about that.  Never occurred to me.  They were breathing in glass!  Mercury, asbestos, lead, metal, every noxious substance you can imagine and yes, human remains.  They were breathing in human remains.

It’s easier to watch the President lay a pretty wreath at a stone memorial.

I was thinking then about this blog and how I try, whenever I can, to poke fun at myself and to lighten up the dark pathway that is traumatic brain injury.  I gussy it up just like we do at every turn:  major league baseball players using pink bats for breast cancer or wearing light blue wrist bands for prostate cancer.

We all have our ribbons.  Even sinners wear nice clothes to church.

Tonight there was no escape from the truth.   I had to sit with the understanding that  those firemen went to one, two, three, four funerals A DAY for weeks until they had buried all of their friends. 

It’s hard to know the truth.

Ten years later and the people who worked at Ground Zero all those months are now starting to acquire cancers they are convinced are linked to the unspeakable things they breathed in while trying to save lives, recover bodies and clear wreckage.   Marriages have been lost, jobs have been lost, dreams have been lost and now, quite possibly, their futures too. 

So we gussy it up.

I know and have seen and heard stories of and from brain injury survivors and their loved ones that I cannot visit as often as, perhaps, they deserve.   Visuals that literally squeeze my heart and knock the stuffing from me.  Their truths are cruel sentences I can only be thankful I was not asked to serve.

Maybe tonight I weep for them too.

But I realized tonight, as I watched those people touch the bronzed names of their lost loved one at the 9-11 Memorial, that we have to gussy it up.  

It had to be bronze.  It had to be glorious.

The ribbons of breast cancer have to be bubble gum pink.  The help for starving, dying, rib-showing kids in Africa has to be fun concerts with sexy stars.  The brass buttons on the perfectly-pressed military uniforms have to be shiny and glistening as they salute our flag.

And I have to keep trying to bring a little humor here and there in a blog about an injury that isn’t very funny at all.

We have to gussy up the truth because we have to live with it.  We have to go on with it.   

We have to carry it into tomorrow.  And the day after that. 

It’s heavy as hell and we need a little help for the long run.  Maybe a little morbid humor.  Maybe a little reprieve.

We have to gather at brain injury conferences and 9-11 Memorials and Breast Cancer Walks so that we can be together.  So that we don’t have to hold the truth alone.

It’s not about hiding the truth.  On the contrary, it’s because we KNOW the truth.  It’s about holding it for as long as we have to hold it.  And holding it together.

I will continue to enjoy news coverage of women walking arm and arm in a sea of pink in order to honor their loved one who beat or succumbed to breast cancer because I prefer believing they will one day cure a disease that could have taken my friend, or any of my loved ones.  I will continue to write blog entries that poke fun at myself and try to bring a chuckle to people struggling every day with bodies no longer willing to accept commands because no one can push a stone uphill every day of their lives without resting a bit.    I will continue to sing our National Anthem with tears in my eyes and my hand over my heart because I choose to believe in a nation that is strong enough to overcome any threat against her.

It’s because of the truth, not instead of it.  It is because I am determined to carry it.  Because I am determined to carry it with you.   Because I am determined to LIVE with it.  To live.

That I won’t be broken, even when my heart is.   That I won’t run from fear, even when I’m scared.  That I won’t forget those lost, even when their memory hurts like hell. 

That I’ll go on with you.   That we’ll go forward for them.  Together.  We’ll continue to live.   As long as we get.  Knowing that easy was never promised.  Knowing that too many are not as fortunate. 

And knowing that the sun does not trick us into believing there is no darkness.   But that it still feels awfully good on our faces after a long, stormy night.

So, wanting to take my own advice, I try to focus on things in everyday life that are “normal.”  Stuff that everyone battles and conquers, enjoys and delights in, suffers and survives.  Car repairs, falling in love, fixing leaking pipes, getting ready for college football season, wishing corn- on- the- cob season would last longer, cleaning the garage, telling myself that cornbread really is a vegetable, etc. 

Today it was yoga.  Normal, wonderful, healing, helping yoga.  Yoga is my friend.

Now…Fifteen years ago I was younger, obviously.  I was more fit, more lean, more flexible, stronger. 

Today I feel like a Budha statue.

I knew yoga would help me to increase my flexibility.   I have to lose weight as well so I found online this fabulous ten minute workout called, “Weight Loss Yoga For Beginners.”

This!!!!! THIS, I tell myself, is my answer.  My normal.  My path back to being slim and fit and strong once more.   Everyone’s doing yoga, right?  It’s a typical, normal thing that healthy, normal people do.   No brain injury stuff to deal with.   I am tough, I tell myself.  I used to play quarterback in an all-boys football league.   How hard could this be?  It’s like poetry and ballet.  Pretty and happy like peeps at Easter.

Look out, size ten jeans, here I come!!!!!  Weight loss yoga for beginners…

My famous final words were, “What could possibly go wrong?”

Well, for starters, I don’t have a mat.  No big deal.  I’ll do it on the oriental rug.  Note to self:  buy kneepads for yoga. 

I’m a good fifteen feet from my computer monitor and can barely see what she’s doing but I’m feeling confident that I can simply make up what I can’t decipher.  How hard can this be?  It’s only ten minutes.

The woman has a low, easy, comforting voice.  She is lovely.  Like spring, she is.  The epitome of health and fitness.  Free, easy movements.  Flowing, glowing.  She is my hero, I decide.  This goddess of ideal health.  She is speaking and I find myself purring rather unexpectedly.  I may even have been giggling.

And then Holy Sh*t!! OMG!! WTF!!!  Did you see THAT!!!!!

She bent her body as if there were hinges, HINGES!!! at her waist.  I’m not lying.  Like a flippin’ piece of paper, she just folded straight down and I’m thinking WHOA!!!!   Nobody can fold down like that.   That is unflippinreal.

From across the room I yell, “Hey, Gumby woman!!!  You look like a sheet hanging out on the line.  No flippin’ way I’m folding down like that.”

She then moves onto other positions.  We do things on our knees that apparently shatter my kneecaps  into several large, jagged pieces.   I curse the lack of kneepads.

We allow energy to shoot out of our heels.  She has her face to the ceiling while mine is barely looking above the floor.  We put the pressure of tractors onto our shoulders, separating them cleanly at the socket.  Note to self:  look for brother’s high school football shoulder pads in garage.

I am now sweating profusely.  My arms are shaking.  I’m out of breath. 

Geez, how long is this workout….

I crane my head over my warrior pose arms, now “pushing the air down”  like she directs and realize….OK, it’s been almost two minutes now.

Crazy Gumby woman now wants me to do something called a Downward Dog.  Now I have owned dogs.  I know dogs.  I love dogs.  THAT does not look like any of my dogs.  My understanding of a downward dog is one of my German Shepherds laying down and rolling over, showing me a belly to scratch while chewing on a Beggin’ Strip.

No, this Downward Dog is something altogether different.  Like inhuman different.  There is no laying down.  My belly isn’t scratched.  No bacon anywhere in sight.   This crazy Gumby foldy woman is now walking her feet up towards her hands.  Walking them right up to her hands until she is closing like a CD case and it finally hits me.  She’s no Gumby.   Oh no no no no no…No normal person can do that with her body.  Foldy hinge woman.   No.  Nobody human does that. 

I know now.  It becomes clear to me.  This is bigger.  Far bigger.

This woman is Satan.

Now, admittedly, I was shaken.   The Bible said the Devil will come as a normal, likeable person whom crowds will flock willing to.

At this point I have to admit that I didn’t expect Satan to come as a yoga instructor.   My bad.

I am standing there in my Warrior Two Pose wondering what does one do when one’s yoga instructor is Satan?   Does she know I know?   Obviously she can see me here through the screen.   Do I make a run for it?  Can I even run, now that my legs have been reduced to mere pudding logs?  Was that her plan all along? 

I find myself wondering, is it wrong, somehow, to keep on with the session when you realize your instructor is Satan?  I’m up to six minutes now.  I hate to quit when I’m so close.

I remember how many times friends had told me, “Yoga is hell.”  DumDum, me.   They were warning me.  I had no idea….

Satan now tells me to cross my left elbow over to the outside of my right knee.  She does it with no effort.  I’m assuming she could have reached that left elbow around  and around her right ankle if she had felt like showing off.   I was half expecting her to tell me to twirl my flippin’ head around in circles until I spit out green stuff. 

She’s telling me in her soft, easy, I’m- hypnotizing- you- to- come- join -me -in- Hell kind of way,  to just breathe.  Deep breaths.   In and out.  Easy.  Soft.  Even.  Nice easy breaths. 

I’m panting and close to hyperventilating.  I’m starting to see white and I’m wondering if I should run to the white light.  Maybe this is how it works.   I can’t know for sure.   I collapse against the wall, resting my jagged knee puzzles.

Now she wants me to stand with my legs bent and make a triangle with my arm straight up and my other hand touching the floor.  She says, “As if you are leaning against a wall…”

I yell out, “Hey crazy foldy Satan bitch, I’m already leaning against the wall….”

She does not send lightning.  I find myself vaguely grateful.

We move onto pushups and I realize that, even with a brain injury, I have crystal-clear memories of doing pushups.   Somewhere in a happy place with toe socks and Shaun Cassidy posters and rock candy…

That was such a happy time.

Before Satan.

I assume by now that my elbows have sustained, at least, hairline fractures.

Eight hours or three days passed and I am face down on the Oriental rug, sweating profusely, breathing heavy, knee puzzles screaming, hips dislocated, thighs burning,  toes cramping, shoulders (see hips)…

I hear Satan say, “OK. Great job.  You’re done.” 

By the time I lift my head, the screen is blank.  She has disappeared.   Just like that. 

Well, of course she has, I say to myself.  It’s not like she would use a door.

I roll over and look down at my body.  Fearing she has somehow tattooed 666 on my arms or legs or forehead, all that is on my arms and legs and forehead are the indentations of the Oriental rug and some cat fur.

I have made it, I sigh.   I have a passing thought that one more day being “normal” might just be the death of me.   I say a prayer, just in case. 

And then I go hit the shower.

Now, before you conclude that my brain injury is obviously more serious than first thought, please hear me out.

My Mother used to always say something about, “having to pay the piper.”  I never really understood the quote but I knew what she meant.  It usually came hot on the heels of a wicked hangover I had just conceded.  Accompanied with a snip of a smile.

“Hot pipes, Swanson?  You got hot pipes?  Time to pay the piper.”

She’d laugh.

It seems, at some point in our lives, often several times, we realize it’s time to pay the piper.  There’s the guy sitting in the dentist’s chair with all kinds of horrifying things going on, sweating while he’s trying to figure out if the $ 1850 bill will fit on his all-but-maxed-out credit card.  He’s lamenting all the yearly cleanings and checkups he canceled and failed to reschedule over the years.

There’s the traveling salesman who still owes seven grand on a car that has just hit the 230,000 mile mark.  When the economy tanked and business screeched to a halt, so did his ability to keep up on his car maintenance.  Now he’s looking at a car the mechanic won’t even release because it’s too dangerous to drive.   He’s got a hemorrhaging engine, leaking transmission, no struts, no shocks, no power steering, brakes that are barely working and he just spent $ 800 to fix three additional things he didn’t even know were wrong.

There’s the woman who gave up her career to raise the kids and, now fifteen years later, she has four under twelve when the husband starts buying new underwear and coming home late each night smelling like someone else’s perfume.

Pay the piper.

We all do it.  Whether we let our health go or our waistlines, our homes or our cars.  Maybe it’s our relationships we don’t pay attention to, our kids we don’t keep an eye on.  Jobs we didn’t stay current on, warnings we didn’t heed.  Preparations we didn’t make.  Safety measures we didn’t take.

We end up in a situation that sucks the life right out of us.  There’s no measuring happiness or satisfaction when everything we do from the second we open our eyes each morning to the second we close them each night is spent getting ourselves out of the situations we find ourselves in.  Or not even getting out of them.  Just surviving them.

In this crazy world where most are working two jobs…where many take care of both their parents and their kids…where there are ten things to run around doing after work or three things to do between two jobs that start an hour apart and are twenty-three miles from each other…

Most people don’t have time enough to ask themselves what would make them happy.  Many don’t even have time to realize they aren’t or they sadly realize, given their situation, it doesn’t much matter because they can’t change it anyway.

The piper’s collecting in spades.

But what if everyone got a do-over.  A Mulligan.

What if time stopped.  All the craziness stopped.  Everything that you used to fill and overfill your days with.  All stopped.  What if you inserted a block of time, an intermission, a half time…

And you found yourself with time enough to figure out what would really make you happy for the rest of your life…

We’re so damned lucky.

Of course, most people don’t consider me lucky.  Or any of us survivors.  Other than the fact that we survived, we don’t get many envious glances.

True, there have been a couple of knuckleheads who told me I was “so lucky” to not have any balance because I get to park in the handicapped spot.   There was one person who told me I might be “lucky enough” to qualify for food stamps.

But, by and large, no one really wants to be me.

They think I’m crazy, in denial or just plain brain injured to be as happy as I am.  Happy as a clam.

Twisted bliss, they concur.

After all, I don’t, for a second, resemble the successful business woman I once was.  The money, the suits, the house, the car, the body, the freedom to spend, to go, to do…

But I’m damned lucky because I survived the tornado.  No, not the head injury one.

The life before it.

We survivors of brain injury are damned lucky because, for the most part, we are afforded and awarded a big huge adult time out.   The hurricanes we called our lives before we were hurt fall uncommonly still.   Quiet.  Utterly quiet.

And many of us find out it’s the first time in years, maybe decades…that we can actually hear ourselves think.

From a near-death experience comes the inevitable realization that, OMG!  we’re actually going to die one day.   And, as the world rushes by outside our windows, from the quiet of our new realities, comes the earnest whisper.   The nagging question.

How can I be happy?  What’s going to make me happy?

What’s truly great about brain injury is that most of us don’t have an endless supply of energy any longer.   Late in the day, most of us are cognitive mush.  Our brains slow down and we simply cannot cram our days silly with a thousand activities any longer.

So we learn what’s really important to us.  We learn what we really want to spend our precious time doing.

Many of us, when cognitively fatigued, can no longer depend upon our memories, our judgements and our sound decisions.

So we learn who in our lives we can really trust with our safety.

Many of us lose our financial stability, our credit ratings, and our incomes.

So we learn who in our lives has compassion, understanding and acceptance.

Many of us now have the time and a new perspective to look at our relationships.

So we learn who really makes us happy, who we simply don’t wish to tolerate any longer and who we want to spend our lives with.

And many of us find a clean slate and a new, exciting tomorrow that beckons us to recreate lives better than the ones we had before we were hurt.

So we learn to try new things, to recheck our dreams, and to cultivate new abilities.

We’re so damned lucky.

What a crazy path to take to sanity.   What an incredulous irony to find that it took our brains to be broken before we finally can think straight.

If anyone in their lives, brain injury or not, can:  Learn what’s really important to them and what they want to spend their precious time doing, learn who they can really trust with their safety,  choose the people who are willing to be helpful and who have compassion, understanding and acceptance, learn and decide to try new things, recheck their dreams and stop to measure and nurture their abilities….

That, I’m pretty sure, is a recipe for happiness.    That is a reason to feel damned lucky.

The crack of the bat.  The roar of the crowd.  The hotdog vendors yelling, “Hot dog.  Getcher hot dog here!”  The pitcher going into his windup.  A baserunner stealing second and sliding under the tag.  Outfielders tossing third-out catches into the stands.  Beach balls bouncing into center field.

I played softball for more than twenty years.  I started going to Detroit Tigers’ games when I was four.  On any  Sunday afternoon in our neighborhood, baseball games could be heard on the radios of fathers outside working on the lawn, in the garage, on their cars.

What’s the best thing about baseball?  No, it’s not the hotdogs although, just between you and me, that was my vote…

It’s the fact that they call balls and strikes.

Imagine if they didn’t.

If all they called were balls, the top of the first inning would never end.  Hitters would have no reason to swing.  Pitchers would walk every batter that came to the plate.  Games would be called when the team pitching in the top half of the first ran out of pitchers after a few hours of just throwing all balls and walking in thirty or forty runs.

What if all they called were strikes?  Pitchers would throw the ball everywhere but the strike zone.  No matter if it bounced to the plate or landed in the dugout, it would be called a strike.  No one would ever reach base.   Every pitcher would throw a no-hitter every time they pitched.

We gotta call balls and strikes.

Too many times in life we stop calling balls and strikes.   A person, a relationship, a job, a condition….we decide they’re either all bad or all good and that’s what gets us into trouble.

We end up not being honest about what is real and what is true.  We choose what we want to believe and make things unrealistically black and white.   All balls.  All strikes.

Doesn’t work.  Leaves us angry, betrayed, disillusioned, hurt…

Take politics, for instance.  We have an angry, divisive country.  Oh my.  There’s so much anger!

I used to get so angry about politics and then I decided to call balls and strikes.

Now I have come to believe that politicians on both sides of the aisle just want to beat the other side.  It has nothing to do with what Americans want or need.  It’s just about making the other side look bad so you can either get re-elected or take back the seat in the next election.

I decided that, after any election, roughly half of everyone is going to be happy and the other half is going to be angry.  Whichever side you happen to fall on, you can expect to either shoot the arrows or dodge them for four or eight years and then you’ll switch positions.   You can watch all the political TV you want but you have to realize that, depending on which party a channel leans towards, the reporting is going to be biased one way or another.   You realize that you’ll never know the truth about a decision, a law, a politician, a party because you’ll never have all the information that the people making the decisions have.

Voila!  No more time wasted getting angry.

We have to call balls and strikes.

In most every failed relationship, there is a hero and a villain, depending on whom you are friends with.  Balls and strikes go out the window when he is a no-good, lousy, cheating, physically abusing, drinking, sloppy so and so with an over-bearing mother and a beer gut and a remote control surgically attached to his hand.

We choose not to ask the real questions.  We crown one and damn the other and that’s the end of that story.

When, if we were calling balls and strikes, we’d ask ourselves…  We’d ask her…  “What is your place in this?”  “What was it about you that made you pick someone like him?”  “Why did you CHOOSE to stay after he hit you, cheated on you, molested your child?”  “What were the red flags you ignored?”  “What is it about you that made you allow this for X amount of years?”  “How did it serve you to allow you to ignore, deny and tolerate all of this?”

Hmmmmm….

If we don’t ask those questions…If we don’t figure out our responsibility in most of the things that go wrong in our lives….If we don’t call balls and strikes and be willing to look at our actions, relationships and situations honestly, then we are doomed to repeat them.

That woman, the hero (shero), will move on to another one, three, five more relationships that are no different than the first one.   She’ll fill a lifetime up with the same relationship that comes in a different face.

We have to be honest about what our situations mean.  What they imply.  What they are saying about us.

Balls and strikes.

Too many times we take a bad break, a bad turn, a bad run of luck and we simply accept our lives as failed, miserable, damaged, disappointing, over.   When you’ve had five of the same relationships with the same man who simply has a different face and name each time, it’s no longer the man’s fault.   Five years after a brain injury, when you find yourself still sitting on the couch yelling at God every day, it’s no longer the injury that’s keeping you there.

Magglio Ordonez is an outfielder for my Detroit Tigers.  He’s a career .300 hitter.   He’s an All Star.

Well, this season he got hurt and got off to a bad start and, almost two months into the season, he was hitting a paltry, dismal .186.

When you’re hitting .186, you’re looking at a mountain to get back to “normal.”   You walk up to the plate every day and see those horrendous numbers attached to your name.  There’s no denying it.  There’s no hiding it.   Fans are cat-calling.  You can hear the booing when you continue to bounce weak grounders to second base four times a night.

What do you do?  There are no quick fixes.   You can accept it.  You can tell yourself all kinds of things.  You can retire and cling to the memory of how you used to hit homers and doubles and ring up RBIs every night.

Magglio has simply gone up to the plate every night and battled.  He’s taken extra batting practice and watched extra film.  He’s sought advice.  He’s worked hard.  He’s gotten up every morning and shown up every night.

He’s up to .245 now and climbing.

The value of calling balls and strikes reaches far beyond the white chalk lines of a baseball field.  Being honest and seeing both sides of our situations helps us to minimize the anger and frustration.  It allows us to become more compassionate by seeking the other side.  Seeking the truth.

Imagine how many blood pressure spikes we could bring down and how many episodes of road rage we could eliminate if we just took a second to call balls and strikes.   To be honest and accept that, even though its wrong,  people every day drive distracted by a dozen things.   To think, for a second, wow, maybe that old man has just lost his wife of fifty years and is driving back from picking out her casket.   He’s driving slowly because he has tears in his eyes…

Or that parent screaming his fool head off in the bleachers at his kid because the kid hasn’t gotten a hit yet.   How amazing it would be if, instead, he simply cheered the fact that he is blessed with a kid healthy enough to be out there in the warm sunshine, running around, learning teamwork, learning the value of sports, keeping his body healthy.

Hmmmm…

I have a brain injury and I have all the ammunition I need to make excuses for anything I fail at or choose not to do.  I am certifiable.  Ha.

But I’ve decided to call balls and strikes in my life.  I’ve decided to hold myself accountable for my actions.  I get headaches a lot but, hell, I don’t have a brain tumor.  I can put an ice pack on my head.  I can take pain killers.  I can go to sleep and still there’s the hope and anticipation that tomorrow will be better.  That I’ll make it better.

I have lousy balance but I’m not going to complain when there is a man who got his legs shot off in Iraq or a woman who has MS or the kid lying in a bed paralyzed from the neck down.

I just read the story of the mother in Africa who, because of the famine, walked with her five kids FOR A MONTH to get to an aid station.

Hard to complain about my electricity going out for five hours the other day…

I will not see my life as all black and white when there are handfuls of rainbows around every corner I dare turn.  Down every road I start down upon.

No game is fun if we don’t choose to call both balls and strikes.  Especially the game of life.

I grew up a swimmer.  I qualified for my lifeguard license when I was nine.  I got up the first time I ever water skied.  I spent endless childhood summers pool hopping and lake diving and river rafting. 

But since my childhood, things have changed.  I was once pulled by an undercurrent along the bottom of the ocean.  I was snorkeling and saw real sharks.   I was swimming next to  a kid who was stung by jellyfish.   I have seen JAWS.  Ha. 

And since my brain injury, my balance does not work like it used to.  

So, you get me out into a canoe and nobody’s going to confuse me for a savvy, graceful, crafty boatswoman any longer.  Remember that movie when we were kids about the Indian paddling in the canoe, silent and still and upright and beautiful?  Not me.  Not to be confused with me…

I was tipping and tilting and freaking out and unable to steady myself.  On the verge of panic.  I was fearing sharks and slipping under the surface into the cold, deep, dark undercurrent of death.

OK, we were in less than three feet of water, wearing life jackets, in a tiny freshwater lake.

But all I wanted to do was get back on land.  Get back to safety.  Ten minutes out in the water felt like three hours.  I about ran onto shore.  Gasping and sweating, friend laughing, sunglasses all skewed and screwed sideways on my head, hair all crazy kind of ways…

OK, so let me see a show of hands.  How many of you, until this moment, had forgotten all about the massive earthquake and Tsunami in Japan?  Come on!  Let’s see those hands.   When was the last time you thought about the failing nuclear reactors and the piles of cars floating down what used to be their roads?  How long has it been since you read coverage on all those people who were displaced from their homes and who lost loved ones in that disaster?

The River Always Moves.

The devastating events which ripped Japan to its core have been replaced.   People moved on to the LeBron NBA Finals debacle (tee hee) and the Weiner Weiner debacle.   They’ve seen the footage of  the Joplin tornado wreckage.  And, closer to home, there have been high school graduations and graduation parties.  June weddings and baby showers.   Yard work, uncovering the pools, going to garage sales.  It’s baseball season and beach season and the Fourth of July is just around the corner.

The River Always Moves.

We have two choices in life.   We can sit on the bank and watch the water move.  Watch life move.  Or we can jump in and move along with it.  Simple as that.

When something happens that turns your life upside down, it’s so hard to remain in the current.   To move along with everyone else.   You want to just make it to the side and crawl out of the water and shake yourself off and dry warmly in the sun.

Everyone has to come out of the water sometime or their fingers will prune.  They need to warm up, dry off, nourish themselves.  Get their bearings.  Check the map. 

But many of us refuse to ever get back into the water.   Paralyzed on the bank.  Maybe the water seems to be moving faster than before.  Maybe there are more rapids than they recall.   But, all of a sudden, they don’t want to get back in that current.  And the current continues to roll past.

How long should we stay out of the water?  My mom used to say two hours after we’d eaten.  Is that a good measure?   Who decides when it’s time to rejoin everyone else?

Today I’m going to do some writing.  I’m going to help a friend pack up her apartment.  I’m going to make another spinach salad, my new addiction.  Later I’ll watch White Collar and Covert Affairs before the Tigers’ game comes on late from the West Coast.  I have to pick up a few things from the store.  Figure out when I’m going to the post office.  Low on clean towels.  Low on toothpaste.   Cat sleeping on my neck.  Need to pick up birthday cards…

The River Always Moves.

Life Goes On.

There’s a million families somewhere in Japan still homeless.  Still seeking their new normal.   There are families all along the Mississippi who have been told to pack up and move away for two months until the river rises and falls again.   There are families in Arizona watching the wind speeds, wondering if their house is safe for another day from the raging wild fires.   Families in Joplin still finding family photos miles away from where their homes once stood.

But what consumes us as a world, as a nation, as a community, as a family, as a human being…all continues to fade in our mind’s rearview.  Paddling down the river of life, we cannot continue to lament, over and over, the tree we scraped by or the deep hole we almost slipped into when there are promised so many more of them ahead. 

We have to look forward.   We have to take what’s coming.   We either have to let go of what’s happened or get out of the water so we can review, report, regroup and release.

Sometimes it’s just too big.  Too much.  Too heavy, too terrifying, too wrenching, too painful.   We just don’t want to get back in the water, dammit!

So we sit on the banks and we watch the water go by.  Watch everyone go by.  Watch our lives go by.  People we love.  Leaving us.  Leaving us behind.

Only we can decide when it’s time.  Only we can decide when we, again, feel the call.  The urge.  The pull.  The need to rejoin our lives.   It takes courage, yes.  Encouragement, surely.   It takes a leap of faith.  Faith in something.

I was terrified out on that canoe a few weeks ago.   But as we paddled out around this tiny little peninsula, I saw a species of beautiful purple lily pads that I had never seen before.  I saw a gorgeous three foot tall bird (wren?) descend low and steady and land perfectly in the water.  I saw the sun peek through the leaves and spray the lake with golden splashes.   And I saw a mommy duck taking her kids out to Sunday brunch in a single file line along the water’s edge. 

Yes, everyone has to dry off and recover and get warm and dry from time to time.  Everyone has to get food in their bodies.  Feel the sun’s warmth deep in their bones.  Gather themselves after what they’ve been through.  Gather themselves for the journey ahead. 

But make no mistake, there IS a journey ahead.  It is patient like grief.  It waits for us.

We’ll all learn along the way.   Maybe we’ll put life jackets on.  Get a bigger boat.  Bring more supplies.  A better compass.   A better map.   Room for people who can help us navigate.  People who have steered this stretch before us.

But the river always moves and so, too, must we.  All of us need water to survive. 

Come on in.   The water’s warm. 

As I craned close to my computer speakers, I closed my eyes, listening to the raw and real emotions as the roar of the tornado engulfed them.   You can hear windows break and debris flying as the group realized that, indeed, this could be the last moments of their lives.

Humid.  Dark.  Bodies stumbling over one another.  The smell of fear.  The sounds of panic.  Huddling close and small, trying to hide from the looming monster.  Please, Please don’t take us!!!

And in what could have been the final breaths they took, the final thoughts they entertained, the final words they spoke, EVER-what I DID NOT HEAR was:

I’m too busy to meet you for lunch, dinner or a cup of coffee…I’m too tired to dance, take a walk after dinner, have sex, or play with the kids…I’ll do that next month, next summer, next winter, when the kids head off to college…   

I also DID NOT HEAR

I don’t like you because you’re fat, poor, rich, ugly, beautiful, disabled, White, Black, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, gay, straight, Republican, Democrat, or an Ohio State Buckeye fan…

I also DID NOT HEAR

I’m glad I didn’t go on more vacations with my family…I’m glad I worked 80 hours a week…I’m glad I held that grudge against so and so all these years…I’m glad I didn’t go visit my mom/dad in the nursing home more…I’m glad I didn’t spend more time with my kids…I’m glad I passed on all those invitations to meet friends and see family…I’m glad I didn’t act on my beliefs, follow my dreams, overcome my fears, seize the moments, enjoy the simple things in life…

I also DID NOT HEAR

I can’t do X, Y or Z because I have a brain injury (or a thousand other conditions), because I’m too fat, because there’s no time, because I’m not pretty/handsome enough, because I’m not good enough, because I’m not smart enough, because there’s no money, because I may fail, because they may not like me, because she/he might say no, because they might laugh at me, because it’s not the way it used to be, because there’s always tomorrow….

When they realized that there is NOT always tomorrow…When they realized that, OMG!!!!  This could be IT!  That, all of a sudden, their stories could be over.  Their sands run out….

That all the things they wished they could try, do, accomplish…All the things they put off, denied, avoided…All the words they refused to say, failed to say, spewed in anger, spite or jealousy…

When they realized that this moment, right here, was the last they would hold…That they were now reduced to a handful of moments, of precious precious moments, in an entire lifetime… 

What I DID HEAR WAS

I love all of you.  I love you guys.  I love you. 

I have been blogging now for three years.  Usually when I create a new blog entry, it is the plated version of  a theme whose ingredients have been simmering for days, even weeks, in my head.   I try to make myself open and aware of common and repeating messages telling me they’re waiting to be noodled over.  Needing to be organized.   Hoping to be shared.

Lately I’ve found myself returned and returning to the beginning of my recovery from the traumatic brain injury I sustained in 1996.   Several times recently, in various ways.   Some gently prod, whispering in the quiet.  Others poke and pinch, screaming their blind curses.

Because I’ll be presenting to a brain injury group in a couple of weeks, I quick-paged through my book for the first time in quite a while.  Several new survivors have contacted me these last weeks with their early struggles of recovery.  And, finally, I gladly accepted the invitation to bring my brain injury blog to Patch.

As I read through early chapters from my book, I was reminded, certainly, of how long the journey and how utterly painful, wrenching and life-changing.   But I was also reminded of how long the journey and how utterly joyful and successful, rewarding and life-changing.

New survivors vent and lament their newfound barricades, preventing easy travels along familiar streets.  Instead they continue to encounter detours and delays, frustrations and heart-breaks.

My message to those individuals new to brain injury, whether they are injured themselves or are supporting a friend or family member, is one that readers of my WordPress blog and attendees at the conferences where I speak have long heard:   Up The Road The Skies Are Clearing.

From here, fifteen years up the road, I shout back and report that the storm clouds DO move past.   The darkness lifts.   The sun makes its way through the clouds once again.  The bitter winds of winter turn to gentle warm breezes dancing through the curtains once more.

For most of us, the greatest challenge after brain injury is to embrace change.   Change no one wanted, no one sought, no one invited.   Change that doesn’t tiptoe or graciously, tenderly caress.   But, instead, change that barges and charges, ripping through our lives as tornadoes do.   Cursing clumsily and smelling and rotten and rude.

It is my firm belief that we CAN change, can recover, can create new lives that work and succeed.   Lives we can be proud of.   For we have changed and adapted countless times in our lives.   We’ve started over.   We’ve learned new skills.  We’ve lost and we’ve taken what we still have and moved on.  We’ve found new love after heart-break.   We’ve found new jobs after layoffs…

From elementary school to middle school.   From high school to college.   Getting into the work force.   Inviting in roommates and partners and spouses and children and parents.  

Change does not pick on the brain injured alone.  We are not special in our plight.  The need for change is no new symptom kept for those of us now differently-abled.  

Change finds everyone.   Change shows up every day at every doorstep and asks for entry.  It wears the coats of a hundred diseases, a thousand conditions, a million stories.

Even as I write this, the lilacs glow in the quiet of night.  The apple blossom and cherry blossom trees flutter in the cool breeze.  Tulips soar and Blue Jays return and it is Spring again. 

Another winter we’ve beaten.   Another winter survived.  Another winter behind us.

It is Spring again.

To the brain injury survivors who stumble across me on WordPress or who now find me on Patch,  I welcome you and your supporters to a community that cheers your every painful step toward a new, fabulous life.   We happen to think YOU ROCK!

We won’t return to the darkness.   We won’t climb back into that hole.  But I swear we’ll keep calling from the light.   Begging you forward.   Reaching out hands and hugs and promising you that, yes, Up The Road The Skies Are Clearing. 

It’s Spring again.  The winter, again, behind us.   You can do this.   I’m cheering for you!

OK, for me…I know right off the top that 27 of those thoughts are going to be about perfect brownies hot out of the oven.   That’s a given.   That leaves me with 2, 973 for the day.  I figure four, maybe five, will be spent wondering if Michigan’s football team is going to be able to fix their defense and find a kicker before next season.   An easy two will be devoted to what I am going to do with this bloody hair today.   Half a dozen may be contemplating meals when all I see in the fridge are natural peanut butter and coleslaw.  I’ll throw out an easy ten deciding on who should be kicked off of American Idol, on why male news and sports anchors dye their hair impossibly dark  and on whether I picked Butler in any of my March Madness brackets.

Now I’m down to 2,950.

What the heck are any of us thinking?

In this world of crazy technology, I wish there was an ap that logged our thoughts.  I’d be interested to see how many of mine begin with, “I forgive…”  and “I am grateful for….”  and “I am capable of….”

Is it half?  Are half of my thoughts on any given day positive and healthy and helping and progressive and appreciative?

How about yours?

If I believe that thoughts are things (I do), then maybe I don’t need an ap to log my thoughts.  I need only then look at the results of my life to find out how I’m spending my 3,000 thoughts each day.

Apparently, I need to start paying better attention to what my mind is telling my life to do.

Three thousand thoughts.   Three thousand.  Think about that.

Now 2,999.   Gotcha.

A couple of years ago I began to start each day writing affirmations about my life.  I had combined elements of The Secret and a book my friend Christine had sent me called The Artist’s Way.    Before I even had coffee in the morning, I would sit down and write two full pages of statements.   I would take what I wanted and phrase them as if they already were happening and had happened.

I would say, “I am healthy.  I can’t wait to get to the gym.  I love working out.  I am losing weight because I am eating well and going to the gym every day.  My heart is healthy.  My body is trim and fit.”

On and on I would write.   Statement after statement.   And damned if I didn’t find myself going to the gym every day and enjoying my workouts.   It  worked.

Right up until I stopped writing the pages.  Stopped spending my thoughts on the things I needed to send my life in the direction I wanted.

At the beginning of this year, I started writing them again.   Part of them had to do with my financial status and I wrote several versions of the same theme:   Jobs keep coming in.  Money is pouring in.  I have more than enough money to take care of  x, y and z…

I’ve had three new jobs this year already.

What are we spending our 3,000 thoughts each day thinking?

If I spend twenty thoughts telling my brain that I am fit and slim and healthy and I love working out and I can’t wait to get to the gym, but I spend a hundred later on throughout the day lamenting my double chin and my side view in the mirror and how pitifully-few pushups I can only do now, what do you think wins?

If I get up in the morning and tell myself once that my brain injury does not impede my success but then I spend the rest of the day cursing my limitations, that poor little lonely happy thought in the morning doesn’t stand a chance.

In such a tight economy, maybe we all need to put our thoughts on a budget as well.   Find out where we’re spending our 3,000 thoughts each day…

I’ve decided I’m going to make a list, print it off and put it  in front of my keyboard each morning where I’ll see it before I race to my morning emails.

I’m going to write five separate statements that each morning I will complete in my head:

Five beginning with, “I am grateful for…..”

Five beginning with, “I forgive….”

Five beginning with, “Today I’m going to improve my health by…”

And five beginning with, “I love my life because….”

Wanna join?

Our thoughts sit behind the wheel.  They choose the turns in the ride of our lives.   They drive the car.

When you read the news or watch what’s going on in the world, there’s no mystery about how many people spend so many of their 3,000 thoughts on hate, jealousy, prejudice, anger, regret, and mean-spiritedness.    Their results don’t require any special ap either.

Maybe one single absent-minded “Love ya” as we’re rushing in opposite directions requires more of our 3,000.    Maybe we spend one thought telling those we love that we love them but we spend five or ten or a dozen showing them different.

If we have 3,000 thoughts in a day, how many do you think we should spend on the past?   In the present?  On the future?   If we cut them evenly, do you think we should spend a thousand thoughts each day on our past?   How many of us even have the time to spend a thousand thinking of the future?

And how many of us spend so much time regretting or preferring our past and wishing or hoping for a better future that we don’t spend enough of those 3,000 improving today?

I’m going to start paying better attention to the directions I’m giving my brain on where to turn and what exits to take in my life.   I’m going to start listening more closely to the voice inside my head that creates the results of my everyday.

Seems we have a lot to blame right now for everything.    We blame the economy, the government, the natural disasters,  the this and the that.   We blame spouses for not talking and children for not listening.  Sitting presidents for not standing, standing protesters for not sitting.   We blame our issues and our failures and our physical conditions on our parents, exes and a hundred outcomes that we feel comfortable saying “weren’t our fault”.   Unsympathetic employers, lousy neighbors, rotten in-laws…

Makes me think that a lot of the 3,000 thoughts a day could be better spent.

I’m going to see if I can’t turn my thinking economy around.   Bring it out of the red and into the black.   Deposit more of it into what I want to have happen  instead of what I actually see happening.

And then we’ll see where the ride takes me.    Need a lift?

Many of us have no proof that we are injured because so many brain injuries occur without the courtesy of leaving an imprint on a CT or PET Scan.   The lack of something to look at, to pour over, to show to friends and loved ones, is often frustrating because people seem to prefer, even need, proof.

Insurance companies, employers, suspicious friends and family…Some start to look at you sideways and whisper behind your back because, as they are so happy to say, “You look great!”

What could possibly be wrong?

Not many of us have props.   I use a cane and, sometimes, a wheelchair.   But it’s not like I have a big old cast on my head.   It’s not all wrapped up in ACE bandages.   I don’t have any scars to show on my scalp.   Except for the too-frequent bad hair days, my head looks fine.

So, how do we convey to those in our lives we most need to believe, understand and accept us?   These people we want so badly, not to understand (that would require their own injury) but simply to try…..

What this is… What this means…What this feels like…   In the absence of proof, how do we paint a picture you might get of what it feels like when, in an instant, what we knew of normal will never show its face again?

Brain injury is the first moment you walk into a funeral home and see someone dear to your heart lying in a casket.   It is the daughter who gets pregnant at 15.    It is the addicted brother who is now homeless.   It is the best friend whose doctor calls and tells her she needs to come into the office to discuss her test results.   It is the neighbor who walks away from the home they’ve lived in for forty years.  

Brain injury is the first time you get your heart broken.  It is the spouse who tells you the affair didn’t mean anything.   It is the any time you’ve put a beloved pet down.   It is the call from a child who has just been arrested.   It is the moment a parent starts to forget things.  

It’s not so hard to understand the unseen when you have felt those same feelings.   The same loss, fear, dread…It’s like any bad news you received over the phone.   You didn’t have to see it to believe it and to feel its pain. 

And, for those of us with the pain, how long is it supposed to last?   If you can’t even see it, how are you supposed to know when it is over?  When are we done being hurt?

Rose Kennedy:

It has been said, ‘time heals all wounds.’ I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.

So, what does your scar tissue look like? 

What do you cover your pains with in order to go on?  To return to the well, the living, the soaring?  

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday who had burned herself pretty seriously and we were discussing our scars.  I was looking at my body, counting them, recalling them, returning to the moments that caused them.

The bike kickstand that split open my shin.   The thin line on my face from my cat’s claw.  That slide into second base.   That fall from the fence.  That slip of a carrot peeler…

Each fading from red to pink to white.   Each softening over time.

I imagine my brain is scarred.   But, in the absence of proof, of some battle-weary badge of honor to display, I know what the scar tissue looks like.   I know what I’ve used to cover my wounds.

My scar tissue is a great cup of coffee, a simple perfect brownie, a tender, juicy steak.   It is college football and Autumn leaves and cider mills.   It is cherry blossom trees in Spring and the smell of rain coming through the window in summer.  

My scar tissue is a dozen jobs I’ve done since my injury using abilities new and old.   It’s day trips and vacations and long drives along the water in a vehicle specially equipped for me.   It is doing the Twist in pajamas and watching movies in the middle of the night.  It is friends on-line and a phone call away.  

My scar tissue includes all these incredible young people in my life whose futures I can’t wait to witness and share.   It is the music friends play, the pictures they take, the stories they tell…

My scar tissue is falling in love.   Laughing so hard I’m crying.   It’s curling up on a winter’s night with one cat next to my head and the other one pushed against my leg. 

What is your scar tissue?   What does it look like?   Feel like?  Taste like?   

What have you chosen to cover your wounds, your pains, your Invisible Monster?

Your answer determines when your pain ends and when your life resumes.   

Cheering for you!

My mom was one of fifteen kids.  Huge extended family.  Aunts and uncles and cousins everywhere. 

My friends and I oftened joked that my family was the CIA because we never really divulged anything, not even to each other.  A bunch of stoic Swedes, everything was assumed or shared in hushed, secret codes that, as a child, scared the bejesus out of me.

Growing up, I was confused and basically terrified.  Women died of “female problems.”  Female problems?????  Like what, exactly?  Women died from too much laundry to do?  From pinching panty hose?  From make-up or high heels or what EXACTLY should I be looking out for here?

And then there were the people who suffered the terrifying fate of, “The sugar got her.” 

The sugar GOT her????!!!!!  I’m ten, thirteen, sixteen years old, looking at the bowl of white stuff on the kitchen table.  Eyes as big as saucers.  How exactly did the fu*king sugar GET her???

Nobody died of anything because nobody really had anything.  People simply were no longer with us or they had passed on.   They had gone back home and surely they were in a better place.  Some had even gone to be with Jesus and I often wondered if that was on the farm where all my pets had gone to live.

I never knew anyone actually died of medical conditions.  I always thought the laundry did her in or the condiments got him.

And growing up, people never suffered depression, had epileptic seizures  or passed out from alcohol abuse.    They had spells and they were tired.  Spells?  They had spells??!!!

Kids never had ADD or any of the other conditions they are diagnosed with today.  They were busy, precocious, “a little hyper, that one….”  When kids were described as “having troubles at home,” I assumed they would soon succumb to the sugar, the laundry or the panty hose. 

Seems that, from a young age, we learn that it is better to present a positive front.  We go from wanting to be just like everyone else in middle and high school (so we lie and hide) to wanting to beat out everyone else in our twenties and maybe even thirties (so we continue to lie and hide).  No one wants to admit they don’t measure up, they are weird, they are different, they are struggling, they are addicted or inflicted or conflicted.   No one wants anyone to know that their family is all messed up or that, even though they are now a lawyer or a doctor or they married one, that they still can’t afford all the props they’ve maxed out their credit cards with to keep up the facade.

I can picture each person I consider nearest and dearest to me and I can recall when we finally confided, finally shared, finally stopped faking and finally took off our masks.   With each, it was the moment when we forged a bond unshakeable to this day.  

We finally told the truth and we were relieved.  We were comforted to know that we didn’t have to be perfect any longer.  We could be the bumbling, stumbling, mumbling knuckleheads we all are anyway.

I was completely taken aback in 1992 when my mom suffered her first major stroke.  I was naive and ill-prepared.  I had no perspective, no savvy, no nothing.  And, consequently, I have regrets.

I made a conscious decision then to never be so ill-prepared, so misinformed, so caught off-guard.

Since then I have sought everything.  Shared everything.  Investigated everything.  I have asked questions about every condition I hear people are diagnosed with.  I have told people probably more than they care to know about every condition and diagnosis I’ve experienced or “my people” have experienced.  I am a medical investigative reporter.   Heck, by the time my dad had had his second stroke, the doctor would ask me what I thought he should give him….

I truly believe that we are all in this together.  That the issues of class and race and all the other walls we construct are made of paper.    White people and black people and Midwesterners and Southerners and Arabs and Jews and Mexicans and Australians and poor people and rich people and fat people and thin people all get brain injuries and cancer and MS and ALS.   Their children die from accidental overdoses and driving mistakes and Internet suicide pacts and choking games and lymphoma.   Their parents get Alzheimer’s and Dementia and heart failure and liver failure.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what color you are or how big a house you own when you are walking into a room to pick out  a casket for your mother.   And it doesn’t matter how much schooling you had or what kind of car you drive when you are sleeping in the hospital on a cot next to your 8 year old.  The tears of the Jewish daughter saying goodbye to her father for the last time don’t look any different than the tears of the Arab daughter. 

I know people who won’t share their brain injuries because, perhaps, they are embarrassed or ashamed of them.  They hide the symptoms.  They make up excuses.  They want so much to present a polished front. 

And it is exhausting.

One of my nieces is a beautiful young woman.  Talented ball player.  And she got elbowed in the head and suffered concussion symptoms.  I talked with her mother and with her and I was so happy to have the experience I do.  To be able to share what I know.  To offer what I have.  To give them what I’ve learned.

Please share your stories.  Please share your secrets.  Be honest.  Inform.  Be willing.  Everyone has or will suffer some type of condition in their own lives or in their families that will knock them sideways.   You can’t know how comforting it is to hear, “Yes, this is normal.” 

When we ask questions, offer what we know and what we’ve witnessed, actually share the experience with those we love and those we cross paths with….then we provide comfort and we arm each other with one more bit of savvy and information and color that might help all of us as we turn that next corner.

Masks are for Halloween.  Taking them off helps to take the scary out of life.

January is a great jumping off point for me, personally.  There is New Year’s Day at the beginning of the month, there is my birthday smack-dab in the middle of the month, and my brain injury anniversary at the very end.  I couldn’t ask for more screaming cornerstones on which to build a new me each year.

The trouble is, sometimes we’re so damned good at the old lives, they’re just easier to keep tolerating than fighting for the new ones.  I look around and I see I am not alone in my struggle to change. 

People who have no problems with their eyes continue to be blind.  People who have no problems with their vocal chords, continue to remain silent.  People who have no problems with their ears continue to hear nothing.  People blessed so richly continue to imagine themselves poor.  People blessed with warmth, so surprisingly cold. 

And people who are given life, gifted life, continue to take it and kill it.

I’m surprised God hasn’t just sent the locusts already and be done with it…

When I read through the brain injury letters I receive, seems the common thread has to do with everyday problems which return the focus on the brain injury that survivors wish to leave behind.

They so so want to not be held hostage by brain injury and yet their everyday is consumed by its ravages.  They resolve in the New Year to “not be injured,” and yet they can’t help but to focus on challenges which throw their efforts into the soup every day. 

One of the ways I have continued to recover from my own injury (it’ll be fifteen years on January 31st!) is to remind myself that, if I want to live in the “normal world” and not entirely in the brain injury one, then I must not live entirely in the brain injury one. 

I had two  New Year’s resolutions and  I’ve already broken them but neither one of them had to do with brain injury.   I may have already stumbled at them but they are “normal world” resolutions.   I am living in the “normal world”. 

And so maybe I ate cake at my niece’s birthday that first weekend.  And OK, I probably had some cake at my brother’s birthday the second weekend.  And alright already, I did eat a little on my birthday too….

But resolving to eat better and exercise more is a “normal life” resolution that helps me, as a brain injury survivor, resist the temptation to return to my brain injury life, a life that gave me all kinds of rationalizations and excuses for gaining weight and not moving. 

Maybe it’s not so much about fighting to stop living an old life but, instead, just choosing to start living one that’s better.  One that looks more like the one you have been dreaming to reach.  Instead of wrestling with trying to fix my balance in my brain injury life, I instead start walking every day to be healthier and slimmer in my new “normal” life.  Does that make any sense?

I hate being cold.  I live in a basement and, when the windchill is minus 20, there’s no way around it.  It’s flippin’, frickin’ cold down here.  But, because I am uncomfortable, I do something about it.   Because I am uncomfortable, I go get another fleece blanket and toss it in the dryer to warm it up.  Or I go put on another sweatshirt.  The point being that, we don’t do anything when we are all warm and cozy and comfortable.  We don’t change anything then.

Maybe that’s why we stay in relationships, marriages and jobs that we hate for so long.  Maybe it’s why we allow him or her to berate us, take advantage of us, cheat on us and ignore us.  It may not be great but it’s not freezing.  We can still get by with a sweater.

Maybe we all need to be cold.  To feel the frigid smack of our realities right there on the kisser.  To be so cold that we have to get up and do something to change what we no longer want, can’t stand and have tolerated for too long.  To ask ourselves, if not now and if not last year and if not the ten before that, then when?

Is this really a new year?  Or is it the thirteenth month of last year still?  Or the 25th month of 2010? 

Are the lives we want actually out there to reach or are they simply air-brushed mirages that taunt and tickle?

Why don’t we all resolve that, a year from now, we will not resolve to change the same things we wanted to change this year and probably every year for the last ten.   Why don’t we all promise to make new pledges next year because we either conquered these or made peace with them or changed our direction and let them go.

Anything is better than continuing to fail.   Anything is better than continuing to be shamed by the unchanged.   The feeling of impotence.   Powerlessness.

It’s time to throw open the windows in January.  Yep.  In the dead of winter.  Throw them open and get cold.  Cold enough where the sweater no longer is enough.   Cold enough where we have to get up and change something.  Anything. 

Let’s live this year as if.  Live it as if we already are the people we have so long aimed to be.  Let’s live it as if we don’t get to make the same resolutions next year.  Let’s live it as if there might not be a next year.

Let’s ROCK THIS YEAR!  This year!

Good luck, everyone.   Let me know how you do! 

I can remember, as a very young girl, the year we had kittens.  Many kittens, mind you.  Walking past the Christmas tree and seeing all these teeny tiny cute little velvet paws poking out, stabbing at all the ornaments.   Paws everywhere.  Ornaments popping onto the ground and rolling around the livingroom.  Little felt soldiers being swiped away in the night, kidnapped, never to reappear.  Branches bouncing up and down.  Garland pulled into the middle of the tree and then mysteriously ending up down the hallway.

There was the year my dad paid for a tree and told them he’d come back for it.  By the time we went back, they had packed up and closed and moved the entire tree lot.  All gone.  My dad was standing there in an empty parking lot telling us, “I’m tellin’ you, it was RIGHT here!  I swear!”

My dad was a notoriously bad tree picker-outer.  God bless him, we spent hours and hours in the cold every year.  Stomping our frozen feet.  Rubbing our mittened little hands while our dad looked for the perfect tree.  From Frank’s Nursery to all the corner tree lots for miles and miles until the sun was tiring and we were, too.  

 My mom would wait for him to come home and then just roll her eyes.  “Oh, God, Swanson,” she’d say, shaking her head.  The trees he’d pick out, year after year, always reminded me of  some of the more stout women I knew growing up.  Like a fabulous Polish grandmother.  Wide as they were tall.  Like a meatball of a tree.  Muscular.  No shape to even hint that they were trees and not bushes.   They spread out across the whole wall and crammed up against the ceiling and there was nothing to trim at the bottom that could have even remotely helped my dad in my mom’s opinion.  The ornament on the top of the tree would then be jammed up there kind of sideways and the tree was so dense and thick that you couldn’t even get any ornaments to hang pretty from the branches.  They all kind of laid on the outside of it like tattoos on an offensive lineman.

I can still hear her.  Shaking her head.  “Oh, God, Swanson…”

There was the first tree I had when I moved out on my own.  I didn’t have money for ornaments so I hung dog bones tied with beautiful red ribbons all over the tree.   It was so lovely and I was so proud of myself.  I came home from work the next day to find that my dog had dragged the tree all over  the house and around in circles.   Ribbons and needles and water everywhere.  Bone ornaments mysteriously nowhere to be found.

Then there was the tree that Mr. Hobbes, my cat, thought was his own personal  jungle.  He would proudly lay under the tree all day, surveying his kingdom like a wild lion.  Paws crossed in front of him.  Chest puffed out.  Sly smile.  Hint of swagger.

 My dog, Coda, all hundred and twenty pounds of him, thought that looked like a pretty neat place to lay as well.  He crawled all under that tree and, when he stood up, the whole tree got caught on his big, heavy shoulders.  Branches got stuck in his collar and he panicked and the water basin was spilling and he was freaking out, eyes like saucers, leaping like a colt that didn’t want to be broken.   Throwing that tree this way and that.  Ornaments flying.  Cat cursing.

Speaking of the cat….Nobody told me that you can’t put tinsel on Christmas trees when you have a cat.  I came home to find my cat standing there with a dozen strings of tinsel hanging from his mouth, half-swallowed.  That was the last year of tinsel.

The ornaments were another matter entirely.  My mom had ornaments that her parents had brought with them from Sweden.  Gorgeous, fragile, thin, glass ornaments.  Those always were put at the top of the tree where cats and kids dared not venture.  She would get a set of three ornaments each year, one for my two brothers and me.  She and her best friend would trade ornaments each year so there was a whole friendship group of ornaments just between the two of them.

One of the sweetest memories I treasure is of my dad’s last Christmas.  He wasn’t thinking all that clearly by then but he was happy to help decorate.  He put all the ornaments on one branch.   The whole side of the tree was bare except for one branch just loaded and bowing with ornaments.   It was so sweet and he was so happy and standing there smiling that beautiful smile…Makes me cry still.

Oh, Christmas trees… 

Seems we get so caught up with what’s under the trees that sometimes we forget about the trees themselves.   It’s no coincidence to me that we use a tree to map out our families.  Our “family trees.” 

On each of our Christmas trees, there tells our life stories.  Branches dripping with every reminder of our lives.  Every sweet celebration and every heart-touching moment.  Every person and pet we ever drew near to our hearts.

Ornaments from grandparents who starved on bitterly-cold freighters, carrying with them a precious few possessions to a new land that promised hope for themselves and their families.   Ornaments of glitter, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks and paste, made in elementary school and girl scouts.  

There are the ornaments that mark cultural trends and long-beloved friends.  Dated ornaments marking first Christmases of couples and babies and homes.  The pets we’ve loved.  The children, now adults.  The adults now gone. 

Perhaps our trees are there to remind us to remember our roots.  To return to them in some measure.  Maybe to remind us to set a center.  To find somewhere to call home.  Somewhere to return to that lights a warm and safe place in our tired hearts.  A place where we bring and remember all of our gifts, no matter the month, no matter the year.  A place that shines a sweet and tender light through the front windows of our souls. 

Putting up the tree and decorating our homes are special traditions because, in large part, nothing much changes for most of us.  The decorations are the same.  The menu is the same.  The holiday cookies and fudge, thank God, are the same.  The Christmas sweater is the same (eleven years and counting!).  Often the gifts are even the same (see neck ties).  Lord knows  the wrapping is literally the same as the year before.  Ha.

Our traditions and rituals afford us comfort.  Because each of us has had at least one special Christmas in our lives, the redoing of Christmas each year in the same fashion returns us to then.   To “Once upon a time.”  To better.  Maybe simpler.  Sweeter.  Something on which we can depend.

We are returned to any one of all the Christmases we have enjoyed.  One before we lost.  One before we hurt.  One before we took ill.  One before we grieved.  

In a world of such chaos and noise and instability, perhaps we all need a place to return to when we didn’t have to remember anyone lost.  A time when we didn’t need to seek out hope because she greeted us each morning in the twinkling of innocent and believing eyes.  A place where we didn’t have to seek out dreams because we still nurtured and celebrated our imaginations and believed that literally everything was possible.  Possible for us.

I hope each of you gets to spend a quiet few moments alone in front of your tree this Christmas.   Turn all the lights out (especially those of you with the eighteen different themes on your front lawns where poor Baby Jesus is smashed and crowded between Frosty, Santa Tigger  and Snoopy on a blow up plane-you know who you are!)           

Splash the room in colored sparkles of your fondest memories.  See the ornaments shine and the tinsel dance.   Allow yourself a favorite memory from a Christmas long ago, when every morning was an adventure  and dreams were not pushed aside and rushed by.  Recall the smell of wood-burning chimneys on an icy-blue Christmas Eve.  The sound of snow crunching beneath your feet.  The melted wax from candles at midnight services.  The anticipation of a child getting up at four in the morning and hoping there are presents under the tree….

There is a sweet peace in every Christmas tree.  A true and silent pride.  A quiet, unwavering hello.   Holding up for you all your life’s memories.  Standing there, awaiting you.  Gleaming.  Saying, “Here!  Here is your life.  Here,  before you!”

 Take time to celebrate it.  To celebrate you and all who have colored you, filled you with song and eased the roughest edges of you.   Hang a new ornament for today.   One that you will look back to years from now.  One that you will smile over and fondly recall saying, “Yes, that’s what meant hope to me.  That’s how I defined good and right and loved and beautiful that year back then.”

My ornament will look a lot like you.  This, my heart already knows.  It will burst with all the love you have gifted me.  My ornament will shine with the smiling faces of you.  The wondrous traces of you.  In all the places you call home. 

And I will hang it where I will see and never forget.   Never ever forget….What each of you means to me.

Merry, Merry  Christmas to all.

Auntie Celia was very religious but not in a preachy way.  She never used hate in the name of a loving God.  She never ostracized or judged, using religion as a ticket to strike anyone down.  Her religious lifestyle was more of a “love everybody” kind of mantra.  Just a fine woman.  One of the best I’ve ever known.

I was nine or ten when, crowded around our dining room table with the table extensions inserted and the card table attached, Auntie Celia suggested that this particular Thanksgiving we should go around the table and each offer up something we were thankful for.

Cripes.

There were probably seventeen people besides me, all crammed in our tiny kitchen.  Each took their turn, stealing all the possible things I could think of to be thankful for.   Family, food, friends, health…People were really reaching by the tenth, eleventh one.  Curses!  Someone stole the one about nice neighbors.  Dammit!!!!

Total Panic Now!!!!  What am I going to say!!!!??????

As we got closer, my brother said U of M football.  That was back when we actually went to Rose Bowls so I can see where that fit back then.

Closer, closer…I’m not even listening now.  I’m praying.  Please, God, give me something to say so I don’t look like a total idiot.

When it finally came to my turn, we had now thanked God for basically everything I had ever known or could possibly conjure.  Surely I was going to be the only dumb dumb who couldn’t come up with anything to be thankful for.   But, at the last second, I shouted, “Socrates!”  Socrates was my hamster.   No one else was thankful for Socrates and thank God for that.   Auntie Celia winked at me.  She smiled.  I had passed.  Whew!

Today, as I was driving home, I put on the station that is already playing Christmas music nonstop.  Usually I am adamant not to put on that station until early December because it makes me feel like I’m already behind in Christmas planning by Halloween.  But when I heard, “Cuz we need a little Christmas, right this very minute….”  I was hooked.  I sang it as loudly as I could, bopping my head.  It made me laugh at myself.

Seems we do need a little Christmas, right this very minute.  Every day my local paper emails me the day’s headlines.  Most days they read like a horror movie.   ”Teens stab couple to death in family home.”  “Woman bilks mother out of more than $350,000.”  “Bullied teen ends life jumping off of bridge.”  “Twins shoot each other in suicide pact.”  “Warehouse for poor and homeless looted.”  ”Pastor murdered in church parking lot.”

We need a little Christmas now….

When I first started writing this blog a couple of years ago, I was wildly wrong about two very significant beliefs I held.   The first was:  Everyone who has  survived a near-fatal injury, one which has left them alive and enjoying a second life,  are most grateful for that gift and appreciating every single day they get to see.  That was mistaken.  The second belief was:  Those who  have NOT suffered a near fatal injury, or condition or catastrophe, are all most grateful for that gift and appreciating every single day they get to see.  That was mistaken too.

What I’ve found, instead, is such a mind-boggling amount of people who aren’t grateful at all.   Whether they suffer a garish sense of entitlement, a lack of perspective, a shameless  loss of priority or just a dismal forfeiture of hope, it seems like too many are coming to the incredulous conclusion that homicide, suicide, assault, bullying, hatred, rape, or prejudice is the best option they can come up with.

Maybe we should just skip Thanksgiving altogether. 

Or maybe we need it now more than ever. 

How many of us will go around the table and get to the 18th blessing or gift and still have a contribution they are thankful for this Thursday?  Do you have 18?

Too often we mindlessly race through grace before dinner, just to get it over with so we can hurry up and get to the stuffing.  We recite the lines we’ve recited a thousand times.  Often we don’t even hear ourselves think.

I truly believe that, in an economy so stressed and buckling, there is no better time than now to be thankful, grateful, humble.  For a hot meal in a warm house shared with people you love.  My God, you have that, you have everything. 

We need to get it so that our kids get it.   We need to express it, highlight it, share it, mention it, teach it…so that our kids and theirs don’t ever feel like there is nothing worth staying for.  Nothing worth battling for.  No one worth battling with.   

Seems maybe we’ve been defining ourselves by all the wrong things. 

When we define ourselves by our successful job, our impressive title, our handsome spouse, an enviable talent, our perfect kids, our gobs of money, our fancy cars….we then are defined by something that can be lost, stolen, taken.  We go up and down and are blown sideways because we’ve staked our claims on things that cannot last.   And, once gone, often quickly so, we recognize nothing for which to live a grateful life.  We are all about the job and, in this economy, the job gets cut.   We’re all about our ability to play football and then we blow out the knee.  We’re all about that hottie of a babe wife and then she runs off with your son’s English teacher.   We’re all about how much money we have and then the stock market tanks and the job gets lost. 

What’s left?

Seems to me we have to define ourselves, instead,  by something that will hold us through the loss of all the others.  Something unshakeable.  An unshakeable truth.  An unyielding spirit. 

For that there can be nothing but gratitude.  Thanks.  Humility.  Appreciation.

I wish, for all of you, that unshakeable truth.  That anchor or strength which holds you still in the wicked  firestorm of life.  Through the losses, all the losses.   May your exclamation of blessings go round and round the table until your food gets cold this Thanksgiving. 

And may you know you will be counted as one of mine.

I’ve beaten the bloody hell out of wedding dresses in a bridal boutique with my cane.  But we’ll get to that later.  Laughing here.

One of the most frustrating and embarrassing symptoms and effects of brain injury is the rapid onset of this crazy-feeling inappropriateness.  Or is that impropriety?  

To escape, to release, to implode, to explode. 

It is mortifying.

From very early on, I termed it, “having a snit.”  I would soon find out that there is both good and bad news about snitting.  The good news is that there are ways to recognize and avoid them.   The bad news is that it usually takes  some practice and a few horribly embarrassing and frustrating instances before you start conquering the bugger.

I’ve found that the gap between being physically and emotionally finished and snitting is akin to taking a brand new Camaro onto the expressway.  I’m at 60 mph before I’m halfway down the ramp.

When brain injury survivors are tired, overwhelmed, have endured too much stimuli or are thrust into a confusing, changing environment, we are prone to experiencing an emotional meltdown that is hard to stop once it gains momentum.

Remember the feeling of being 21, 22…  You’d had way too much to drink and you’d want the night to be over.  You’d lay down and the room immediately began spinning and you knew the night was going to end laying on the cold bathroom tile floor?

You knew what was coming.

Or how about when you were a kid and your mom would beckon you using your first AND middle names and you immediately knew whatever was coming wasn’t going to be good.  That feeling of dread…

Avoiding snits is all about recognizing the feeling of snits.  Recognizing that the situation is ripe for a snit, like when a cold front clashes against a warm front and the sky turns still and green and you know a tornado is coming.

My snits come if I allow myself to go for too long.  Way past my quota for any day of chaos, plans changing, too many people, too much activity…

I was helping a friend shop for wedding dresses that day and we had been to so many bridal shops and had seen so many dresses that, abruptly I was “done” and had nowhere to escape to.  There were too many people in the tiny shop and it was hot and there were literally thousands of dresses all puffing out into the aisles and I just started chopping at them.   Oh, I’m giggling here with embarrassment.

There was another time when I had been at the hospital for my dad’s surgery since 5am and I was tired by 3pm.  I was waiting for the update so I could head home to bed.   The doctor came out and, instead,  told me that they didn’t have anyone to watch my dad, he was freaking out, and I’d have to stay and watch him until my brothers could make it there by 6:30 or 7.   I had sooo needed to be done and home and I couldn’t handle the change in plans.  So I went into the waiting room down the hall and beat the hell out of the couches and chairs with my cane like it was a baseball bat.

I had a snit one time when I couldn’t take one more dirty dish and I literally threw every plate and utensil angrily into the dishwasher from about three feet out.  Cups like fastballs, clanging and banging and bouncing off onto the kitchen floor.  Butter knives like harpoons….

Not one bit of pretty.

In every instance, and there have been more, it is easy to dissect the factors which contributed to my snit.  In hindsight, I recognize how I allowed myself to invite the different ingredients into a dangerous, volatile concoction.

I needed  to change things.

I have long-held the notion that healing from brain injury is about learning to successfully navigate it’s twists and turns.   Some of the symptoms don’t go away as much as we learn to jump over them, sidestep and avoid them.  

You learn about the injury and its effect on you and you create ways to avoid the outcomes that don’t serve you.  It’s like, if you can’t change the fact that it’s going to rain, you either stay inside or you put on your galoshes, your rain coat and grab an umbrella.

I know a survivor who, early on, would just cover herself up with a blanket when she became overwhelmed.  I can’t help but still smile at the visual.  A room full of people talking and too much stimuli and there she is in the middle of it all with a blanket over her head.   God bless her, I love that. 

I remember being at a brain injury conference one time.  I had spoken in the morning and spent the rest of the day speaking with survivors, family members and professionals who lined up to welcome me and tell me their stories.  All of a sudden, I was done and I knew it.  I told my cousin, who was helping me that day, and she said, “Oh, there’s so many more people in line, Kara.  Can you hold on a little longer?”

I made it maybe another half hour and then I said, again, “I’m done.”  This time I just disappeared under the table and refused to greet even one more well-wisher (my poor cousin, explaining that!).   Then I promptly said, “I’m leaving” and took off without her, heading out of the hotel with no notion as to how I was getting to the airport.  All I knew is I had to get out of there and NOW.

Over the years, as I’ve come to know this “passenger”, I know that being tired breaks down my walls.  When I am at the end of a busy, challenging, changing day, I will cry more easily.  I will swear more. I’m more apt to say something inappropriate.   I lose my inhibitions like the night of the group skinny dip.  But that’s a story for another time. 

It’s important that brain injury survivors and their support people learn to recognize the elements that contribute to their meltdowns.  Physical, emotional and everything in between.   Crossing that line and suffering a snit is not only embarrassing; it can be downright dangerous.

I fear the young survivor who loses her inhibitions at a high school prom or a college frat party and ends up allowing or initiating sexual behavior that she will regret or that might land her in real danger.  I fear the soldier who is concealing or unaware of his/her brain injury, needing to endure lengthy dangerous days with a rifle in hand.   I worry about any survivor driving a car too late, using machinery or handling tools or the professional writing scripts or making financial decisions that affect a corporation.

We gotta blitz these snits!

Plan the day.  Be smart and realistic about what you can handle.  Schedule a nap.  Quiet time.  Minimize those instances when you are besieged by too many people (concerts, ball games, carnivals).  Take along trusted support people.  Get help in identifying warning signs and setting up boundaries.  Share the concerns.  Trust your support people when they tell you you need to call it a day.  Have a backup plan.  Have an escape route.  Get a good night’s rest before a crazy day.  

Thankfully, it is rare that I have a snit anymore.  I’ve learned to anticipate them.   To feel them coming on.   To implement smart strategies which keep me, for the most part, out of danger and out of embarrassing situations.   I haven’t beaten up a wedding dress now in six years.  And I kept the coffee mugs with the chips in them as reminders of how smart I have to be now in order to maintain control of the situations I face every day.

I’ve learned to blitz the snitz and there are brides all over Michigan breathing a heavy sigh of relief.