There Are Clues Everywhere

Those who know me know that I am a passionate college football fan. I’ve been cheering my Michigan Wolverines since 1974 and, throughout my whole life, those Autumn Saturdays have been very very dear to me.

Having said that, a lot has changed in all these years. Back in the 70s, most of the games were not televised. For most college fans, we were lucky to see our favorite teams play a couple times a year.

Over all these decades, the college game has changed a TON! More channels were added, more TV deals were struck, and more bowl games emerged. They went from voting on a National Champion to installing a playoff formula. The Big Ten added teams, dizzying the heads of football traditionalists who didn’t want to add Penn State or Nebraska.

Fast-forward to today’s game and you see games on many standard and sports channels, on streaming, on college football-specific channels…You can catch your favorite team on your phone or laptop. There are more bowl games than most could name. The playoff has changed and changed again. More teams are headed to the Big Ten. Some of the other leagues are falling apart and teams are latching on to new conferences. There is the transfer portal and NIL monies to add to the mix.

I find our brain injury journey play out in so many facets of everyday life. Like football traditionalists, many brain injury survivors don’t want to change. They don’t want anything to look different because they loved how it was before.

But, whether it’s college football or social media, or technology, or TV watching, nothing stays the same. We all need to embrace the chance to “stay in the game” and to keep adapting, all throughout our lives.

Change can be hard when we don’t choose it. Full stop.

But happiness never visits those of us still living a life that no longer exists. Not in brain injury recovery, not in relationships that end, not in loved ones gone, and not in college football. Our goal cannot be to just hang onto something that no longer exists. It must be to make today work. Make NOW happy. Find a way, figure a way, because, once you can create happy and make new things work, you don’t need to hang onto a past that will not ever become a future.

I watch my Michigan Wolverines every Saturday and I cheer them on like crazy. It doesn’t matter to me if I have to find them on a different channel or if I have to watch at a different time. I don’t fuss over the new teams coming into the Big Ten. I don’t curse the transfer portal because I don’t want anyone on my favorite team who doesn’t want to be there. I’ve learned streaming and I’ve added channels and I’ve downloaded apps and, no matter the stumbles, the results have always pleased and rewarded.

They kick it off on an August Saturday when it’s too hot and too early to call it football. My Wolverines will play Oregon and USC and UCLA and Washington in Conference Play for the first time, ever. And, though it looks a lot different than it did in 1974, my love has only grown for it.

Our injury recoveries, our lives, more broadly, will never be the same, regardless of injury. Never the same as yesterday, even. The sun is glorious upon our faces but we cannot enjoy that warmth if we turn our backs, only looking at what is permanently behind us.

People get remarried after lousy divorces. People find glorious new jobs and careers are old ones dry up. People start over after losing limbs, houses, jobs, people…We all can. We all must try to keep creating good and better.

It’s Springtime. Let’s all turn our faces to that glorious sun (wear your special glasses if you do this tomorrow for the eclipse-ha).

I’d like to send a shout-out to the great survivors and therapists and everyone at Success Rehab in Pennsylvania. I was able to present for them a couple weeks ago and they are super reminders of how many awesome people make up this community.

Keep rocking THIS life! Wishing you all a great Spring.

xo

Pitch Perfect

In a fleeting moment, a day, a season…You hear a particular song, realize an old lyric you had been singing wrong all this time, catch your breath from an incredible line in a movie, or get caught up in a wonderful novel…

Someone says something or writes something in a card and, often, they don’t realize what kind of goodness they’ve done. The kind of word magic that pricks an ear, turns a head, shoots straight to the heart.

I saw this quote in a series last night and immediately thought of you. Of us:

Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. 

Some form of this is attributed to both Ernest Hemingway and Leonard Cohen. I love it!!!

The best song writers wrote hundreds, even thousands, of songs that never made it big. Never made it onto albums or onto charts or onto stages. Even the greatest authors wrote books not many cared for. Same with columnists and speech writers, advertising jingle writers…

We just have to keep putting it all out there. We have to keep ringing the bells that can still ring because we never know when we will produce a sweet, pitch-perfect moment that keeps forever in our hearts, in the hearts of those we love, in our recovery journey, in our family’s history, in a friendship’s path, in a lovers’ dance, in a world that needs our particular note song.

Merry Christmas, all.

You know how I love and cheer for you. Kara

Sneaky, Glorious Symptoms of Recovery

For most of us, the healing and recovering from our injuries are something akin to slogs swimming in pools of honey. After those initial weeks when we might enjoy rapid healing of some of our symptoms, we continue to watch and watch and watch for more but, after that first rally, we can barely tell anything is better. Nothing seems to move or change.

Sometimes, we don’t realize that, even when the injury didn’t improve, we did. Even when the damage didn’t heal, we could.

For many years, I never missed a month in writing a blog entry. Some months there were two but there was always one. Always.

I have noticed that, in the last few years, I have missed more months along the way. While I first wondered if I am just getting lazy, like with my dusting (ha!), I am thinking, instead, that it is a good thing. A great thing!

Another sneaky, glorious symptom of recovery!!!!

If you are anywhere near my age, you can see the tally of years in the mirror. In the stiffness of morning joints. In the slowing of need to be out and about and busy all the time. I will concede that I get less done now and I am always looking forward to getting my stuff done and getting home to my cozy nest.

My life is quiet. Modest. Peaceful. Full of love…And it occurred to me that my life is not some sad effect of brain injury. It is the resounding, fabulous result of everything I’ve learned since I was hurt.

There is very little time for brain injury now. I have tweaked the changes enough to have made their place in my life comfortable and, even, welcome. While my injury changed my thought processes, my recovery changed my thinking in wonderful ways I am grateful for.

I have realized that peacefulness, ease, comfort, and well-being are are not ceremoniously stripped from those who suffer and hurt. In many ways, those who suffer and hurt become fast-tracked to the importance of seeking these things and finding ways to obtain them.

I think we spend half our lives gathering. We gather everything from people to possessions, obligations, responsibilities. We gather time stealers to stuff into our days, our months, our years, filling our calendars and piling on more.

As we age and earlier, for those of us who are injured, we realize the wonderful release and relief of shedding, discarding, trimming and slimming.

They are sneaky, glorious symptoms of recovery but they are also sneaky, glorious symptoms of successful living.

After forty or more years of gathering, there are things that no longer fit. Some of the people in our lives no longer fit. Some of our old attitudes, habits, routines, clutter, stances…

For any of us, time spent realizing, sorting and trimming is good time. It is a sneaky, glorious symptom of happy living. In this season of Thanksgiving, I invite you to recognize what you don’t have much time for any longer. Old relationships in your life that have become toxic. People who have become snarky or judgmental. Groups that drain your energies. Things you’ve always done that you cannot recall why, any longer.

Autumn reminds us that, when old, once-beautiful leaves turn brown and dry, falling all around us, those trees take time to ready for new life and they blossom again. When we have less time for brain injury, for things lost, for people who no longer replenish good in us, for the 87 water glasses we inherited along the way…

We are ready for new life. New definitions of what makes well-being.

Something to be thankful for.

Hope this finds you well. xo

Paddling Downstream

Many years ago, a wise woman in my life introduced me to the concept of “paddling downstream.” I have used it and applied it all throughout my life since then and, time and time again, it has helped me “right the ship” when necessary.

In a nutshell, the concept is simple. When we are paddling downstream, the journey is smoother, it helps put easy miles behind us, and we can enjoy the ride and the scenery because we aren’t always battling like we do when we try to paddle upstream.

Simple enough, eh?

Sometimes, simple is just flippin’ brilliant.

I picture an easy river on a sunny day, paddling in the quiet. Oh, look over there, that pretty bird! Oh, I see a deer family in the woods! Oh, look at how the sun comes through those leaves-so pretty!

The ride is quiet, connected, peaceful, healing, loving, filling.

Most of us get turned around at points in our journey and we don’t immediately realize we are no longer paddling downstream. Whether it’s a tornado-type relationship or a significant change that we did not invite, we get sucked into a path that doesn’t look or feel anything like paddling downstream.

Turn Around, Don’t Drown!

When we decide to paddle downstream, the best thing we can do is to hone our ability to realize when we aren’t. Over the years, I have recognized paddling in the wrong direction in myself and other people. It usually is surrounded by an increase in loud INGs: splashing, thrashing, flashing, gnashing, blasting…

You get the picture.

We can quickly find ourselves and lose ourselves in these changes of direction. Whether in a relationship, with our peeps, at work, or trying to deal with something significant like a great loss or a disease/injury, we find that, all of a sudden, we are no longer paddling downstream. The peace is gone. We don’t see that happy deer family because they ran and hid from us. We are scary, then.

When our lives take a turn and we find ourselves in a new normal that is full of loud INGs, the first-best thing to do is to hurry and paddle over to a side shore where we can stop and get our bearings. Too many of us stay in the splashing, struggling and angry, until we have allowed the good to move on. Regardless of the arena in our lives, everything will continue to move on.

When we find the angry INGs having to do with relationships, it’s usually because one person changed the dynamic or the two people are no longer living in the same time frame. Someone stopped living in the present and returned to try and live in the past or someone could not stand the present and started planning a different future.

In our case, many of us experience this after TBI, as the scales become unbalanced so quickly! As we scramble, often desperately, to return to a past we preferred, all of our people are trying to hurry ahead to when things might get better. The space widens between us as we head in different directions.

You might recognize symptoms of this as impatience coming from your people, irritation when you continue to talk about your injury more than anything else, more heated words and quick tempers, and more absence as your people start to go off in other directions to find their version of happy.

Now what?

When the happy downstream paddling of life gives way to the exhausting attempts to paddle against the current, get to the side, stop the slide, quiet the white waters, and take a breath. We can blame those around us, our partners and our bosses and our lousy neighbors or clueless friends or whomever and whatever.

We can only change ourselves.

When our relationships start splashing up white waters, we can only calm our part of it and sometimes that’s enough.

When did the calm change? When did the space between us start growing? When did the arguments start? What am I digging my heels in about? Why am I not being heard or seen?

When it comes to our brain injuries, we must realize that we cannot stop the stream. We cannot hold people in our stuck present for long. We cannot, ourselves, go back. Can we change the way we present things? Can we reduce the time, each day, of hardship and grievance? Can we enlist more help? Can we take a break and have some fun? Can we call a truce, come from a different direction, or decide that sometimes the best thing we can do for an ailing relationship is to end it?

Downstream there may be more healing, more recovery, more hope, better days. But nothing good comes from living in a past life that no longer exists.

We need to paddle. When we stand stuck in the middle of churling rapids, our legs get cold and numb, soon unable to move. We will tire then. We will tire and fall.

Get back in the boat. Get back in the canoe, back on the raft, into the kayak. There are many ways to go downstream.

You will know you are heading in the right direction when you leave the white waters behind you and you can, again, feel the quiet rise within you. As you begin to see the peaceful signs of happiness return, you will know you are no longer scaring the deer family. 🙂

Regardless of the vessel, regardless the pace, choose downstream! When nothing good is accessible behind you, choose forward, knowing that any good is ahead and not backwards.

Safe travels!

Let Barry Manilow Help Fix Us!!!

I’ve known since early in my recovery, now 27 years strong, that music could gift us beautiful gems to carry in our recovery basket. In the first weeks and months after being hurt, I utilized music and singing to help my halting, bump-along speech and processing speeds with what I consider marked success.

I just read an article about how, over the years, studies great and small-but-promising have continued to reveal hopeful insight into how music helps our cognitive and overall health.

It has long been my personal visual that our brains are filled with empty hallways and closed-off rooms, aching for us to dare down them and fling open rooms of old capability and helpful stores. I have believed, from very early on, that music helps connects those rooms to lighten up more of our cognitive houses.

So I sing. Always have. I don’t sing well anymore but I sing anyway. I am older than many of you so I sing old ABBA and Bob Seger and Rolling Stones and David Bowie. And yes, I belt out old Barry Manilow and John Denver and Beatles and Carpenters and I don’t care when I am lousy or when I am nerdy.

I am fixing and I am healing.

Are you?

The article I read noted several wonderful ways experts now believe music can help us. They tout that music helps overall cognitive function. It releases endorphins and we could all use a little feel-good flood. Singing tones facial muscles, diaphragms and intercostal muscles. It has benefitted those struggling with vocal and swallowing control. It aids lung capacity, it helps memory and may boost immunity.

SING!

It’s easy and fun and it doesn’t cost a thing. It feels good, it benefits us in so many ways, and it may just be helping to fix our brain pathways.

Music is a gift to the soul. The exhausted being of those of us who struggle on all sides of this injury.

There are too many times when I cannot recall the movie I just watched or the score of a football game that just finished. But, doggone it! I sang one of Barry Manilow’s hits from the late 70s today, start to finish, without a flaw.

Laughing at myself.

A favorite thing I love to do is to get lost on YouTube, chasing down rabbit holes of songs from my youth, great duets, brand jingles from the 70s, unforgettable performances I saw once in concert or on tv, perfect harmonies, beautiful hymns, certain show tunes that made me cry.

Music is a gift like wild flowers. Like sunrises and sunsets and autumn colors and starlit nights. It fills us, all for free. It heals and soothes us when we all need healing and soothing.

Sing in the shower. Sing in the car. Sing with your kids, your people, your friends. Sing at church or in a community choir. Dance a little. Clap to the rhythm. Grab two long kitchen utensils and pound the beat on a pillow. Tap your toes. Whistle. Hum. Learn to line dance. Join a polka at a neighborhood festival. Take up an instrument. Find a free summer concert. Go downtown and listen to the sidewalk musicians.

And sing.

Your successful recovery is music to my ears. xo

One By One, Inviting Creative Thinking To Overcome Damaged Thinking

After brain injury, our brains are damaged. That might come across as obvious but it is, surprisingly, an oft-missed ingredient to our fabulous successful recovery cakes!

Successful recovery is not so much about healing. Healing comes and it doesn’t. Most of us heal to some extent and we fail to heal fully in other ways.

What’s left are the challenging, bothersome, prickly stumbles of our everyday.

I did the best recovery work when I started taking the injury apart and attacking smaller parts of the elusive recovery. Brain injury isn’t something that heals as one whole. It is, more often, the result of conquered smaller problems. Hundreds of them. Thousands, even.

One of the challenges that faces so many of us is trying to manage finances after injury. Many of us lose big money after we’ve been hurt. Jobs and careers are slid into the shredder, coming out in pieces we don’t recognize For those of us who slink along after injury with razor-thin margins for error, it becomes imperative that we invite creative thinking to overcome the challenges of our damaged thinker.

My memory problems greatly affected my ability to successfully manage my finances after I was hurt. I quickly realized I would need to jot notes for myself but the next problem was trying to find the notes, remember to check them, and wonder what that scribbling meant with no date and no context.

Over the 27 years since my injury, our banking has changed so much! I’ve had to reinvent new systems to execute my finances as checks have gone away and banking is now, mostly, completed online. Through many trials, and too many errors to count, I have finally devised a cock-eyed system that serves me perfectly.

Each month, I have a typed grid where I swap out numbers. I have my creditors and utilities companies listed down the first row. I have a “Paid” column next to it where I put the payment and the date. In the third column, I have “Remarks.”

I check it many days a month. If the date in the paid column is from the month before, I know I still have to pay it. In the remarks column, I might write “auto deduction” or what I still owe on it and it when.

A lot of people do this. They create grids and budgets and pie charts and whatever fancy doodles their computers can create. But, for me, what I added made a huge difference in my quest to invite creative thinking to tackle my damaged thinking.

I added a story.

Below my table, I tell the story of the month. I add what I call “recall context.”

For May, I started with this amount. I paid x, y and z on the 3rd. Now I have X$. I spent 40 at the grocery and 15 on prescriptions. Now I have….

This “story” of my month helps me to overcome my recall challenges by providing color and context to my expenses. In this way, I don’t have to fuss about what’s come in or gone out of my bank account. I keep to my table and story. It works for me.

As we come and go through this injury journey, challenges will come and go, too. We all will be helped with some things and we all will, likely, be forced to come up with very specific-to-each answers for questions most of us ask.

We find that a lot of the rules that once guided and comfort us now, after injury, look like someone dumped the junk drawer onto the floor. We have to identify the particular problems that threaten our success, happiness, well-being, relationships, and independence and get busy with solutions we can thrive with.

Hope your Spring weather is as lovely as ours. Wishing you well.

Kara

“Don’t Let Perfect Be The Enemy of Good”

Voltaire, the Italian philosopher, is most commonly credited with the quote above. Though many believe the quote, or some version on the theme, pre-dates Voltaire, the quote had legs and has withstood the test of time.

Have we?

Over the years, when I have spoken at brain injury conferences, I have often said something to the effect of, “Don’t let the injury continue to injure.” Most of that targets the many of us who just can’t stop comparing our post-injury, lousy lives with the pre-injury ones we dreamily recall as perfect and preferred and ideal.

We waste a lot of time, unwilling to have anything less than that day before we were hurt. We allow “perfect” to become the enemy of all the potential good.

It’s a lonely conundrum, this. No matter how many plead with us to let the past go and get busy in the present…no matter how many abandon us in our place with no budging, leaving us as they continue on…no matter how long and how far we drift from that last day of our old normal….

We dig in our heels. We are willing to keep waiting. We continue to scour the Internet for a miracle pill, a rumored specialist who cures brain injuries, that next book with the secret revealed, the ancient Far Eastern Remedy…

Maybe the quote should also be, “Don’t let yesterday be the enemy of today.” I’m sure someone far smarter than me has quoted some version of that in prettier ways.

Over these many years, I’ve learned that waiting stubbornly only wastes those days. Burns them. Gifts them, too, to our injuries like sad forfeits of what might have been.

What do we do when “perfect” is gone?

There are two things I did to overcome my early waiting. One: I admitted that not everything about my former life was perfect and two: I left the door open in case “complete healing” decided to find me down the line. That was the bargain I made with my past.

And then I got busy standing down and stepping back, refusing to be the enemy of good.

It’s amazing how much good you gather when you seek it, invite it, create it…

I believe we find what we are looking for, in most cases. If you want to be angry, you can find angry people to be angry with. You can find things to get angry about all over the news. You can point out this and yell about that and it’s all probably valid, at least in part.

But, by the same token, if you want to be happy, you can find happy people to be happy with. You can find things to be happy about all over the news. You can point out happy this and shine light upon happy that.

We all have to make our own choices about whether we want to be angry or not, happy or not, peaceful or not, successful or not. We each get this one life to decide for ourselves.

If we decide to dig in our heels and stay where our “perfect” lives died, we will stay there alone. No one will stay with us there. They have lives that move forward.

But if we decide that a good present and future is worthwhile, even at the trade of a “perfect” past we cannot reclaim, then we are recovering from this injury. Like a person who finally chooses to date again after a bitter divorce…like the person who finally updates his/her resume and starts looking for another job after a painful firing…Like the person who chooses to embrace prosthetic limbs or breasts or a wig after a tough bout with an angry illness….

Once we realize that an enjoyable good will always be better than a perfect that is out of our reach, then we start joining again. We catch up to those people who kept moving forward when we chose not to. We stop grieving at the grave of one we can never have back and we start fine-tuning the one we are lucky enough to be.

Promise yourself to insert verbs into your life. Descriptors of movement like joining, trying, engaging…Even failing and struggling and bounce-backing. Ha.

I’m not a money-rich woman but I’d bet my last dollar that someone who loves you and needs you is waiting for you to join them for a dance. The dance of life. The dance of the living.

You know how I cheer for you!!!

Prioritizing Successful Recovery Efforts

Most of us, especially early on, think of our brain injuries as one thing. We look at it like it has some kind of answer that will make perfect sense. There’s dirt all over the floor so you buy a vacuum. One of your tires has blown out so you put on the spare. There’s nothing in the fridge so you go to the grocery store or you order carry-out or zip through the drive-through window.

Logical, simple, sane solutions.

Unfortunately, the longer it takes to recover, the more we realize that brain injuries are more like maddening Christmas lights. One light fails and everything goes. You try to find the one failure but it’s all tangled and, when you replace one light, something else is causing the whole string to stay dark.

Most of us do a lot of waiting before we get busy with our successful recovery. There is denial and there is prescribed rest. There are waits to get in to see a doctor and more waits for tests and test results and whatever is prescribed after that.

It is exhausting, frustrating, wearying and heartbreaking.

For those of you who are early in your successful recovery efforts, and for those of you who love someone new to our community, there is a way to slash through the waiting and start making progress on your successful recovery.

Because each of our injuries are distinct and because each of our lives are, as well, only you and your trusted people can decide what needs the most work. Are you single with no kids and you cannot work yet? Afraid of losing the house? Are you partnered but were the primary bread-winner or married and, since your injury, your relationship is really struggling? Do you own a business you can’t manage or have kids who need more than you can give them right now?

What is your biggest problem?

Start there!

It’s too overwhelming to try and fix everything all at once. It’s too time-leaking to just wait for all of this to return to how it was. No one is going to understand how you endure the symptoms of your injury every minute of every day or how many times it affects your daily life.

Only you.

When you begin to prioritize successful recovery efforts, you teach and you share and you receive. You teach those closest to you what you are struggling with and you share the burden of change. You receive information on what is going on in the minds of those you care most about.

Most people, when prioritizing successful recovery efforts, can put the fire out on a lot of high stressors by choosing to work on their primary relationships. We have our own inner turmoil and grief about what we miss in our selves but, too often, we fail to ask our people what they see and what they miss.

If you haven’t asked in a while or if the subject has not been addressed, ask your people what they miss about your old you. Too many people won’t take this simple step because of how painful and scary it might be to hear what our people might say.

You may be surprised.

Often times, partners will admit that they are “over it” and they are tired of you being so self-absorbed and all-consumed with your injury. They miss you showing interest in their day, their struggles, their work, their “stuff.”

Kids might report that you used to bake or you used to cook dinner or you used to whatever.

There’s your starting point.

In an injury that has a blinding blizzard of components, you get started on the relationships that are most important. It’s a conversation. An invitation to team up with those we love in order to find a way through this.

There are ways to eliminate some of the dozens of prickly fall-outs from these injuries.

Do you kids wish you would cook like you used to but you are just too tired by dinner time? Can you install a nap while they are at school? Can you have their favorite meal delivered and invest in dinner chatter with them about their day?

Can you set aside a time each day to allow your partner to share his/her fears, daily stuff, concerns? Can you do it at a time when you are not yet cognitively fatigued so you can actively engage and partner?

What can you do and where can you turn if they report you are angry all time? How can they help you and what strategies can you install if they complain you don’t remember what they told you the day before?

I’ve heard uncountable complaints from brain injury survivors who are so frustrated that their people cannot appreciate all they are going through and continue to bombard them with their “selfish” needs. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that.

The truth is…they aren’t going to understand what you are going through. Not entirely, ever. They are going to want to move on and that will often be way before you feel ready to. They may become resentful of your injury and blame you for not recovering fully because they prefer who you used to be.

Once you realize these things, you have a number of paths you can choose from there. If you choose to try and make your intimate relationships survive, then ask them, invite them, team with them, hear them. And then you get busy solving those problems, one by one. You get help from them on this so that you can participate in that. You change the routine, change the dynamics, change the schedule. You get the help you need to be able to thrive again in the roles that matter most to you.

These injuries hurt everything. Not just our brains. Our relationships, our financial situations, our emotional well-being, how we see ourselves and how others see us.

Figure out what is a priority and get busy there. Just as there are uncountable stories of those unwilling to change and prioritize and get busy, there are even more stories of those who did and are living wonderful lives after successful recovery efforts.

Join us. :))))

Let’s All Get Better

As the anniversary of my brain injury fades and fogs through the years, now 27, I find that the effects of TBI blur and meld and stew together with the effects of age. So many things seem slower, saggier, and breezing away.

“Turning back the clock” requires, I’m finding, the realization that the clock is faltering, wobbling, failing. I think it happens to people at different ages and stages but I’m starting to understand yoga classes, Zumba, and all those people walking at the mall.

Where, long ago, I was obsessed with deciphering the minutia of my injury and its effects, I find that I am at peace with it. I no longer seek a former me who once was able to do things I don’t even care to do anymore. As my eyes have gotten bleary with weary, my vision has become quite clear.

We all wish to stay sharp and enjoy and employ as many tools as we can for as long as possible. Doesn’t matter which side of the TBI fence we find ourselves on, we all hope to keep our cognitive tools sharp.

Let’s all get better!

One of the ways to clear the clutter down the hallways of our minds and behind the doors of our memory stores is to fling those doors open and allow them to breathe. Find and revive them. Sort through the closets and drawers of our past.

I invite you to improve with me. Just sitting here today.

Picture your childhood home. Most of us recall them as warm backdrops for favorite, easy memories of Christmases and birthdays. But improving invites nudging. Looking left and right. Waking up the quiet memories, tiny ones, all around the big easies.

In order to light up our brains and enlist more of our fabulous, wondrous grey matter, we need to inch around like hands in the dirt, like fingers in sand.

Go into your childhood garage. What did it smell like? Can you smell grass clippings on the lawnmower or oil for the car? Is there fertilizer in there? The family grill? Your bicycle?

Walk into your bathroom in your childhood home. What’s in the medicine cabinet? Open the door to the linen closet and the cupboards or drawers. What’s in there?

Go sit at a tiny desk or table in your kindergarten class. What did your paint shirt look like? Can you smell the paste? Can you feel the warmth of the slide on a sunny day during recess?

While most of us here focus on what our brains can no longer do, it sometimes helps to recall how enormous and outstanding and mind-blowing our brains really are.

Let’s enlist them! Let’s help them connect to new pathways that might just assist in our successful recoveries.

It might just start with the memories of our childhood jewelry boxes or what was in the family junk drawer or our first stereo or winter boots.

Let’s spread our cognitive wings and see where they might take us. xo

Delicious Distractions

For most of us with TBI, distractions are so derailing in terms of our efficiency and ability to execute daily to-dos that keep us “in the game” with our people and our lives. For me, spontenaity and last-minute changes and plans that go haywire often throw me into a tailspin and it’s hard to recover.

While distractions can derail and topple and zig-zag us off our carefully-planned game, they can also be a blessed gift of relief from all the effort it takes to function in our TBI worlds.

Right now, most of us are distracted by Christmas doings and, for most of us in the United States, we are distracted by the horrific weather that is a challenge at so many turns.

But I am harkened by the distractions.

What???!!!!

Most of us, after we are hurt, long for a normal we no longer have access to. We lament those days before, often with grief and anger that stubbornly keeps.

Soooo…when I find that I am side-tracked by last-minute Christmas things and when I realize that we are all trying to bundle up against minus-20 wind chills with 50mph gusts, I smile a little beneath my 17 scarves.

I remind myself that these are the delicious distractions of the normal and I am grateful. It is a reminder that we will always be way more than this injury. Way better in so many ways!

I wish you all a Merry Everything. Whatever holidays, traditions, and moments you seek and treasure, may they be bountiful and fill your hearts.

May there be delicious distractions that remind you of how wonderfully normal we are, whatever that means. Laughing here.

Please keep safe and warm and healthy. Please enjoy more moments of smiles and love and joy than you can count.

Merry Christmas! Love you.