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