I've Become an Annoyance

Hiya.

I’ve reached a level in my brain injury that I seem to be annoying some people, even when I tell them about the things I try so hard not to do. I babble on and on as if I’m drunk. When I get tired, I talk out loud to walk myself through difficult tasks. Actually, my cognitive therapist said I should talk it out. I repeat myself. I have trouble stopping or leaving when I’m sitting down and I’m tired. The best part of this one is that I told my students about these difficulties and they happily let me know when they’re finished. No drama. No irritation. And they’re quite smug, in a nice way, to see that I make mistakes when I’m tired, especially in elementary math. But adults have more trouble with my blunders. I can tell when I annoy them and I’m trying so hard to change when I really can’t.

I wonder how many times I have been irritated with neurodivergent people? Oh, it’s embarrassing to think about. I think I’ll sign off now so I can go meditate an apology to some people.

Thank you for listening, jules

Fractured Inner Monologue

My inner monologue is broken. I never realized how much I loved hearing the voice in my head, especially the quiet morning voice that seemed to have so much wisdom. I can conjure other voices into my memory, my son’s and my husband’s, but this voice belongs to me even though it didn’t always sound like me. It seemed kinder and wiser than me too, so sometimes I attributed it to God’s voice. Who else could it belong to?

Later in the day, my inner monologue sounded like me. It would shift to my continued conversations with people I had spoken to, arguments I’d make, dialog to match scenes I imagined and the looks on the cats’ faces, and…

I forgot that Mike was home after all, and I just got pretty freaked out for a minute. You know, when your eyes dilate and you stop breathing for a moment to hear what’s happening in another room?

Okay, I’m going to go talk to a real person, not try to listen to a fractured voice in my head. I know he’s got plans for helping someone today, but he’s here now and I need to hear a coherent voice.

Thank you for listening, jules

The Intersection between School and Brain Injury Therapy

I’m almost finished with cognitive therapy. They call it speech therapy, I think, so that we’re not embarrassed about it as we negotiate with the world to get to our appointments. I’ve decided to go the direct route, not hiding that I have brain injury. What good does it do to hide that my hair doesn’t grow well? I could wear a wig, but you’d probably recognize that It’s a wig. In the same vein, what good does it do to work so hard to pretend there’s nothing wrong with my brain? No matter how hard I try, you’re still going to see my mistakes.

Last night, while watching Uncharted (I had to google the name of the movie), I said that there had to be some squashbuckling. in it because they found Magellan’s ships. I fixed it, said swashbuckling two or three times, when I realized my mistake, but it is part of my difficulty, my brain injury, recalling words. Here’s my list of difficult words so far.

There are some words I have trouble simply recalling as I speak:

• cognitive

• nursing home

• pernicious

• histoplasmosis

• cookies

• mayhem

• deadline

• navigator

• rivalry

• cadaver

• quarry hole

• swashbuckling

Oh, there are more, but those were the ones I wrote down the way I’m supposed to. Then, there’s the loss of spelling:

• medieval

• dependant

• annihilate

• dilemma

And so many more. I used to be really good at spelling.

The cool thing is that I get to start working the same way my students do to work around my shortcomings. The hard part is that I know I’m going to admit my shortcomings with my students and their parents instead of trying to hide them. Will they still want to have me tutor their children if I don’t have the levels of executive function I used to have? Maybe not. Or maybe they’ll watch me struggle alongside them and they’ll see the benefits to their children of learning that learning is a struggle worth pursuing. I guess it depends on the student and their parents.

I don’t organize as well as I used to. I forget how when I’m tired. I have trouble following directions. I have some challenge even reading when I have too much I need to read. I have lots of trouble organizing my writing projects. I have students with this difficulty so I’m going to make copies of the paperwork and workbook to teach them what I’m learning. I’m getting a headache just writing about this. It’s time to wrap up soon.

Together, my students and I are going to break large projects into smaller projects, plan how long it will take, organize our space to make it easier to concentrate, schedule tasks on a calendar, plan and implement breaks, set up people to report progress to, and celebrate the completion of our small steps as well as the large ones.

For now, I need to do this for my tutoring, plus for my writing if I’m ever going to finish another book. I really want to do both. Don’t I?

I’ll admit that it would be easy to slide into oblivion, painting in a memory care class and not worrying about the future. It would be easier to let go of my life and my dreams, but that’s not who I am, is it?

How are you going to make sure you finish what you started?

Thank you for listening, jules

Remember

I keep trying to remember everything, but I just can’t. If I remember to write in the morning, I forget to take my pills. If I remember to take down the garbage, I forget to clean the cats’ litter boxes. I have trouble filling my pill containers with a list. I can carry on a conversation, but I forget to tell the main idea of a story, or I fall into drunk talking when I’m tired but don’t recognize it until later when I’ve rested. There are stories I’ve told that I had only ever told Mike and Nick. I make lists then forget to check them.

I drop things too. Three days ago, I broke two bowls in one fell swoop. What the heck is a fell swoop? A few weeks ago, I broke one of my grandma’s glasses. The other day, after I broke the bowls, I swept up a pill from the floor that I must have dropped. I’m glad the cats were smart enough not to eat it.

Yet, I can still remember the list of words the cranial, carotid, cognitive therapist gave me to test my memory. I made them into a story: candle sugar wagon hotel farmer village sandwich feather artist paper. It was a stupid story, but it was a story and now I can still remember it even though I don’t need to. I still work fairly well on exercises with my students, though my lessons are getting a little repetitive. Don’t worry. I’m on it. I have a list of concepts that I often forget to check.

But I can still see beauty in the world. I can still comprehend and appreciate geometry, visualize the planets spiraling behind the sun as it rushes its own orbit around a black hole, and hopefully write a decent sentence though my spelling is slipping away and, now that I look at it, my sentence structures are simplifying themselves. Dammit, I’ll have to do some editing. Editing is exhausting.

It’s hard to find a bright side to this. There are so many things on my body I would have preferred to break instead of breaking my brain. Maybe you’ll be entertained and enlightened as I spiral into my black hole. Maybe it’ll just be tragic with no redeeming features.

Thank you for listening, jules