Category Archives: First Person

Out on a Ledge

This week, I wandered the Bruce Trail overlooking Georgian Bay. Cedar, pine and fir smell like home. The rock of the Canadian Shield shows the marks of millennia; fissures and crevices, some large enough to fall into, focus my mind and keep me in the present moment. Step by step, I make my way over tree roots and rock. I’m careful. I walk softly. The trail features several outcrops and we stopped at every one to take in the view. My husband took this photo of me on one ledge while he stood on another.

As I stood there, I realized I’ve been feeling like I’m on a ledge since the car accident that left me concussed. Since the pandemic started, I know that many of you are also feeling like you are out on a ledge. Believe me, I feel no satisfaction in having your company out here. I would have preferred it if you all could have stayed innocent of the sense of isolation I have come to know so intimately.

But now, you know how it feels to be unable to see your people. You’re scared. You’re wondering when or if it will ever end. Your reasons for feeling this way are different than mine, but the result is the same. Sometimes we’re lonely. We miss our old lives, our friends, our old jobs, the old way of doing things. We rebel against the new restrictions.

We miss the simple pleasures of life and when we try to replicate them, they do not measure up. We miss big things like vacations and weddings and birthday parties, but mostly we miss the little things. I used to enjoy grocery shopping and then it became a gauntlet of light and noise and chaos. I used to have a lively social life, but then that same light and noise and chaos made seeing friends and going out difficult too. There is always an undercurrent of concern, of what if. The new conditions in which we must live suck the joy from everything. Or so it seems.

Because of my brain injury, I was already so accustomed to my life being smaller that the accommodations I had to make for the pandemic did not have the same impact on me as they did on you. Like you, I suddenly had to worry about germs and hand washing and finding Lysol wipes, but the shrinking of my social and work life had already happened. I already spent way more time in my home. I already couldn’t concentrate well enough to work consistently or even read. And now, you are in a similar spot.

I have watched you go through many of the same phases as I did, particularly the “this won’t last long” phase. I have waited for you to catch up, to be where I was about four years ago when the niggling thought, “this is not going away,” took root. Now you, some of you, are coming to realize that the two or three weeks of shut down we embarked upon way back in March might not be going away soon. No matter how much we wish it would and no matter what kind of schedule we try to impose on it, what happens is not in our control. Like me, you are figuring out your new life and negotiating this new you, the you that cannot control anything. It’s an ever-changing emotional landscape.

The mental health impact of dealing with trauma is real and overwhelming. I’m not a mental health expert, but I can tell you that what you are dealing with is a big deal. You’ve got to give yourself a break. You need time. You need compassion for yourself. Please, stop beating yourself up because you can’t be like you were.

Whoever you are, whatever cracks were in your life before the pandemic are now crevices big enough to fall into. You might feel like you’re out on a ledge. Alone. And that ledge isn’t feeling too stable.

There have been dark times for me in the past four years. Strangely, one of the worst was just last week. It had nothing to do with the pandemic, but just another layer of what happened to me revealing itself. You would think I would be used to everything by now. I don’t want to go into details, because it’s not necessary to add to your trauma by sharing mine. Suffice it to say, I was out on a ledge.

I can offer you this: one thing I have learned is that I have to feel my feelings. I have to sit with them and feel them and ask them what they are teaching me. I have to befriend them and stop pushing them away. I have to be grateful for them. It seems impossible, but it is possible. When I am awake at three in the morning, heart racing, frustration rising, dark thoughts taking over, I take a deep breath and accept that this is where I am. I know something now I didn’t know before the accident. I am more than what I do or how I feel. I am more than my successes, I am more than my failures. So are you. Those plans you had were just plans.

I understand now how notions of productivity and progress replaced true joy with a twisted capitalist version of success that made self love impossible because I could never be enough. I know now that the world can fall apart around me, I can fall apart within me, pieces of me can break and strain, my brain can struggle to find words or balance or memories, but I am still me. I am fine. Even out on the ledge, I can find the place of quiet inside of me and observe. Who is this observer? It is me. The calm centre of me.

You have a calm centre of you.

When I stood on that literal ledge this week, I looked around and felt gratitude. I felt immense joy. The ledge can be a beautiful place. The wind rushed and the clouds swept by. The water below was jade green and crystal clear, becoming dark blue as it deepened. A hawk soared high above the water, but eye level with me, circling, playing on the wind. We all belong here, right here, where we are. Me, the hawk, the water, the ledge, the trees. You. There is no other place to be. You are here. You’re okay. You’re not alone.

Prize Winning Worrier

To Mary Oliver, in gratitude

“The Hidden Life of Trees” and Learning Patience

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Walking to yoga yesterday, I had one of those irritating interactions with a driver who seemed to think it was taking me too long to cross the street. The driver lurched forward at our four way stop, I jumped back off the road and made eye contact, the kind of eye contact that says, “What do you think you’re doing?” She made the kind of hand motion that says, “Get on with it then,” and I did not break eye contact with her until I crossed through to the other side of the yellow line. She gunned it and passed behind me well before I was safely on the other sidewalk. And I thought about patience. Actually impatience first, and then patience.

I have a strong reaction to impatience. My father was impatient and sometimes volatile. One Saturday morning, I was in our basement rec room, a masterpiece of 1970s wood-panelling and red carpet, listening to my new album over and over on our single speaker record player. It was K-Tel’s “Fantastic.” (Mock me if you will, but you are mocking an eleven-year-old.) My father was in the back part of the basement, the unfinished part where he kept his workshop and tools. He was doing something that obviously wasn’t going too well. He opened up the door to the rec room, red with fury, took my record off, broke it in half over his knee, went back into his workshop and slammed the door. When I encounter impatience, I feel just like that eleven-year-old girl. I had no examples of patience as a child. It has taken me a lifetime to learn.

I need patience to read now. I’m reading about trees again. This time it is Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. I’ve been reading it, or trying to read it, for well over a year. I’ve started it four times and am currently on page 62. Again. It is great, but dense, and the kind of reading that is the most challenging to me as I continue to recover from my concussion. Trees are models of patience. They live in slow motion compared to us. Their actions take time. According to Wohlleben, they might even be called conscious actions. They might even be communicating with each other. And if we knew how to listen, they would be communicating to us. When I am frustrated by my slow reading, I think about the trees I’m reading about and find my patience again. Like Wohlleben, I am most at peace in a forest. Even if I can’t be in the forest at this moment, reading about it is the next best thing. I can imagine the smell of a stand of Douglas Fir and transport myself there. My own free Forest Therapy.

In yoga, we do tree pose. I think about the trees, their roots, their silent (to us) communications to each other. I balance my weight across my foot, try not to wobble. I have my drishti, my gaze on something unmoving, and I am, for a second, one with the trees. Then my mind wanders to the driver and I fall out of the pose. I don’t know why she was impatient. We are all fighting our own battles and I don’t know what hers are. I hope she finds some calm in her day. I return to the pose. I fall out again. I try again.

Today’s featured book: Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees. Vancouver: Greystone Books. 2015.

Recovery, Reframing, and Gratitude for 2018

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Happy New Year. 2018 will be the year I recover from this concussion. I know, I know. I said the same in 2017, and that came and went in a concussed fog. Don’t make promises you can’t keep, says someone in the back of my rattled brain. I’m ignoring that person, choosing optimism and saying this will be the year.

When this happened, way back in 2016, I couldn’t have imagined the time between then and now. My former GP told me dismissively that I would recover in three weeks. So I pretended I was fine and tried to carry on. I pushed and pushed until I couldn’t anymore. I remember thinking, “What is wrong with me?” and going into a blind panic amid the clangour.

What does recovery even mean? It’s a process, not a destination. I know now that it does not mean I will be like I was. There’s no going back. Time only moves forward, and so must I. But I will be something else, somebody closer to normal (whatever that is), somebody who doesn’t worry about falling sideways in the supermarket. I hope I’m somebody who can read quickly and deeply again, who can assimilate information, who can remember, who can write creatively, who can think creatively, who can understand a metaphor, who can ride a bike. I hope I am all of those things. And more. I hope I sleep soundly again.

I have been negative about 2017. The lost year, I call it. But it is time for a reframing. I accomplished something. I pursued my recovery. I followed up every lead on practitioners and treatment and completed every treatment plan given to me. I did puzzles and mazes and built with blocks meant for six-year-olds. I memorized patterns and tested my memory in thirty second intervals and two minute intervals and now a little longer than even two minutes. I filled in the pages of cognitive treatment work books. I budgeted my energy, learning over and over from my mistakes. I wore special glasses and eye patches and learned to see again and to focus and refocus close up and in the distance and every point in between. I regained my lost peripheral vision. And I read, doggedly, even when I couldn’t read, even when I had to use a ruler to follow the lines, even when the words swam on the page and pretended to be words they were not. I read something (anything) every day because I knew that to get my life back, I had to be able to read. And I wrote, little bits, tiny posts on social media, or here on my website. They took forever, but I tried to keep my hand in it any way I could. I launched a book, which I could not have done without Elaine (dear Elaine) but it got done. And then after my brain learned to understand my eyes again, I went to driver rehabilitation and got the go-ahead to drive. I still have huge anxiety in the car, but being told that I have the cognitive capacity to drive is a big step forward.

Creative writing is still elusive. The novel, almost finished in January 2016, remains where it was. Novels are big, you know? There’s so much to remember. So much logic and sequencing and so many words, words, words. Reading remains the second-most difficult task I have. To write, I have to be able to read. They are inseparable tasks. I acknowledge that there is improvement. I don’t need a ruler anymore. The words don’t jump around. I can read for twenty minutes or more most days without getting a headache. I still mix up meanings sometimes. I’m still extremely literal. But it is so much better than it was. Now I’m concentrating on concentrating, trying to build my capacity again.

I had (and continue to have) help. Lots of it. I heap special praise upon my neuro-optometrist, who really, truly, listened to what I was experiencing and didn’t look at me like I was crazy. She had seen this before. It was real. I was so grateful. I have a wonderful new GP, who, although she sees a thousand patients, is always able to make me feel like she has time for me. And I don’t want to forget the massage therapists and physiotherapists, a naturopath, a neuro-psychologist, an occupational therapist and a lawyer who helped me navigate the insurance and the crap I need to do to pay for it all. I thank them all.

I spent too much of my time in 2016 and early 2017 pretending I was fine. I wasn’t honest about how difficult it was to see friends or go on a simple outing. Some friends, close friends, knew and understood. They saw me cry, saw me fall apart, saw me have to disappear for a sleep like a cranky toddler. Thank you. People I know who face chronic illness gave me words and insight that helped. I can’t remember the past twenty months closely enough to give you all proper attribution. You know who you are and I am so grateful to you.

I am so grateful for my husband, whose life has also been curtailed by my brain injury. He has been patient and kind and encouraging. My daughter has too. She also had a big injury in 2016 and she was my recovery buddy for a long time. She’s all better now. She visited for the holidays and one day when I was out with these two cherished souls, I completely lost my equilibrium. My world slid down and to the right where I could not make sense of it. It lasted a long time. Too long. It’s a worry. But there they were, unconcerned about abandoning our plans and ready to take me home instead. It’s good to have people in your life who are with you, no matter what.

And I’m grateful for social media too and the friends I connect with there. Last January was a terrible time for me. I was standing at the edge of the abyss. I fought it back. I cannot overstate the value of social media in helping me back away from the darkness. It allowed me to connect with people without actually having to deal with, well, people, and noise and light. It kept me tethered to the world. To all of you who have sent along an encouraging word, thank you.

So here’s to reframing, to 2018, to health, to family, and to friends.

For the record, I started this post January 1 and it is now January 3. Good God. How can it take this long? Oh yes. Reframing. What matters is I could do it at all. I’m grateful.

Tis the season to think about Food Banks

Jane Cawthorne

Writer and Editor