This blog is rapidly approaching its 2nd birthday. I am starting to tell people about the blog more and readership has definitely been increasing. I was surprised to find how acurate this post still is in describing the purpose of this blog and how it came about. Since there are so many new readers, I have decided to repost it. Here you go:
This blog came about from having over and over said “I could write a book on How to do Everything Wrong with a Brain Injury“. I decided that I might as well start blogging about my experience and see what comes of it.
For right now, I am simply enjoying blogging! In fact I am loving it! It feels like something that was stoppered up for a long, long time finally got uncorked.
Blogging is providing a medium for me to make sense of this crazy journey I find myself on. The journey is crazy not only the result of having a few consecutive head traumas. It is also just life! Having a brain injury just gives me the opportunity to look at it in a different way.
It is like the brain injury (or more accurately the realization that I have a brain injury) caused my whole haphazardly constructed reality to crash down around me. The building blocks that I used are scattered on the ground and I have to rebuild. I can use some new ones but most of the building materials need to come from this mess strewn around me.
I have the opportunity to carefully examine most of the tumbled blocks one by one before I add them to the new construction. It is giving me the occasion to examine patterns I developed to operate within the confines of my nuclear family as a child, coping skills I developed as a bright girl with undiagnosed ADHD (due to the fact that in those years ADD & ADHD had not even been “discovered” or identified by the medical community), habits and behaviors that I have overlaid on the core patterns, etc.
Will I someday write a book? Who knows! It is a possibility. Will it be about healing a brain injury? Maybe. If it is the above title will not be it’s name!
Why is Dancing Upside Down the name of this blog? Well the name actually came from a different chain of thoughts but it seemed to fit here. I am in the middle of writing a longer post about “Why Dancing Upside Down” but here, in brief, is the story.
One night in the fall of 2007, I was out walking after having watched Randy Pausch’s last lecture. I was very moved by the talk. As I walked I was taking a good look at my life and comparing it to the lessons and steps Randy had listed in his video and where I had gone wrong.
What if I had the opportunity to start over?
The whole point of this train of thought was to look at what I hadn’t done right in the past so I could figure out a way to do it right in the present.
I never set goals when I was young; I didn’t know to do it or how to do it. I did not have the kind of support and guidance Randy had as a child. Then I attended a college in it’s infancy (The Evergreen State College) and we students did not have advisers. (Evergreen has since changed their policy on that topic due to the feedback from myself and other early students!) I never had mentors. People did not take me under their wing and mentor me; probably because I did not know how to accept a mentor’s help or ask for it.
Though I felt like I wanted a chance to start over as a young adult and “do it right” I had to face the fact that I am in my early 50’s. I cannot have my age 20-40 years back (and in many ways I wouldn’t want my twenties back!!). I have to start from where I am. Instead of learning the dance steps as a young person, I have to learn them now and hope to be a “Late Bloomer”.
Thus the name: Dancing Upside Down.
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