Samuel Johnson said that a little ease is
the ruin of great men. This is a fact of nature. Nature strives to be
efficient, the most return for the least effort. When one is struggling to
survive it is the most sensible path to follow.
Fast forward out of the Neolithic and such
hard scrabble existence was not part of my life growing up in the twentieth
century. I was not rich, but white middle-class was close enough. I had learned
to get by on minimum effort.
When I awoke out of a coma with a severe
brain injury everything had changed. I had to learn to walk, talk, read and
write, basically everything, all over again. Only this time everything was harder.
Much harder. Nothing came easy. I found myself at the proverbial crossroads. Do
I give up and accept my lot, or do I push on?
The choice may seem obvious when you see
where I am today. I've been happily married for over 25 years. I have worked satisfactorily
for 23 years in a factory and have now retired to pursue more fulfilling work
as a wedding officiant and writer/speaker. I have a wide circle of friends and
an extensive list of awards and accolades. In a word, I have thrived.
When I was in the hospital I had no idea
what brain injury recovery involved or how long it would take (essentially a
lifetime). Had I foreseen what would be required I would have blanched and
quailed. In fact, it was really about two years later, when I reached a plateau,
that I became clinically depressed. It was then that I realized that I had to
accept that I wasn't going to breeze through my recovery like a wunderkind and that
I was going to be “brain injured” forever.
That was when I decided I didn't want to
live the rest of my life half lived. I did not want to live a half-life. I
wanted to live a full life. This is the time when many would say that they “pulled
themselves up by their own bootstraps.” If anyone thinks that’s possible, I
want you to reach down right now and pull with all your might. Yeah, it can’t
be done. If anyone tells me that’s what they have done, I eye them
suspiciously.
The first help I needed was with my
depression, which took a few months of therapy and about a year of
anti-depressants. The second thing I needed was a support structure; friends
and family who believed in me and supported me. Then, with all that in place, I
was ready to do the (seemingly) impossible.
I had an overwhelming list of issues and
deficits. I chose the one that bothered me most, thinking that if I could at
least do that I could maybe keep on going. For me that was walking and being in
good shape. I had to have the energy to climb the mountains before me.
I started walking every day. Soon I was
running a little bit of the way, kind of a lope, really. My balance and partial
paralysis (left side) made running difficult. I kept it up and ten years later
I ran a ten mile race in 92 minutes.
A couple years after my accident I saw a video
tape of myself at my birthday party. I was shocked at how poorly I spoke! I had
always been well spoken and I was not aware that this was no longer the case.
This had to change.
I remembered in German class in school how
good it felt to leave the class and be able to switch back to English where I
could pronounce things easily and that finding the words I wanted to say was
easy and effortless. I wanted that feeling again, so I started studying German,
not to learn the language, as my memory issues made that a quixotic quest, but
to make English seem easier. I was cross training for speech! Eventually, I
switched to Finnish because that language is really difficult for English
speakers to pronounce. After a few years of studying Finnish for about 15 minutes
a day people began telling me I didn’t sound like I had a problem speaking.
Speech has never become easy for me, not
like it once was. I still slur and get confused when I am tired (basically, by
evening), but for a part of each day I can speak well.
The thing was, absolutely everything was
hard to do. Since everything was hard it didn’t matter what was on my plate, it
was a challenge. Nothing was too hard. I had learned to walk, I had learned to
speak. I could do anything if I just put it in a routine and chiseled away at
it. This is the secret to my success. Much of that time didn't feel like
thriving, it is when I look back that I can say, “I have thrived.”
