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