Learnings

With the National Holiday named for the sentiment of gratitude just passed and because I’ve often found it a difficult topic and feeling, (as evidenced by a prior post; https://morethanaspeedbump.com/so-many-g-words/), let’s examine gratitude a bit…

How blessed I was for to have such an amazing team to make the rehabilitation journey with! Allow me to concur with the thought that this piece could easily been called Non-Abandonment, however, in my case the abandonment isn’t by others rather can be of myself.

While the expression may have its’ origins in a situation of social embarrassment, my experience yesterday was one of the internal variety. To set the stage… As you may have picked up on in previous posts, one of the blessings in my life is the opportunity that I have to share my experience with others, particularly students through ThinkFirst. ThinkFirst is a National Injury Prevention Foundation with the mission to prevent brain, spinal cord, and other injuries through education, research, and advocacy.

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but it happened without notice, without bells and whistles. At some point I made the shift from a life consumed with “real” urgent issues, triage type of medical stuff in the early period after a severe head injury, to one in which I continually manifest my own distress and emotional trauma, or at least “make mountains out of molehills”.

I remember someone describing their life with the phrase, “Wow, that didn’t go as planned, but it worked out fine.” Couldn’t we all use those words to label chapters of our own lives? Regardless, whether it was my limping cancer survivor Boomer and I steadying each other as we traversed Portsmouth or Clooney and my matching thinning/graying hair situations, I always seem to end up with a four-legged soulmate!

While both addiction or behavior modification are both complex and multi-faceted topics, one key to recovery and positive change that I’ve found to be paramount is the need to replace any negative behavior with a positive one.