A couple minutes before a meeting started, I was scrolling through my Lightroom folder on my phone of photos I have taken over the last few years. There are many, but what I noticed is that since I had the stroke in the summer, I have been far less active and the series of shots I have taken have been less. I think that this is aligned with my personal motivation, my level of general energy and patience since it happened.

It is very much like a lightbulb filament blew and a room in my brain went dark. It is quite off-putting to think about, but I do so regularly as I am constantly reminded of it at pretty much every waking moment and many whilst sleeping.

One of the things that I have noticed is that I have become more reactive, rather than proactive, where even in conversations I am looking for cues instead of leading the discussion. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I believe that it demonstrates the struggle my brain is having to create imagery automatically to present, so it is waiting for an external source to create.

Without that external source, the light just doesn't seem to want to fire up, regardless how many times I flick the switch like an obsessive compulsive. Yet, even though I recognize the bulb is burned, there is no way for me to replace it and because of the structure of the rooms involved, there is little chance to shine a light into the nooks and crannies to see what I have lost in there.

It is a random checkerboard of light and dark, where the darkness is an impenetrable void, blockholes of experience that has been lost in such a way, that it is like a dream if it was ever known at all. I think that this is where at least part of that sense of disconnection from myself comes from, as even though I "know" certain things, the way I know them and my inability to use them are no longer tethered together. It is like feeling like being able to dance a tango, whilst simultaneously knowing you are a quadriplegic without even a wheelchair. Mentally of course in my case, not physically.

But perhaps the weirdest part is that it doesn't affect the brain or skills uniformly, so in some areas it is like there is no difference at all, but others (like my ability to build visual representations mentally) is so heavily affected that from perhaps the casual observer, they would feel I never had the skill to begin with.

It reminds me of my grandad, who I first remember from when he was already over 80 years of age. He was this little old man, quick-witted and sharp, but would spend a lot of time sitting and napping. I only knew him in this way. However in his youth 60 years earlier, he was a decent football player and was one of the fastest runners in the state, as well as someone who was highly regarded in his professional life and across his many diverse talents that he considered hobbies, but performed them at professional levels. He was somewhat of a renaissance man, but sitting there in that armchair gently snoring - there was little sign to indicate all the experience that he had lived, or all the talent that he once held.

I wonder if as he dozed, he remembered those days in the 1920s, kicking a football for his team or running barefoot along the grass to take third place in a city sprint race that is still run today. I wonder if when he looked in the mirror at himself these memories seemed real or, they were like skills of mine, perhaps just a dream.

Maybe there is a softening as we age, where the mind starts to accept that these things we once held have slowly slipped away and disappeared. It could be that the brain changes to accommodate the inevitability of decline. If this is true, I haven't had that luxury of preparation and instead, it feels more like trauma, an act of psychological violence that has torn an invisible limb from my body and then cauterized the wound, leaving me alive and no longer whole, with diminished capabilities and no good explanation as to why I was targeted.

Of course, I wasn't "targeted" at all, there is no sense, no plan, no actual reason it happened to me, but that is of little comfort. I know life is never going to be fair, because life doesn't care about our concept of fairness at all. Some people have easy lives, some hard, some get lucky, some unlucky, some get a break, some get broken. Or perhaps, we all get some of these positions sprinkled on us throughout our lives.

Sometimes I feel like I am living a dream that I will awake from and everything will be normal again, I will be me as I was, but this is not the case. We can only live the life we have, experience what we do, do with it what we can - as the ripples keep radiating outward. What I do know is that there are many things I am no longer capable of today, but what I don't know is where what I do today, will take me tomorrow.

Scrolling through those photos I can see my wife and daughter, but I don't recognize me.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]