I was scrolling through edited images in Lightroom on my phone and it got me wondering something that I hadn't checked earlier. I was looking for two images, but I didn't know what they were, just the approximate dates, but with the metadata intact, it was pretty easy to find.
The First is the entry photo. Let's call it
It is a photo of my wife sitting on the cork floor of our kitchen, preparing to paint the walls. Not too long after this, the floor had been taken up and it was down to bare wood, which later go painted white, as it still is today. The entire kitchen is redone now, but that wasn't completed until a year or so later.
Next is;
This was taken six days later and is of my wife and daughter walking through a very empty shopping centre. The doors of the shops were still down, as it was early. I like the photo as they are both wearing a similar stripy dress and the stripes of the door gives a reflective balance.
Both of these images were taken on my old phone.
But, while these photos are nothing special, they are also something significant to me, because they were the last and the first. Not long after taking Image One I had a stroke. And Image Two was the first photo after coming out of hospital. There were some shots in between, but they were of random things inside the hospital. I don't have an image of myself in there.
Well, I have an MRI of my brain, but that doesn't really count.
It is interesting to me because between these two shots, everything in my life changed. It is perhaps hard to really explain for anyone to fully understand, but while I was still walking and talking, who I was at the time of the first shot and who I was at the time of the second, was quite different. I thought differently, felt differently, acted differently, and the way I experienced the world had completely shifted.
Yet, I looked much the same.
If there is ever evidence that we shouldn't judge people on their looks, this might be it. For the people who knew me the best, who were closest to me at the time of image one, had very little idea who I was at the time of image two. Yet, they believed they knew, because they "used to know me" and that was less than a week earlier. They applied their past experiences of me to create their expectations and assumptions about who I am, but the conditions had changed.
The conditions of me.
Brain injury is a difficult one for everyone involved to deal with, because there is so much ambiguity and nothing is directly seen, it can only be inferred from behaviour. If I had had a broken leg in a cast, it is pretty obvious that no one would expect me to run. But with a brain injury where I look the same as I did the day earlier, the expectation is that if you could do it yesterday, you can do it today.
And then there is the "recovery" aspect where people have a poor understanding of the way brain plasticity works, where they assume that because they heard a story of a person having half their brain destroyed in an accident and who was able to walk and talk again, that other parts of the brain can just take over all of the time. While it is true in some instances, it isn't the case in many, and there are some things that will just not come back. Yet, people who don't understand make it seem like a person who doesn't fully recover just didn't try hard enough to rehab.
It is like having an arm cut off and blaming the person for not being able to grow it back.
But I get it, because most people at best do a bit of a google search, watch a video or two on YouTube, and then deem themselves experts on the matter. Most people don't even do that much research, and deem themselves experts.
I am no expert.
But I am pretty good at reflecting on my experience and observations, which kind of gave me somewhat of an advantage over many stroke sufferers, because I was already interested in the way the brain worked, and interested in how to improve cognitive function. And I still failed to make a significant impact on my recovery. But, perhaps it would have been far worse had I just sat down on the couch and watched TV, like many people have done in the past.
Through all of this, between picture one and two, I still wrote on Hive daily.
That is not a brag of any kind, but I think that taking the time to put together something despite the challenges I was facing personally, helped me stay somewhat attached to reality, even whilst I felt detached from my own body. It probably helped me process what was going on, my thoughts and feelings and maybe gave me something to focus on other than the stream of news telling me that my life experience had change for the worse, forever.
The images aren't great.
But the quality of an image comes down to the meaning of the image to the viewer. And while these might not mean much to you, upon reflection, they mean something to me. My life was split in half between these two shots, where even though nothing much seemed to change in the environment, everything changed in me.
The cover stayed the same, the theme of the book shifted.
Taraz
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