No Off Switch

I got home from the hospital late last night, after the CT scan failed to find anything that could be causing my grievances. So, since there is nothing that shows up there, there is nothing that can be done and I will just have to live with whatever this is until it improves or worsens on its own. It is unsettling though, as it feels very much like it did before I had the stroke and for the last couple weeks I have been living with that feeling of "any time now" where I will either die, or worse, become a vegetable incapable of killing myself.

The Sword of Damocles

I don't know if the threat is real or not, but it certainly feels real enough.

There is zero I can do about it though, so I just have to go on pretending that it isn't there or, ignoring the feelings and just accepting at some point, it'll happen or not. It is a weird feeling to have the sense that at any moment I might drop dead, even if it isn't likely according to the tests. That feeling is still there and it doesn't just shake away.

Life goes on.

And, since there is nothing I can do about it, that means I just have to keep doing what I have been doing, which in itself now feels strange. It is similar to just after the stroke where I feel quite disconnected from my own experience, kind of floating through existence, not fully registering that what is happening is happening to me, or that I am even present in the room I am sitting in. It feels a little like being a ghost perhaps, where I know I am in the room, but can't touch anything real.

How to live if living doesn't feel like being alive?

It is a weird sensation for sure and it makes me wonder what happens if this is the case for the rest of my existence, because I don't think it is conducive to what would be considered a good life. It might be the best it gets though, so in that case, I would be making the most of it and still feel like crap. Which raises the question, what is the point?

Meaning of life stuff.

Although life is ultimately meaningless, there is at least normally the general sense that we are able to create meaning out of something in our lifetime that makes us feel like what we do matters. But if we are unable to connect to something that makes us feel that, it is generally not going to be experienced as a good life at all and if I am unable to feel connected to the world, that makes that connection to meaning quite difficult to find. And, with my inability to focus clearly or imagine anything much at all, it just becomes harder and harder to make sense of the world and the reasoning for it.

Perhaps it will pass.

Maybe it is just the lag from being ill or some other brain change that will shift in time and things will improve. That is the hope I guess. Well, the hope is that something will click in my brain and rather than having another stroke, I will get some cool superpower.

Fingers crossed.

It is tiring to live this way, but unfortunately, it is impossible to get respite, as every moment I am awake and even during the rare times I dream, my brain constantly reminds me of its condition. It is obsessively compulsively an asshole.

Does that make me an asshole too?

Probably.

Many people think that I am an asshole anyway, because I am not as driven by my emptions as they are accustomed to and now that my responses are deadened even further, they probably think I am a psychopath. With 1-4% of the population being psychopathic, I should be able to blend in somewhere.

Is there a club for psychos?

Parliament perhaps.

Well, now that I am home, I should just turn my attention to something else and tell the constant voice in my head to constantly shut the fuck up - but I know it doesn't listen. So, this means that I am always split, where there is what I have to force my attention to attend to, and what my attention will automatically attend to at the same time.

Multitasking is very ineffectual.

Brain injuries are not like a broken leg, there is no cast that can set it straight and there is surprisingly little guidance on what will even help. What I have learned though is that very few people understand it even at a basic level, which is not surprising, as I really think it is one of those "have to experience" it kinds of things and even then, there is a large degree of variation in how different people affected, especially depending on what parts of the brain have been damaged.

A lot of the advice from people is akin to telling someone with a snapped femur to "change their mind" about it, as if the "power of positive thinking" is going to heal the bone.