Loss and Change
One of the things that I don’t think gets talked about in terms of traumatic brain injury is how we survivors must deal with loss in order to move forward. We had an incredible NeuroMaps event last Saturday that I am still recovering my energy from. (I will soon post the video of the event on NeuroMaps.co)
One of the things I remember clearly is Bryan Pugh, the executive director of the Brain Injury Association of Maryland saying is that a TBI is really the closing of a chapter where a new one begins. I remember when my injury happened at 20 getting stuck on who would love me now that I am partially brain dead? I had forgotten about that time until the panel last Saturday.
In many ways I was relearning myself, similar to learning how to walk and move again after my muscles had atrophied during my hospital stay. I hadn’t learned to value me as I was with this new injury and lifelong journey with long-term TBI. It was so hard for me to imagine others who hadn’t known the “full” me to love what I (at that time) considered a broken me.
Thinking it through it’s also no wonder I fell in love with and found my conceptual voice in clay. It wasn’t just that I had a leg up as I already knew how to throw pots, it was that the material goes through so many stages before it is a finished, glazed piece, and that at every stage it could be destroyed.
One of the mantras with this is “you did it once, you can do it again and it may even be better.” About 6 or 7 years ago there was a great article in the NYT talking about how ceramic artists process loss so well because it is an inherent part of our practice.
I have said many times that I have lived a few different lives, meaning transitional periods in which I am physically and psychologically changed and living with a new set of systems. It’s like Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon- if I do this, I cannot go back.
Often when I say this I do it as a joke — I have 5 different birthdays or days that mark the transition from one me to the next me. My actual birth, my TBI, my sobriety date, moving into my current studio (and a different state), and getting rear ended causing severe wrist damage.
With each of these events I have gone through the stages of grief and the grief echoes that show up. Now, looking back at 18 year old me it really does seem like a completely different person. I still am in the middle of my stages of grief with my wrist injury as I am still learning how to live with not being able to be autonomous in a medium I am a master in.
I’m thinking about all of this not only because of the NeuroMap event last week, but because my dads cancer diagnosis means that I am now living with the transition of him from this world to whatever happens to our soul energy when we pass away.
One of the things my transitions have taught me is to give myself as much grace as I need. I will be living in my hometown for much of the next few months and bringing as much work down there as I can. Of course, I will likely be in DC and at my studio once a week or so, but will be relying on my amazing assistant and now studio manager to run the show and do the heavy lifting.
I remember when I was 20 years old, finishing my last neuropsychology visit, understanding the full gamut of my injury, and just wanting to be normal and go back to school. I was advised to take a year off and recover. What I said then was that if I go home and don’t do anything I am afraid I will become so depressed and that my friends will then be graduated or ahead of me. It was me trying to understand the full impact of this injury and realizing that I really had two options: to stew in the why me’s, it’s not fair, my life is over, or to look at the positives, I had found out about a hole in my heart, had it closed and won’t have to worry about strokes from it in the future, I still had my artistic talent, and then that I found the medium and conceptual voice that has carried me forward since.
As I look at the catastrophic events in my life I can see how learning to live with and accept the loss or change and move forward I have developed an immense tool belt of healthy coping mechanisms - with a few not so great ones thrown in. Now as I type this on my phone (where I write most of my stuff) I am so thankful for everything that has happened as they have prepared me to be able to face any challenge head on and walk through it with as much grace as I can hold.
My dad is doing really well right now and I am hoping that if a tumor can hold off maybe we can get many more months with him. But I also realize that is my greediness talking. I want him here. I want a miracle of his cancer to enter remission. What does Hamlet say, “there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
But those sentiments are about me and this isn’t about me at all. It’s about supporting my father and allowing him the grace to have this period be what he wishes. We all feel the loss that is coming. But what I have learned is that we get to choose how we act and react. I am choosing to love my father, enjoy all the good times we will still have, and do what I can to support him and his decisions with unconditional love as he navigates the weeks and months ahead as he and we transition into a new chapter.