8/17/2025

I’ve always been somebody that has a lot on her mind. My mind is never fully present where I’m at physically, I’m always thinking about what I need to do next.

But lately, my mind has felt heavy. I’m very emotionally intelligent and painfully self aware. This makes me a very good patient medically, because it gives the professionals a springboard to work off of. I am frequently told that I am whichever professional’s new favorite patient.

To add on to this, my young age, athletic build & history with sports, hyper fixation on medical TV dramas, hunger for more knowledge about the brain and body, and desire to heal, I am basically the ideal patient to work with. I’m complex, like a problem the good professionals want to help untangle. I bring new ideas to the table and can fully comprehend the complex medical terms the doctors bring up. This makes them feel like I understand what is going on with my recovery. And I do! I find the brain stuff super interesting. I wish I could go back to CTN (in Phoenix) and soak up more of their information. I don’t really expect anyone to keep up with everything that goes on with me but damn it’s exhausting sometimes keeping track of everything.

I think I have felt so heavy lately because what I’ve gone through is mentally and physically taxing. I naturally set mental goals for myself, just by nature, and I often say “My goal with _____ is to ____.” This can make it hard to see how far I’ve come, unless I stop and do it intentionally. Then it makes me cry because, well I haven’t figured out why it makes me cry, but without fail, every time I think back to what I experienced in September 2021, to what I have accomplished up to today, I tear up.

It’s especially hard to keep perspective on just how far I’ve come, because I keep moving the damn goal posts. I am never satisfied with my current state. It’s annoying. The heavy feeling I think might be some form of grief.

I’m not sure if I’m grieving the life I would have had from 2021 on, or something else. But I do know I have had multiple shrinks encourage me to “Feel my feelings! Feel all the feels!” Whatever that means. I seem to develop feelings that are way too big for a normal person to decipher and tell me what to do. I’m trying to process all the trauma I went through 2021-2024 when I was on mood stabilizers and my emotions were stunted. Think of it like a river that gets blocked and sediment builds up surrounding what is causing the block, and when you remove the block (antidepressants) it takes a while for the sediment to be processed by the river.

I am finding that there is not a single person on this planet besides maybe God who can tell me a prognosis about how much further in recovery I’m meant to go. I am an outlier on the data set. I wasn’t supposed to recover more in my body beyond what I’d gotten back in 2022 and even that was a completely unprecedented recovery. It can be frustrating being this person sometimes, but my goal I set when I became disabled– see there it is- in September 2021, was that I would recover as much as I could in order to close this chapter of being disabled. Like… I was disabled 2021-2026(5 years is perfectly reasonable I think to recover from a stroke), but now in 2026 or 2027 I have all my functions restored, and now I’m not disabled anymore. I do not want to use a wheelchair at the airport forever. I’m like itching to be a fully functional person again. I just want to close this frustrating chapter. My stroke will always affect my life, and that’s never going away, but I want to get the physical stuff “fixed.”

Anyway, I’ve always yearned for a person to go through this stuff with me. But I think my stroke and strength and learned independence scares men off. Oh well. They do not write about this stuff in the stroke books. I’ve read like 10 and that’s why I’m writing about it here. Going to use this to figure out how to format my book. I’m still not entirely sure I have done enough to constitute a whole book, but I definitely want to write one to guide others who may be in my similar position at various points in my recovery. I’m not embarrassed anymore, I want to help everyone who is uninformed about their injuries and if that means being extremely candid about what I’ve gone through on the internet to make that happen, so be it.

At the suggestion of another member of Brain Buddies, me, my event planning degree, and my 4 failed relationships(lol) are organizing a speed dating adjacent socialization event to help connect those of us that are lonely, brain injured or physically handicapped-or in many cases, affected by both, because dating in 2025 is freaking hard, even without a brain injury or handicap. Adding on what I & my friends have gone through, makes it nearly impossible. I’ve dated both brain injured men & non brain injured. I am still friends with my ex that had a TBI and we talk fairly regularly. It’s hard to not scare off new people though.

ANYWAY, what I’ve been getting to is that sometimes I’ll hear something or see a powerful scene and just burst into tears for a few minutes and process whatever feelings come up. It’s extremely cathartic & extremely good that I work from home. it usually passes within 5 minutes.

Life is just heavy right now, because I couldn’t process all this AND recover to live on my own at the same time. I’m big on multitasking but I couldn’t do that. I’m moving towards getting to thinking about moving out of my parents’ house. I’m probably a year or so away from actually doing it, but the thought is exciting. Love my parents to death and back but I’ve pretty much lived at home for the last 5 years plus my first 18 years of life, and it’s time to open a new chapter (soon-ish). Getting mentally ready was a big step, and the next barrier is that I can’t put my own hair up myself yet. As soon as I can do that, then it can become more realistic.

Thanks for reading, clearly there was a lot on my mind. ☺