I have nightmares that I’m going to wake up and everyone’s driving a Prius and living in a condo, and we’re all getting health insurance. – Kid Rock
Realising by this point that I am probably in total denial, but have come too far from my king size bed to go back now.
My mornings don’t always start like this and I refer to it as the “Low” or delayed onset of cognitive fatigue.
However my family prefer to describe it as “Down Day Dylan”
or Triple D for short.
The most confusing part for the people around me is how my functioning can change so dramatically in just one day.
It normally follows a few up days, some high functioning tasks or emotional stress that I don’t even realise my brain is processing.
I go through the day with a smile on my face and a clear head until I lay down to go to sleep and for some forsaken reason decide to start critically analysing every intricate detail and contemplating the meaning of life.
Waking up feeling like I just went 5 rounds with mike Tyson and rather then biting me he just talked my ear off all night.
Rather then accepting the low and recognising these down days as just a normal part of my life, I end up trying to fight it instead.
This often ends terribly.
Maybe ill go for a walk on the treadmill and get some endorphins pumping, that will help.
This resulted in fighting off a mixture of post rain mosquitoes and nesting wasps, comparable to snakes on a plane.
If the snakes were insects and made terribly annoying buzzing sounds in the passengers ears.
Life is trying to tell me something here.
So why is it that I struggle to just accept the lows and don’t deal with the lack of productivity by just laying around in bed finishing every series I’ve ever started.
Probably because that productive guy yesterday planned a whole afternoon of things to do…
What an ass.
Somehow with a brain injury the concept of
“we are what we repeatedly do” goes out the window.
Its more like “We can often never do what we repeatedly think we can“.
So who is this productive guy that wakes up sometimes?
I like to refer to him as.
“Driven Dylan”
Or Double D for short.
He will generally spend his entire days trying to makeup for all the shortcomings of Triple D.
This normally results in a high stress and exhausting day filled with…
brain training , writing, appointments, answering messages and comments, exercise, planning, blogging, training with Parker, and driving to the shops to pick up essentials for the week after of course cleaning out the 10+ empty water bottles and V cans from the back seat.
Hes pretty handy.
However he can also oversteps his boundaries.
- Organising my computer desktop, making me incapable of remembering where anything is.
- Changing music folders and replacing songs with upbeat bass filled tracks, resulting in my anxiety playlist being filled with the “calming harmonic melodies” of deadmau5.
- Downloading Quit smoking applications on my phone and deciding that its probably best for both of us.
and finally filling up my calendar for the week with pro-active tasks and appointments bound to make life a living productive hell.
Ultimately resulting in pretty much nothing on the list being completed.
By the time this is all over…
He’s so exhausted that without fail Triple D is back the very next morning.
Awakening to pick up the pieces, with an overwhelming task list and a fuel tank that is now barren
and he just burnt the toast again.
