How the Brain Works

Try as I may to close out this blog for good and move on to something else, I can’t seemed to shake it off. It’s like Michael Corleone in Godfather III - “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” 

So here I am. Back.

I’m not going to bore you and me with a long tedious paragraph about the inception of this blog (if you feel so inclined, I encourage you to click on the right margin and peruse the several posts over the years) and I’m not even sure what I’m going to write about for future posts! The last few posts I was sporadically posting about my stroke, and then after that I kept most of my writing offline. Over the last year I have been working on a memoir about my stroke and other things, and also working on a fictional short story and a book of my photography. As of right now, all projects are incomplete, which is fine, because while the writing skills were coming back during my recovery, I was also re-acquainting myself with my love of photography. Photography has always been a huge passion for over 20 years, but the truth is I lost a lot of creativity after the stroke, physically and emotionally, so it’s really just been recently that I have regularly picked up the camera again. 

Which brings me to how the brain works.  

There is something very terrible about brain trauma - nobody would contradict it - but there is something glorious about it, too. During the times when you are contemplating the parts of your brain that you have lost and then trying to regain them, your thoughts can be turned upside down, exposing the beautiful coiling brain matter that are now oozing with musicals, operas, sonnets, books and paintings - things that otherwise never would have been created if not for the trauma. But whatever the kind of trauma you experienced, your brain tapped into your unconscious and brought it up so eerily present that it is hard to ignore and you will see things that only you will see. 

I’m still deciding whether I should use my powers for good or evil.

Truth is, it’s been terrifying and frustrating to have to deal with this new brain that sometimes works swimmingly and then sometimes works achingly slow. The bad days are really bad, and the good days are sonnets and operas and paintings. I’d love to even it all out, but I think the brain is still working on the kinks. The good news is that good days are winning over bad days. Trauma or not trauma, aren’t we all a work in progress?