Awkwardness

I know that I’ve already used this blog for several years and for several reasons, but when I started writing again on here this year, I knew that there were lots of things I wanted to write about, but mostly about the experience of stroke - not just MY stroke, but the experience of stroke itself in hopes to help other stroke survivors. 

There are many topics that I want to write about in a free-flowing way specifically for this site, but some of the topics about the stroke I have already written for my book that I am working on and wanted to share. Rather than re-write a new essay about a particular topic, just as I similarly had posted finished work in a previous post, here is another excerpt from some finished work for the book.

To give you the context, I’ve just started to write chapter 4, which includes the days coming home from the hospital right after the stroke and how strangely the world felt to me. 

Enjoy.

_________________________________________________

CHAPTER FOUR

“God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Coming home to my once familiar place, my skin was singed by the newness, and my gait was hesitant as I walked over the threshold. It wasn’t just the late afternoon sun warming the walls of the living room, a toasty aura was giving life to the rooms in a way I hadn’t remembered. Even the sounds that reverberated seemed unaccustomed to my ears. In previous years and days, I hung the pictures on the walls, I placed the furniture, I bought the house, but was it my house? Like coming home after a vacation, for a few minutes a house feels new again, but that day coming home from the hospital my familiar feelings were completely astray. The only word I could snatch in my mind to describe the circumstance was: awkward. The world had turned completely awkward.

By the time I had come back home from our road trip to the ER there were 5 long days for me to grip the shock of what the damage of my brain had entailed. As I entered into the house, it was the first time I had experienced a physical separation of my surroundings, observing all the comings and goings in the domestic happenings like a spectator. To say that it was an out-of-body experience would lose the point in the rabbit hole of religious fervor, but it certainly was an experience, an experience not particularly in control of my senses. I knew that my welcome home was what I needed to live again but the awkward world looked fresh and new as if I had been transported into another dimension and so I wondered inwardly what parts of my brain were killed from the stroke and those that were newly ignited.