How do we confront the defeats, the frustrations, the angers and the often agitating--even disconcerting--changes that life naturally brings our way? Those're just part of the default bumps in the road that come from any kind of progression through space...or even through time, right? Well, I've found that how we confront challenges...the nature in which we acknowledge any disturbances in our lives...is simply all a matter of perspective, no? As Helen Keller had once so simply, and so wisely, asserted, "life's either a daring adventure or nothing."

As I understand it, her claim is a very sensible declaration that life is best lived by confronting every occurrence for what it truly is:  a very authentic, and so rather daring affair in which, for any person, everything is always completely unique, original and so entirely unpredictable. Nobody can predict the future, and so any simple event can potentially bring outrageously threatening, overwhelmingly angst-inducing ends. Perhaps even more challenging, we never know when we might confront an inescapable event that could be vacuously halting. So goes our ride on the whims of fate, eh?

Keller's mantra has been helpful for me as I've been confronting the slow, sinuously threatening challenges involved in my recovery from a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Struck by a car as a pedestrian over in Moscow, Russia--where I had been working as a journalist--I've made an unbelievably good recovery, physically. Though I've been riding threateningly vacuous ebbs & flows in my TBI recovery: I still love to read and write--and I've  been a good writing tutor and ESL tutor for different students, but damage to my executive functioning means that I have a hard time identifying a clear focus and then adequately prioritizing just what needs to be done. On top of that, my cognitive processing speed now is just "normal," and so the strong work ethic that had driven me so far earlier in my life now often leads me to feeling of defeat and frustration.

Now 12 years into my TBI recovery, it's been a very deceiving challenge to identify where I'm now going. An intelligent & always very active & energetic guy, I experienced my trauma back in 2002--just three years after graduating from college and within one year of finishing up my volunteer service with the Peace Corps. in the post-Soviet country of Uzbekistan. My recovery has felt corrosively insidious, though I'm very blessed to have an incredibly strong & supportive family to stabilize me a bit, along with a few supportive (though intermittent) friends and some very helpful psychiatric aid. And of course, regular visits to the gym have also helped me to release a bit of the steaming anger, frustration & agitation that generally come from the defeat that now so often seems to mark much my experience now.

At the persistent urging of my psychologist now, I want to take this opportunity to document my struggle through this recovery. I hope this will help to override the trouble I now have in staying focused on some of my immediate goals; I think & hope this can also help to curb the frequent cases in which I feel emotionally overwhelmed--or hijacked--and thereby distracted from my immediate tasks.