A Change of Focus

New Year’s Day, my husband started talking about what he’d like to do in 2023.

His sentences began with “When you can ...”

They continued, “If you’re able ...” and “When you’re better,”. They ended with a travelogue of places he’d enjoy visiting.

“We’ll go to New Zealand to hike and walk around Ayers Rock in Australia.”

“You can go back to Japan. I’ve never been there and would love to experience it.”

“How about we go back to Indonesia and see old friends?”

While it was great to hear his dreams, it also weighed heavy on my shoulders. His dreams felt dependent upon a future that neither of us could predict. A future that was dependent upon me. I know it wasn’t meant like that. And he knows that if I could fix my brain completely, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

We talked a long time, cried a little, and tried to be honest with each other.

Then, I came to a conclusion.

I don’t want to spend the next year feeling rotten about the things that I can’t do, focused on the what if and when. Living for a future that may or may not arrive. A future that would contain overseas travels, concerts, movies, oceans, noise and motion. I don’t want to live in that dreamland of maybe. In the land of I want.

I’d rather live today in the spaciousness of things I’m able do, not things I can’t.

So, I’m changing focus in 2023 from want to can.

I’m throwing all the weight of those impossible possibilities thrown to the wind.

Mahmoud Darwish said, “We love life if we find a way to it.”

I think that’s what I’m trying to do. To find a way – not back to who I was – but forward into my new life. Into the life that I actually have.

It’s a major change of focus for me.

I spent much of 2021 and 2022 wanting to be and working to be who I’d been before my brain injury. Trying to get back to myself.

Or, as the medical world says, living in the land of recovery.

Recovery means to recapture or regain something lost or taken away. To retrieve. To return to an original state.

But what if return, recover, and regain are not possible? Then what?

I’m not being melodramatic. I’m not giving up. I’m still going to therapy every week and doing at home exercises every day. The past two years have brought me enormous amounts of recovery and restoration. I’m enormously thankful for my therapists and each step I’ve made on my journey forward.

But. There is also a truth to be faced.

I am not who I used to be.

But then, none of us are. Life changes us immensely. Of course it does! Change is just a part of being human!

Currently, I live with constant dizziness, a condition that one doctor diagnosed as Central Positional Vertigo. What it means is that I’m dizzy. Always. It never goes away.

It’s like my brain is trapped on a small ship in the middle of the ocean. Some days it storms, the waves roil and the ship flounders. Other days, the storms subside, the ship rights itself, the lurching slows down. I never know. I can’t control my days. I wake up more dizzy or less dizzy. I wake up nauseated or not. My day gets better as it goes on or it gets worse. There doesn’t seem to be any reason or causation. It is what it is.

This is my life.

I’m told it’s not going to change.

Ah, but my doctors have been wrong before, I think.

Ah, but they have been right, too, I remind myself.

As I begin to change focus in ’23 from the things I want to do, to things that I can do, the image that comes to my mind is doors.

Stop starring at the closed doors, I tell myself. The can’t, the maybe, the what if.

Look at the open doors instead. Let the open doors be your new focus.

I often choose a ‘word of the year’ each January 1.

This year, I couldn’t find a word that seemed to fit.

After stewing over it far too long, thinking about 2022, wondering what 2023 would bring, I chose a quote instead of a word.

These are the words I want to think about in 2023. They are from, of all people, Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. He wasn’t exactly known for his cheery books. But Joseph Conrad it is for me in 2023.

“The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.” ~ Joseph Conrad.

Thank you for reading! I hope that 2023 brings you all things good and an abundance of joy! May each of us find our way to live.

Love always,

Jill