Recovery

It's been several days since I could sit at a computer, writing and reading and thinking without pain-- 'brain pain,' I could call it-- left over from the concussion. I didn't mind it so much myself but everyone around me was sternly reminding me not to work right now, and instead focus on recovery from the accident.

It's funny how that left an impression on me--and I don't just mean my skull. Not being able to read or write or work felt like punishment, and I was angry--irrationally so. I could hear myself thinking, "It's not my fault my head bumped the window. I want to write!" Which is silly thinking. I remember Mark saying on our trip that he was an unrepentant workaholic, and I suppose so am I.

Still, writing, and even just reading, are how I make sense of things, and being cut off from the way I make sense of things was nearly unbearable. I didn't mind so much needing to excuse myself from so many social functions--I don't really like crowds, after all, and can't understand more than one conversation going on at once. But any other time I'm sick, I just want to read. Or write.

This time, when I wasn't sleeping things off, I was actually realizing I may as well watch movies. First of all, I don't have to really watch them--I can close my eyes. Or drift in and out. And they are pretty mindless often enough. But I also have some guilt over TV time as being wasted time. I hate to admit that I do now watch several more hours per month than I used to, and don't know if it's made me much better of a person. Even though I now have a reason to do so, the guilt remains.

So, I am a bad patient. It's time to learn this now, another lesson under age 30, all these life lessons I'm trying to teach myself before this upcoming birthday, when I feel like I should somehow be monumentally wiser. I don't know if it's going to happen. I'm still pretty far from the person I'd like to be. Granted, the person I'd like to be looks a lot like St. Francis or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or perhaps even Harry Potter. I could cut myself some slack.

I guess I'll try to do that. Right now's a good time to try.