Moving in a Straight Line

and other things at which I do not excel

It’s been a week, as they say. After three months of waiting, I finally had the initial eval/consult with the hospital-based cognitive rehabilitation program that my insurance covers. The timing seemed perfect, because Dr. Altman - the fabulous neuropsychiatrist I’ve been working with (and that my insurance does not cover) - is going on maternity leave in two weeks. But then the therapist performing my evaluation informed me that this just moves me onto a new list with an average wait of 2-3 months before any actual therapy happens.

GAH!

Also, I did slightly worse in terms of memory and processing speed than I did on the tests in January. I don’t have scores or an official work-up yet, but remember how I was all swagger about my perfect word recall score in the first go-round? This time I couldn’t get better than 8 out of 10, even on the last try. I also blanked on two of the objects I was supposed to identify, although I did remember the words for them after a few beats. (“Turny-thing - shoot, what’s it called - um…PLIERS!” “Not paperclip! The other clippy thing. Um, ummm…CLOTHESPIN!”) This fits with my and Andy’s perception that my memory and word recall have taken a hit in the past month, which (to mix metaphors) is hardly the direction in which I want to be heading.

DOUBLE GAH!

I guess the good news is that I now have 2-3 months to work on my current cognitive therapy homework, because it is “Try doing things in a more linear fashion,” and that might just be the hardest assignment I’ve ever been given.

It’s not that I don’t want to move in a straight line, either literally or metaphorically - it’s that I never have, and not for lack of people telling me to or even my (sometimes) trying. When I first heard of structured procrastination, my joy knew no bounds - finally a respectable label for how I did things anyway! My mind is much more tangle of interconnected tree-roots than lines of computer code, and my system of getting things done (while highly effective pre-brain-injury!) has resulted in me being described by close friends on occasion as both ‘the center of a tightly organized whirlwind of chaos’ and ‘a hummingbird on crack’. (Apparently when the Calvin Philosophy Department hired a new administrative assistant in 2013, she was given strict instructions to come to any meeting with me with a double coffee, 2-3 notepads, and several pens, just in case.)

A few years ago, my own mother described my movement through life as dancing to the beat of my own drummer, saying that there was nothing so regimented as marching involved in my “unique approach” to existence. Although she said it in the resigned tone familiar to me from childhood admonitions of “Why can’t you walk in a straight line?”, that characterization actually resonates deeply with me, and I treasure it. Who would march when they could dance? And why do anything to the beat of someone else’s drum if you could have your own drummer?

My spouse is a Very Linear Person, however. When Andy starts a task, he keeps going until he finishes it. At the very least, he works until he completes a particular stage and/or reaches a ‘natural stopping point’. (Quote marks because to me a natural stopping point is any point at which I stop doing one thing to start doing something else, which can be mid-bite-of-toast.) Andy needs long stretches of uninterrupted time in order to research or write, and his focus is intense: I’ve learned over time that he’s not intentionally ignoring me when I say something to him while he’s hard at work - he legit doesn’t hear me.

The difference in our styles is perhaps epitomized in how we pack for trips.

For me, 98% of trip preparation is mental: I plan it all out in my head before I make a move. Once I’ve figured out exactly what I’m bringing, it usually only takes 15-20 minutes or so to gather it all together, in a process I think of as ‘purposeful wandering’ and also the same process that inspired my friend Natalie to call me an amped-up hummingbird. When I pack is also important: I like to start an hour or so before I need to leave, so that everything’s freshly set when I walk out the door. And, because worrying about checked bags and dragging carry-on roller bags up and down stairs are not my favorite, I plan so that everything fits in one regular-sized backpack.

Andy, by contrast, starts preparing for a trip about a week in advance, and he begins by making piles of things he might want to bring with him. These piles - which usually contain some combination of books, notebooks, pencils (colored and non), clothes and shoes of all kinds, toiletries, and mysterious sundry objects - are distributed carefully throughout the house. (They also contain several cloth and plastic bags that I am assured are necessary to protect the other items in the piles, and for any grocery shopping during the trip.) Then, over the course of the next few days, Andy marshals his troops: items are added and subtracted from the piles, and entire piles are frequently re-organized. At least a day in advance, chosen objects are packed into items (plural) of luggage selected via a similar process, and by nightfall all luggage is sitting by the door waiting for go-time the next day.

At this point, we’ve devised a system of surviving the other’s packing that works for us both - a delightful cocktail of denial and trust whose most important ingredient is timing the processes so they don’t overlap at all. [See the postscript of this entry for a story about the first time we attempted to pack together, at the same time and in the same space.]

Guess whose style of packing is brain-injury-recovey approved? (Hint: it is not mine.)

Unfortunately, my brain injury has disrupted many of the methods I used for keeping my whirlwind of chaos organized, because those methods relied on my ability to hold in mind all the moving pieces of the different projects I was engaged in, including locations, amounts, time-sensitivity, etc. Before, I didn’t write down to-do lists, and I didn’t keep a formal calendar because I didn’t need to - I just remembered everything together as different nodes on a complex interconnected web. If I had some Raisin Bran and left the box on the counter, for instance, it wasn’t because I forgot to put it away. It was because that would remind me to get out more toilet paper from the pantry, or to pay the phone bill, or to answer a particular email. (This also contributed to a certain amount of relationship conflict early on: like a responsible adult, Andy would put the cereal away, and then I’d be all “Wait - why are we out of toilet paper? DID YOU PUT THE CEREAL BOX AWAY?!”)

Now if there’s a cereal box on the counter, it probably is because I’ve forgotten to put it away. (I have mostly stopped putting pantry things in the refrigerator, at least.) And if I stop doing one thing to start doing something else, there’s a good chance that I’ll leave both those things unfinished to do a third thing. Hence, my therapist’s injunction to try to do things in a more linear fashion.

So far, I have not been particularly successful at this - at least in large part because I keep forgetting about it! (This is one of the annoying things about having your meta-cognition messed up.)

I suspect that it’s time to bring back the chart I was using as incentive last October, after my second PICC line and round of antiviral infusions:

The bar for accomplishment at this point was very, very low.

But how to remember in the moment? Dr. Altman suggests things like post-its and ‘twinning’ tasks, so that I start to associate making coffee with then sitting down and doing another ‘SMART’ task. And….as I write that, I realize I should probably figure out something else I do regularly to pair with writing up some SMART tasks, because I’d forgotten that I was supposed to start doing that.

In any event, this is all very much a process in progress, and if you’ve got tips or methods that have worked well for you, please feel free to post them in the comments! (The weirder the better, really - the standard ‘making to-do lists’ has so far not been super-effective for me, because I keep forgetting that I made them and it turns out that if you don’t look at the list, it doesn’t actually help you remember to do those things.)

Until next time, be nice to your noggins!

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Ok, bonus story about Andy’s and my first co-packing experience:

It was June, and our first international trip together: we were starting with a colloquium at Cambridge University and then a quick visit to Oxford before heading to Pisa for another conference, as academics in love do.

That love was seriously tested, however, when it came time for us to get ready to leave Cambridge. We’d flown in from different places: I’d come from Grand Rapids, and Andy had just finished out his semester at Brooklyn College and flown in from NYC. (Read: neither of us had any idea what the other person had brought with them or how they had packed it.) Now we were in a tiny ‘hosted’ room in Cambridge, with little space to spread out there and no other place to go, because the landlady didn’t share her parlor or kitchen.

Suddenly, Andy is underfoot everywhere I turn, like a cat, and where his body is not, there are these weird piles of STUFF. In fact, there is so much stuff multiplying on every surface of the room that I can’t figure out where it’s all coming from, until he reveals that he’s completely unpacked everything he’s brought with him on the trip, so he can re-organize and re-pack it…into his large checked bag and generous backpack. (He has, it transpires, five completely identical black t-shirts with him. These are not the only t-shirts he has brought.)

I end up curled up on the bed with a pillow over my head, waiting for it all to go away so I can take my turn. Meanwhile, Andy gets increasingly stressed about the fact that we’re scheduled to leave in less than 12 hours and I haven’t started packing yet. He also insists on leaving the house at ungodly o’clock the next morning, pre-coffee or breakfast. (I am still seriously jetlagged at this point and consider both coffee and food to be absolute necessities.) As we stumble down the cobbled streets in the pre-dawn grey, Andy’s roller-bag bumping along noisily behind us, I hiss to him in irrational fury what has since become a catchphrase in our home:

“You know that sound is the mating call of tourists.”

(Love you, sweetheart - happy anniversary!)