Per Mike and Dave Radparvar, Co-Founders of Holstee, September is a month where "we explore ways to leverage Resilience in the face of adversity, and how we can grow through the setbacks we experience in our lives.” As a member of Holstee, I receive a monthly reflection guide, art, resources and more, with this month focused on Resilience. Most importantly is the opportunity to explore deeper conversations on a one hour video chat call with other members, which happened today. I highly recommend this to anyone interested. It’s absolutely wonderful to meet others who like to delve deeper.
We explored moments when we faced adversity, how we felt at the time, and if we experienced growth from those periods. For anyone not familiar with post traumatic growth, it’s “the idea that human beings can be changed by their encounters with life challenges, sometimes in radically positive ways” per the Post Traumatic Research Group at UNC Charlotte. I’ve written in several different formats about this idea, but haven’t actually hit the publish button on any of them, but perhaps today will be that day. Thoughts swirled around my mind from recent events that have personally happened to me, to events long ago, and then on a societal level.
I remember after surviving the head-on collision when I was 24, how my perspective of the world shifted from most everyone else my age. While many of my peers were thinking about their 5 and even 10 year plan, I was distinctly aware while recovering, that life keeps moving on whether I participated or not. I distinctly remember where I was and how I felt when the thought crossed through my mind. I think in many ways, I was much more aware of the present moment and wanting to take advantage of embracing all of it.
With the two later concussions I experienced in 2016 and 2018, I remember feeling as though I was in slow motion as I saw the world keep going and I remember a full gratitude for all of the many things I took for granted that my brain does that I didn’t even know to think about. I had to slow down. My body forced me to do this. I continue to circle back to 2020 and though I am not experiencing the full range of concussion symptoms that I had from the 2016 or 2018 concussions, there was and is so much uncertainty to life. Reflecting back, when would I be better? What was the timeline? When would normal happen again? Would normal ever happen again? Was this a new normal? I’d try one thing only to potentially have to take a step back, pause, and restart another day if it was too much.
As a child we learn so many different things as we grow. And it takes us, perhaps 18-20 years to become an adult? And even then we continue to learn. So, if we get a brain injury, is it that surprising that we may be reverting to a child-like state in some ways to have to relearn certain things? And maybe this time we have to learn how to do them slightly differently than before. And maybe, that’s a good thing.
In many ways, I feel as though 2020 is the same way. It’s like everyone in the world is learning to slow down, or in some ways, speed up trying to juggle it all. But we can’t do it all. In 2020, I’ve learned how to work with a sourdough starter and to feed it several times a day. I’ve now come to fully appreciate the length of time it takes to make croissants (a several day process). And through this, I’ve really thought about how many hours of the day we have and how much we are able to actually do on an individual level and as a collective whole. Some folks I realize are trying to juggle childcare, hold down a job, among many other things. So back to this idea of the baker; this person made bread as a specialty and wasn’t trying to add in time to be the butcher and candlestick maker on top of that. And as a result, the baker was able to refine his/her craft and we get to eat incredibly delicious bread as a result.
When someone has a brain injury, you don’t know what part of the body is trying to relearn its craft. You may only feel the impact of when it has reached its end point and your head begins to throb as a means of saying “no” and to please stop for now. Maybe that’s what society is doing now. We’ve reached a point of pushing so much, that 2020 is the headache setting in and beginning to say no, please stop and pause. Because, when we do slow down, and do some self exploration, we begin to realize that there are other ways of living that may be more fulfilling than trying to do it all. Or we weren’t doing it in a way that is sustainable.
So even though 2020 continues to have its own set of challenges with the virus among many other things (protests, deaths, fires, etc.), maybe somewhere in there, as a collective whole, we will start to figure out better ways of living with each other, and supporting one another. Maybe we will find ways individually to refine our set of skills so we aren’t having to do it all and can embrace new ways of sustainable living that help to better support and encourage one another. Perhaps, one day, we will look back at 2020 and say, that period of adversity was a moment that we needed in order to find silver linings of better ways to live, connect, and share.