New volunteering and Bolé with Hannah

November 29, 2023

It’s almost noon and it’s already been a good day. This morning I went to the Minnesota Brain Injury Alliance to begin my volunteer job there. I also thought this morning, that getting paid has never been what I enjoyed about working, so this is kinda of a good situation for me where I am working, but as a volunteer. In addition, not getting paid will keep me on disability, which I’ve decided is actually a good thing. It comes with benefits that I wouldn’t get otherwise, and also making money for not working too much is kind of nice. This morning, I thought I lost my phone for a bit, but it turned out it was just dead and in my bed, which is why I wasn’t able to ping it or locate it on Find My iPhone. Then, I went to the Minnesota Brain Injury Alliance at 8:45am. There, I really just did some basic office work, like addressing envelopes and alphabetizing papers. I told that boss, Debbi, that ideally I would love to work with people a bit more, and she told me about something a guy named Alec does for them where he goes out into the community to give talks on brain injury stuff. I told her that I would be very interested in learning more about that, and she said she’d connect us.

While I was at the office, mom also called me and let me know that I’m going back on my cancer drug, which I’d been on a break from for a couple days. We decided that for today what I’m going to do is just take two pills for lunch, and not do any for dinner since I already made plans with Hannah to eat a not-med-compliant meal at night. “Night” meds at 11:05am with some 13g fat Indian food that I ate most of. Also, I didn’t really take a good picture at the Brain Injury Alliance, but I did take one of my lap and notebook while I was doing the work. I also asked the boss if other people there had brain injuries, and she said that everyone had some connection to brain injuries, but it didn’t sound like most of the people who work there have one. That actually made me feel a bit better, because it made it feel a little more like a normal job, and not something special for me.

In a way though, doing work there really made me appreciate the work I do as translator currently. I’m meeting with a potential job coach tomorrow, and I’ll mention that doing some office work that was not related to Spanish really showed me how much I need to work with Spanish if I'm gonna work The cool thing at the volunteer job today was that sometimes they have TBI survivors share their stories publicly, and I’d definitely be interested in that. The boss, Debbi, told me that she’d try to connect me with that communications person, Alec, who does that kind of stuff.

Anyways, let’s jump to the Hannah part of the day. At night around 7pm Hannah and I met up at Bolé Ethiopian restaurant, a place we’d gone before with Caroline. There, we ordered a shared plate and each chose two sauces. While I was there, I also showed her some of my recent posts on Lang-8, a Spanish website where you get corrections. In those posts I talked about the reason why I was a workaholic, and about how working in a Brazilian restaurant had made me wanna be “normal,” and also how I’d commented on someone's post about blogging today. As well, I showed Hannah a few of the messages I’d sent guys on Bumble that were in Spanish, and told her about how I organize copies of messages I send people by texting #toldName to myself with the content of the message as well.

I’m also gonna add it’s kind of nice to see this more as a blog I run than a photo of the day project for a therapist that I created to cope with a brain injury. In a way, it’s a true positive effect of the brain injury, because I never would have started it otherwise, and it truly came out of having a terrible memory from being run over by the car. And also, now just writing this blog is how I discover how I feel about my day every day. I’ve also decided that I’m still going to be continue making business cards that have my photography on the back, but they won’t say “visual journalist” now. I changed it to “Photographer | Translator” the other day, and ordered a bunch of new ones like that, in addition to the new set of https://anyatbirecovery.wixsite.com/tbi-photo-journal business cards that I ordered recently.

At night, I didn’t do meds because I'd done two pills at 11:05am, since today was the day I started back on meds after the break I took for a few days.