Translation, Sunglasses, Support group with Kathy

November 14, 2023:

Alright, today I tried to not really take smiling selfies with people. The biggest event in my day was volunteering at Methodist in the morning, and I had some great conversations with a woman named either Jeri or Lynn, and even told her that a few weeks ago I’d have asked for a photo with her for this project, but now I’m trying to find other photos that still capture the day. I didn’t really succeed at that today. I just have a pic of the lady’s hand while I was telling her my life situation. I think her name was Lynn, but there’s a tiny chance it could have been Jeri, who I talked to a little bit too. I also had some decent convos with the Mexican guy, Ary. I asked him how he learned about the food shelf, since he’s not a client volunteer like Margarita, and he’s here legally, unlike the other guy who just left for Mexico. I forget what he said about how I heard of it, something about being friends with some church leader’s son.

This morning I also did meds at 8:30am with a bagel and piece of 9g fat Pepper Jack cheese. Purposely did it a bit later bc I knew I’d have stuff at night.

At Methodist, I also got the wonderful chance to work on the computer. It dramatically helps to have someone who speaks Spanish on the computer, and I also like to use the “find” feature that Kathy doesn’t like, which she even said today. After Methodist, I actually looked at the wrong day on the calendar, and thought it was Thursday where I had a 1pm ECD call. I rushed to leave. Then when I realized it was Tuesday, I went back to Methodist to grab my Valleyfair jacket that I'd left there at first. At home, I organized my life. I did some pre-checks and also decided that saying “I did Dr. Chen’s pre-check” is not something that’s generally important enough to put in my photo of the day.

Ok, did photos and first half and am gonna shower now.

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Now, it’s the next day, and I’ve realized I forgot to ever finish this. I had some important thoughts yesterday too. They were things like, “the TBI is definitely bad in that it took away a ton of my memory, but the way it has pushed me to write things down has also helped me to process a lot that has happened to me better than I might have otherwise.” So I’m not gonna write, “now I’m grateful for the traumatic brain injury,” but I’m definitely seeing some positive side effects.

Yesterday, I also made one of my monthly calendars I hadn’t made yet for November. I’m still using the calendar I bought with Eleanor at Half Price that has dog pics on it, which I chose only because I’m not a big fan of dogs and thought that was kinda funny.

I wrote yesterday that, “I deeply believed I’d never be happy after the TBI because I’d never been happy before the TBI either, bc I was drowning my entire life in working CONSTANTLY.” So the way the TBI has made me not work for a while has actually helped me to discover who I might wanna be in life. Those are all just things I wrote in my notebook before attending my first TBI support group!

Then, I went to the support group. There were nine or ten people there, and we had wonderful conversations. It was definitely worth missing a night of translation at Open Door. Most of the people were older than me, but one girl was a bit younger and was there with her mom. Some talked about headaches, and I said that I sometimes had them, but partly from the cancer, not the TBI. We decided one of the big issues with interacting with non-TBI people is that they often live “faster lives.” People agreed it can be hard to make new friends. I also got some ideas about new things to sign up for, including food tastings and cooking classes. Also, apparently being on disability gives you a free fishing license, which I might care about if I were a fisher. I thought it was funny that two people said they had big spelling struggles post-TBI, while I have gotten better at Spanish afterwards. In a way, the best connection I made there was with someone who I had already known a bit. It was Kathy, my mom’s good friend who used to work at the Star Tribune.

At the end of my notes, I wrote that I could possibly do the rest of this “morning pre-yoga”, and I obviously didn’t because now it’s about 5pm the next day and I’m doing it now.