I recently got in touch with one of my former girlfriends, not for any romantic reason but because she’s almost the only person I have ever been close to who had had receive treatment or counseling for any kind of mental or brain disorder. Her problems appeared to be more psychological than physical, although apparently she has been using Wellbutrin and it appears to have been working for her.
We’ll call her Alice because … well, let’s just say that when we were dating she took me through the looking glass a time or two.
At the time we talked, I had just changed from Lithium to Depakote as my bedtime snack. The Lithium had made me snappish and had given me tremors. More generally, I was noticing some of the problems I’ve already blogged about. I brought up what my doctor had said about not regaining the same levels of, well, ability I’d achieved in the past. He’d suggested I might not. She flat slammed the door on it.
Moreover, she introduced me to a concept that I hadn’t been introduced to before in terms of my own disease: rehab. Not in the drug-rehab sense, but in the injury-rehab sense.
She talked about learning how to compensate for certain types of damage. Having problems typing? Slow the hell down. Having problems stumbling into synonyms or even flat-out wrong words in your speech? Slow down AND don’t try to do anything else while you’re speaking. Forgetting stuff? Make writing it down Job 1. And so on.
She was upbeat and encouraging, but for all that, she didn’t sugarcoat the ways and means in which I’m going to have to change or adapt. She also didn’t sugarcoat the fact that all the adapting in the world might not be enough to make me an all-star once again.
Still, that level of effort won’t be optional. It might be necessary just to keep the bottom from falling out. As I’ve already pointed out, the kinds of mistakes I’ve been making in my typing may have real-world consequences for which I could be held accountable. And an amputee who gets fired for not closing enough deals is, at the end of the day, just one more guy who gets fired for not closing deals … and rightfully so.
And I owe my family no less, as well. It isn’t an issue of job performance there, of course; it’s an issue of my obligations to them as husband and father, obligations I take very seriously. They depend on me; they need reasons to keep doing so. I need to give them some.
