Stroke Passages
Hi Nina,
In your reply to my last Enable Me post, “Mosaic Brain – Too” (22/08/26), you observed well my level of literacy as, “someone who has read widely.” Thank you. My post was written, though, in response to your Enable Me article, “Forwards Again” (19/07/26), in which you broached many themes regarding resilience, chiefly amongst them, two ideas, expressed as the preservation of a “sacred space,” and a “re-grouping,” or the regaining of ground lost to the disappointments of formal, medical rehab.
I was stunned into writing you a response by your understanding of a complex insight into the poststroke condition (conveyed in your two concluding sentences) in which you appear not to resist the helpful advice of people and entities but, rather, the ‘ought-to’ attitude often creeping into relationships of enablement, such that the patient may feel judged or perhaps even condemned. At the same time of resisting you continue to write as a form of self-healing. There is here an equilibrium of subtracting and adding that deftly keeps open a space for others to express themselves, also. In other words, this sacred space you describe is immanent (inherent, not requiring explicit definition). It is this space of immanence that escapes the trained minds of the many medical-science professionals charged with the enablement of humans. It may be registered by them as a void. But it hasn't escaped you, Nina, or other stroke survivors. Sophia Anna-Faria says as much in the concluding paragraphs of her Facebook article, reposted to Enable Me by Chris Lassig (22/07/26). She writes of a space previously accessible to the “changed brain” now sacrificed to the convenience of an automated world.
By the exceptionally fine writing from both of you, I’ve decided to change the thematic thread of my blogs to Enable Me, from stroke stories, to stroke passages. By imagining a conceptual stroke-users’ scalpel I intend to open-up the flesh of survivor stories to reveal an equilibrating inter-section through and by which such stories evolve; examining what it is, precisely, we actually - materially DO - in our sacred spaces to reclaim ourselves in a poststroke milieu; thereby regaining the ground lost ceding to others our own immanent capacities to theorise living differently.