Mosaic Brain, Too
Hi Nina, and Sophia, (Chris L, et al.).
You concluded your article, Nina, 'Forwards Again', (July 19, 2026), with two, seemingly irresolute, sentences amounting to a stunning insigjht. You wrote:
"No is a powerful word in post stroke recovery."
Followed by,
"By writing this - again I move forwards."
If I understand you correctly, Nina: you gain territory IN THE WRITING ACT, by simultaneously choosing to cede territory. In other words, there is no destination here but a choice to remain navigating the passage. If my interpretation is correct you join a venerable cast with other refuseniks, most notable, perhaps, the 'father' of modern Western philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche (late nineteenth century Germany). While acknowledging his own health was deteriorating he innovated philosophy by imaginatively recasting illness as a condtion for health, and unreflexive health as a condition of illness. All this, during the period in which he composed his master philosophical narrative. Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
From what I have read here, you and Sophie share a similar kind of irresolute imagination with Nietzsche, one that goes beyond binary comparisons (this/not this). You appear both to possess a CREATIVITY beyond pessimism/optimism - a different way of being poststroke.
Jane Speedy, a UK Humanities professor, appears to express this CREATIVITY in a poetic account of her poststroke experience. In the Introduction to her book, Staring at the Park (2015), she writes,
I wrote this book against the grain of the more triumphalist, coherent, archetypally 'male' mountain-climbing survivor narratives that I was given to read. I wanted [instead] to privilege confusion and incoherence and old age and to express a resistance to the pioneering, more youthful myths that made coherent and linear sense of it all (p. 14).
What I read in yours (Nina) and Sophia's writing is a sense of the tragical-absurd, for example, in such C. 20th works as Albert Camus', The Myth of Sysiphus (1955/1965), and Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1956/2006). I look forward to further remits from The Passage.
John