Ripped Off
Hello,
Here is a link to a post I had originally placed on LinkedIn, that some of you may wish to read.
If the link doesn't work (which given my technical capability may very well be the case!) here is the content:
If anyone has seen Dr Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk, she describes her stroke using terms such as euphoric nirvana. This is about as far away from the terms I would use to describe mine. To borrow the words of my Neurosurgeon “This now 37 year old man suffered a spontaneous haemorrhage into the left side of his cerebellum…..Joel has made a slow but good recovery from this near fatal episode” Its slightly more matter of fact than euphoric nirvana isn’t it? I suppose neurosurgeons aren’t known for their emotive descriptions of these events.
Why I feel somewhat short changed here, apart from the fact I had at stroke when I was 34 with no warning, is my actual stroke experience doesn’t really have many magical moments to it. My only real recollection is a headache that made me scream with pain, but there is really precious little I remember about the event itself! I do remember waking up and not believing it had happened because in my ‘dream coma’ (I don’t think that is an actual thing but its pretty close to how it felt) I was at work – going to meetings, answering emails etc – all the really fun things. And in some very strange mixing of memory and brain trauma I do have a very very vague recollection of feeling like someone (a nurse or orderly or someone) was after me. Which manifested itself in my attempts to jump out of bed and run away. This resulted in me being strapped into bed. Given I was effectively paralysed, in hindsight that was a rather humorous outcome. None of these experiences contain any particular inspiration to write a novel or anything similar. Ripped Off.
To be clear, the fact I am able to even type, very slowly, this is pretty special to me. I now walking (no pun intended) this increasingly fine line between extreme happiness and gratefulness that I am here and a somewhat functioning human being and being extremely frustrated that the damage to my cerebellum means that walking, seeing, talking and general doing things are freakin waaaay more difficult than they used to be.
Something they never tell you, and you are very unlikely to read about in some stroke survivors book, is that the perspective gained from having a life altering event, actually tends to piss people off. While there are so many things that I can remember used to get me wound up that I no longer deem have any importance at all, telling others that the things they have got themselves in a ‘tizz’ over really don’t matter generally go down like a lead balloon.
At no point in the recovery process do they teach you how not to be a sanctimonious dick. Some would quite happily take that role, indeed it could be interpreted as a right after what they went through, but I really don’t want to be one (we can all stop laughing now.). Instead I have unwillingly taken on the dual challenge of ‘getting over it’ and ‘learning from it’. And there are many roadblocks in the path to ‘getting over it’. In fact, I seem to take one step forward and two steps back sometimes. I am trying to fully embrace going back to work and all that it entails, but some days it is quite challenging being useless! It is impossible to accurately describe but one of the biggest mental challenges I am trying to overcome is the rather large shock to my confidence that has resulted from having a massive brain explosion. I sit through things at work now and constantly question myself – “do I understand this?” Even though, my stroke apparently has not resulted in any major cognitive deficits, I still question whether my brain actually works at every opportunity. And hence employment presents this problem very regularly.
I have no expectation that I can teach anyone anything as a result of my experience. Do I want people to understand my daily struggles with tying my shoes? – no, definitely not. What I do hope is that I can influence people’s negative perception of other’s behaviour. I definitely don’t want to be seen as promoting some sort of rose coloured beautiful world or anything but if people’s first reaction wasn’t one of negativity then I think we might all be a little more content with our lives. I don’t believe most people deliberately go out of their way to do things to annoy others, unless they actually are sanctimonious dicks. Sure maybe my judgement has been somewhat clouded but people have been exceptionally nice and accommodating to me since my little ‘adventure’.
So why o’ why am I posting something on LinkedIn? To be clear, I have never posted anything on any social media ever. Never. So is this therapy? I wouldn’t pretend to know. But I hope I have something to offer my network and that I can manipulate my post stroke thoughts into something useful and not be a sanctimonious dick. A fringe benefit of this whole adventure (and let me say, one skill I have definitely got better at is finding the upside to otherwise challenging events) is that I have a lot more time to research and think about issues. For those that know me, I have effectively spent my entire working life in analytics and data driven marketing, so I hopefully have something interesting and useful to say on these subjects now that the opportunity has been afforded to me. I have identified a few particular topics which I now feel I want to say something about:
• The drastic increase in the amount of awareness and discussion on data and analytics
• The move of these functions to be seen as rather important in the business mix, from being a somewhat fringe idea.
• The significant shift in business ‘buzz words’ over the last three years
• The continuing struggle businesses face as the consumer moves further and further online
So I need to be up front about this – there will not be any links to inspirational quotes or things that very very rich people think. I suppose I should be able to write some pithy list of easily digestible LinkedIn friendly “ways to improve your life”. But to be honest, I don’t know what they are…..