Circling the Drain
As a child I loved to play with the Coin Vortex Funnel donation stations that would often be found at a museum or zoo that our family would visit. For a penny, I could have minutes of entertainment. Watching the penny shoot down the shoot into a seemingly endless spiral. Around and around the coin would go. Often it would seem the coin was circling the same exact spots. Higher, lower. Around and around. From above, watching the coin circle, I would see the path. I could see what was coming up next.
Instead of watching the coin though; it is almost as if my brain is that coin. I keep finding myself in what seems to be the same spot. The same symptoms. The same things over and over. Unable to see the path ahead, always spinning. Dizzy. When I get the opportunity and moments of energy to look closer, I can see I’ve made progress. I’m closer to the goal. I’m further down the vortex. But it all looks like so much of the same. Sometimes, when we would do these coin vortexes, instead of the coin making nice neat circles, the path would be oblong, getting close to the bottom hole but then shooting back up toward the rim. In brain injury recovery, it feels like we are all on this same journey as each other yet no two paths exactly the same but yet all on the same path still somehow. I’ve been told no brain injury recovery is linear. Somehow like that oblong path it can even appear to backtrack.
But what is the end? What drain am I circling?
I used to think that it would be recovery. Fully back to life as normal. Now, I’m learning that the end of this vortex isn’t recovery to my old life as it used to be, but rather more of an adjustment into rebuilding this new life into what we can live. I’ve learned a lot from the other coins, er… people, on this vortex with me already and I hope to keep doing so with the ones unfortunately that will keep being added down the ramp. It does get easier with others. As a kid watching the coin vortex, the shortcut to the end the coins took was when one coin bumped into another and they would get knocked down closer to the end, if not straight to it. Like those coins, the people I’ve met on this journey bumping into each other in our recoveries at least take a little bit of the edge off of the circling. It may not get you to the end. But it may make the journey a little easier. You’re not alone.