Whose Lens Are You Looking Through?
I recently attended a life-changing leadership educational opportunity with thirteen other incredible professionals. After six months of coursework together, we met for a two-week capstone course on leadership.
On the first day together, we encountered an activity as a group together surrounding the importance of checking our perspectives, our lenses, that we are looking through. Depending on the color of lenses, different numbers on a page of paper were visible to different people. The reality didn’t change, but only with the correct lens color could all of the numbers be seen.
This is an important reality check, and leadership skill. It is a skill that everyone should use. Whose lens am I looking through? I can’t see everything and have limitations as just one lens.
Brain injury has taught me this physically through the blurred vision and floaters in my eyes making even the act of seeing itself into something that requires focus and intentionality in ways it never did before. As someone wearing glasses I’ve experienced discernment and focus in seeing at the eye doctor.v “Better 1? or better 2?” could be difficult to answer sometimes, but often very clearly there was a clearly better view in one of them. One lens seemed better than another. Clearer. Sharper. In focus. With brain injury, however, almost nothing has seemed clear for the last three years.
This leadership course demonstrated a question and lesson that is pertinent to all people - “Whose lens are you looking through?”.
For the person recovering from brain injury, the question takes shape in a new dimension. Are you looking through the lens of who you used to be before suffering from the brain injury? Or are you looking through the lens of the new person of who you are today, the survivor of a brain injury?
Acceptance of your brain injury is essential in the recovery process. I say that as someone that hears this truth from those much further in the journey than I am. I am barely to the point of recognizing that it is true. But even that, is progress. I don’t accept it yet myself, but I recognize I need to continue to work to do so. A year ago, I barely recognized I even had a brain injury despite checking every symptom on the list, but lacking the cognitive ability to understand what I was facing.
Accepting the brain injury means looking at the world through this different lens. Looking forward to a meaningful life spent focused on what is, as opposed to mourning a life looking backward at what was.
Carole J Starr, MS in her book To Root & To Rise: Accepting Brain Injury states, “My favorite definition of acceptance comes from one its synonyms: the word acquiescence. It’s derived from the Latin word that means ‘to take rest in’. We’ve reached acceptance when we’ve found our own place of peace, even as the storms of brain injury swirl all around us”(3). Reading this struck me as exactly this lens question - how am I approaching my brain injury recovery? Whose lens am I looking through? Am I looking back or looking forward? I won’t find that peace in the fog until I can accept that no matter what I do, or how hard I try, I cannot change that there will always be some brain injury symptom to deal with. What am I doing with using that lens to move forward? Carole J Starr, MS describes the continuing brain injury symptoms as the “storms of brain injury” swirling around us. It is this fog that is going to be there each day of my life. But there is hope in this fog. There can still be peace. I just need the right lens. If I am always wanting the sunny day of yesterday, I will always be disappointed by the fog of today and the appearance of its continuation for the coming days, months, and years.
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
What lens am I using? Like in the leadership lesson color lenses activity, on my own I am missing things from just my own perspective. But surrounded with this community of other brain injury survivors and caregivers, there are many lenses to continue to try on as I work toward acceptance in this fog seeking hope. “Better 1?” “Better 2?” It gets better. I hear it from those 40+ years into their injury, 20+ years, 10+, 8+, 5+. At almost three years into my recovery, I can see that it does get better compared to two years and one year. But just like trying on glasses lenses, sometimes the difference between better 1 and better 2 isn’t clear. That’s ok, hang in there. It does get better. The lens I need to use to accept my injury is that there is hope in the fog, and the fog is a fog of hope. No matter what I do, or how hard I try, I cannot change that there will always be some brain injury symptom to deal with. Changing the lens changes how I think of my injury and day. I haven’t learned how to fully live this acceptance yet. But the change in the lens is a helpful start in seeing what I couldn’t see before. Whose lens are you looking through?