Don't dis orderly living

 For people who struggle with concentration, I prefer to think of them as living with ADHT, or attention deficit hyperactive trait, not disorder. Back in prehistory, I figure there was a survival benefit to having a few individuals who weren't too engrossed in the group's discussion to notice the predator sneaking up through the woods. In times before teachers shushed unruly students, this was a mortally valuable trait!

I'm also not a fan of the diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder, preferring to swap the final word for "awareness". In my last post, I mentioned riding in the dark past the spot where I was hit, and yes, every time I pass, I still wave and say "Hi" to the enormous roadside tree there that I didn't impact. Back in 2022, when I was still in the hospital before discharge to the recovery facility, I determined my primary goal was to not feel like a victim, to fight for as much recovery as I could achieve, and most importantly, accept that.

For the most part, I feel successful in those goals, wrote the person who has been awake two hours at a bit before 7AM. Yes, there isn't a day when I'm not aware of the accident, and yes, mentions of it do surface in this blog, but by and large, I have managed to accept it as the single biggest event in my life, but I also think I've lived a richly enough that it is far from defining me. Later in '22, after encouragement from one of the hospital doctors to consider psychological counseling in addressing, well, being left for dead on the side of the road, I met with a therapist a handful of times.

She was good, I believe, but not the right match for me, so it didn't last long, but one particular memory I keep from those sessions was when she talked about how I had been helpless to influence being hit and the outcomes from it. I stopped her, disagreeing. Was I hurt by someone else's action? Yes, most definitely, but in considering that it was the back half of my helmet that broke off, and, aside from knees, there were no scars on my front, I figured my body must have tucked and rolled when it hit the ground, and that could be a big chunk of the reason I'm still able to write blog posts today instead of simply waiting for someone to wipe the drool off my lip. I get to own that, as well as the fact that I face planted much less gracefully two years later, breaking my neck again, fortunately as much lower speed.

Am I affected by the trauma? Damn straight, and yes, I be sharing that now and again. It's real. It happened. It will always be lurking a little in my psyche and comments, but hopefully you, as a reader, don't feel like a victim of that either!