What I always say about recovery, is to work with real life, with the familiar, to retrain the brain. Just as you’d do to wake up a coma patient. If you want something badly enough, if it is a passion, a hobby, you put the effort and the hours in because you won’t lose the interest, the momentum, the drive to improve and perfect, and you will set goals and targets.
I certainly didn’t get up in the morning and say right, I’m going to clip X number of pegs onto a cup or pick up pennies or beat my last target for however many straight lines and swirls I drew yesterday. That kind of action may be familiar to someone who’s worked on a production line, but I certainly didn’t have any enthusiasm for it. In fact, I did a lot of flitting about with those kind of tasks out of sheer boredom, which is not what you need.
Your brain will be slower, so it finds it harder to maintain interest long enough to imprint on the brain if it’s too boring and mundane. I don’t know about anyone else but I had the attention span of a gnat for the first 6mths or so and has gradually built up again over time. Couple that with the dreaded fatigue and your brain has a very limited window of opportunity to relearn or retrain.
Working on my computer, reading, gardening, fitness, sewing, puzzles, writing shopping lists…regardless of the fact I couldn’t write; they are meaningful, memorable enough to spark the brain. The how-to is already stored in brain’s hard drive, the brain just needs to get access to it again. You know how to hold a pen, what it’s used for, and what to do with your hand to produce writing on a page. It’s the faulty electrics and mechanical connections, the dodgy software that’s needs fixing or rerouting to access some or all of it. And the only way to do that really is to just pick up a pen and start writing, no matter how illegible it is. So the brain can find that access or is given enough time to map a new route to it and store it again.
It all sounds so simple and easy, but it takes years of practice practice practice, every day ’til you get it right. Probably as long as it would take a child to write neatly and legibly. So get writing, you never know, you may even learn to control the tremors 😉
Lorraine