Finding the light that will aid recovery

My new year's resolution is to focus on the positive, hard as that seems at times, writes Edward Lawrence
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Spiral staircase in the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
Trying to resist the downward spiral. Photograph: Kevin Foy/Rex Features

As my mood is inextricably linked to motivation and thus to getting better, I ask your indulgence whilst I tell you about it briefly. Given that it is a wide-ranging subject I might return to it – albeit occasionally, I hasten to add!

A psychiatrist from the community mental health team called two weeks before Christmas and suggested an insight that had never occurred to me. The reason for the visit was that I was just like you, until hopefully unlike you, some time ago I collapsed, flatlined in the back of an ambulance, suffered multi-organ failure, was in a medically induced coma and then woke up like this. This being relearning to walk, to talk, to write and not having fine motor skills; in fact, having to relearn everything as a result of brain damage. That this came as something of a shock is a considerable understatement.

And the insight he offered was this. Essentially, my childhood was a fairy tale, inasmuch as it was a grim one. I was used to looking after others from a young age and to compartmentalising certain emotions, because if I ever thought about what I was doing and why, they would be as much use to me as a jelly hammer. What, as a child, had acted as an emotional anchor and survival mechanism, keeping me steady during the rough seas of my childhood, now holds me back, so I need to be free of my emotional anchor. As a child I saw everything in black and white and if it was anything else, it got compartmentalised. Seeing my present in black or white isn't helpful as it automatically negates any hope for the future, as it gets compartmentalised.

An example? Whereas before I was briskly walking towards the light at the end of the tunnel, now there isn't any light at the end of the tunnel, just a continuous series of bends, so that, just like an anchor, the way I think has become so ingrained it threatens to drown me because in fact, when I was in the rehab unit, a friend said the main obstacle to me getting better was my own mental state. One which I have to change – for the better.

So my resolution for the coming year has to be one of positivity and optimism for the future, but unlike most resolutions, this is a matter of necessity. The way I think at the moment is not conducive to my recovery. You wake up only to find yourself in what to you is not a body but a prison and how you related to the world, how you fitted into the scheme of things, gone.You may have thought you were the most fascinating person you knew. All that gone. Forever.

It is the worst kind of identity theft. A bereavement, if you will, but the person who has died is the person you once were, a person whose dreams will remain only that, dreams that will never – or at the very least have a very high probability of never coming to fruition.

And what you didn't say is much more important than what you did say and you realise, with horrific clarity, that your life won't continue on the trajectory you had always thought it would because now everything has changed. You don't get time to adjust to a drastically major change, you are just expected to get on with it immediately and not be depressed. Because if a person had done this to your self-esteem, they would be on a manslaughter charge. Those that don't have the constant stream of negativity, which is my interior monologue, tell me to ignore it, but sometimes it is easier to ignore it than others. And so I try as best I can to resist the easy but inexorable downward spiral that could become a journey of no return. Although I sometimes wonder what exactly are the delights that others claim I might miss out on if I were to embark on such a journey...

A glittering future?

A never-ending horizon packed full of countless pleasures?

A smorgasbord of delights?

One is not meant to dwell on the fact that one's life was supposed to be infused with lots of laughter and so much fun. Neither must one fix upon the rather unpalatable fact that because certain things haven't happened as you envisaged, they can't happen. No, you must instead focus on the fact that you might get better. Or you might not.

Nobody can say. It gives a new meaning to the phrase, the sword of Damocles. Or, as TE Lawrence says in Lawrence of Arabia: "Of course it hurts; the trick is to ignore the fact it hurts." A passing slight or injury, perhaps, but one's self-image?

Somewhat trickier to achieve.

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