No Excuses

I love getting comments on my blogs.  It is fantastic to hear your experiences, and get your feedback.  Occasionally though, I feel that it is important to discuss a comment.

In my recent blog post, “building blocks,” I wrote about offhandedly telling my boyfriend J I was going to South America for 6 weeks.  It hurt him terribly that I had not included him in my life and I felt dreadful that I had been so insensitive and thoughtless.  I felt dreadful about hurting J’s feelings and used this as an example of how survivors can “miss” social cues or ignore rules of social etiquette obvious to others.  I finished the entry discussing ways to learn from these oversights and improve.

I received this comment:

“Wow, nice cop out! I think I'm going to use it next time I have a misunderstanding with my boyfriend. Thanks!”

I feel awful that this entry was taken like this but I am happy to receive this comment.  It gives me the chance to address exactly this issue.

Please don't misunderstand me to be using brain injury as a cop out or advising my readers to do so.  It is extremely important never to use brain injury as a crutch or an excuse.  Not only does that take away your credibility but this can hurt other survivors as well. 

I do try to keep my blog on one topic and most entries discuss events in my life in terms of brain injury. I do this in an attempt to use these events to illustrate aspects of brain injury as well as to offer perspective and give advice.

Though these events are examined in terms of brain injury in my blog, I generally keep these insights to myself unless I feel the discussion would be appropriate or useful.  It is good to be open about the struggles you face, but choose wisely.  Even if your actions are related to the brain injury it is still important to take responsibility for them.  (There are clearly exceptions to this rule dependent on the cognitive state of the survivor.)

If you believe that talking the event over will be useful to your friend, strengthen a relationship, further your improvement, or help you to move forward then don’t hesitate to talk about it.  If however, it is simply to alleviate guilt, or worse still, an excuse, then it might be best to keep it to yourself.  Blaming everything on the brain injury dilutes the impact of what you experience, and being accused of the girl who cried brain injury is awful.  Conversely, not sharing your day-to-day struggles can have the same effect.  There has to be a happy medium.

Do not use your mistakes as excuses, use them as tools – learn from them.  After all, learning and improving are what life is all about!