The swift punch-in-the-gut of COVID-19 has hurled our wellbeing into a state of confusion, dilemma, and reflections. No longer do we wake up early to prepare for work, but change our top and plug the laptop’s charger to conduct remote working in the kitchen. Although it seems impossible, we have found ourselves more online to replace the in-person interaction at work, school, and personal lives. Besides such a leap of change, the news has flowed in with stories about death of loved ones, despair in isolation, and desperation for breakthroughs in news and research. While the gloom hovers in the air of the everyday living, a shift in narrative pervades.
Neesa mutes the side effects of doses and medications. She’s a part of a housing agency that offers safe space to people who experience mental illnesses. She doesn’t walk up to the residents just to prescribe them certain drug tablets and capsules wrapped in tin foils. Instead, she morphs into a sponge that absorbs their dripping anxiety, siphoning their exhausting heavy thoughts as her own to ease the burden that weighs on their mind and shoulders. Neesa heals lost souls as a Mental Peer Health Specialist.
He had ridden motorcycles since he was twelve years old, perching on the back of his older brothers for rides bummed to school or just to go riding in the summer. At the earliest age allowed by his parents, he had secured his very own. Through the years, he had owned one kind of bike or another, always moving up and getting larger. Now, after much hard work and saving, it was a six years old 1965 Harley Davidson salvaged from a police auction.
The biggest single event concerning both TBI and PTSD would have to be my being hit by a truck while standing on the side of the road. This was a huge shock to me, as up until that time, I was proof-positive that I was almost bullet proof, or at least invincible. Double digits of surgeries later, I can tell you that I wasn’t. Well, not quite.
One of the few things I can remember was clawing my way back up to look over the guardrail to the tiny ants below on their own road.
