Time markers that signify a year passing are really hard for me. Birthdays & new years socially seem like the time where you’re supposed to reflect on everything you’ve achieved that year, and set goals for the upcoming one. Besides some tangible goals that I set in the first few years of my brain injury recovery (manage pain, tolerate computer screens, get active again, and apply to grad school) I think I was honestly afraid to set any bigger goals in fear that something bad might happen again and I’d be disappointed.

I can’t remember where I saw this, but someone said the mid-point of a year around June is a much better time for endings and beginnings, and our Western new year is actually a time for resting. I feel that a lot, especially when I tend to have more energy and desire to see people in the summer. June is a month for awareness & celebration, among many things it’s also brain injury awareness month.

Around this time last year I wrapped up my master’s research project for Inclusive Design. It involved mailing blank postcards with prompts on them to participants living with or recovering from brain injury. I wanted participants to draw & write about the experience from their perspective.

The prompts were: “How are you today? How would you like to be? and What do you need to get there?” It was meant to be as open-ended as possible, open to the participants’ interpretation of those questions.

The result was a nuanced view of disability and illness that I’m still untangling to this day. The website subscription has just expired (another ending!) but you can see a digital version of the compiled artwork here.

Some other accomplishments:

• I went back to my undergrad program to teach last fall. It was so rewarding to be able to build on courses that I’ve taken not too long ago. It was a nice reminder for me that I’m really interested in the field of education. If I hadn’t gotten into illustration, I would have gone to teacher’s college.

• Four years ago I had trouble keeping my raising my heart rate even slightly (it was related to brain stuff – isn’t it wild how these things are connected?) Today I’m back to - safely - biking on the trails in Toronto! At the beginning of this month, I even participated in a charity ride where they close down two major highways in Toronto, I did the 50km route to my surprise! Later this summer, I’m thinking of making a zine about my love/hate relationship with bikes.

I’m finding ways to make life more stable and continuous despite interruptions that are inevitable. I kept seeing my flare-ups/regressions as interruptions to my ‘normal’ life. I realized this wasn’t sustainable, and I was losing time by thinking that I would get back on the horse once I was finally better. I would reach out to that person, or sign up for that thing I’ve always wanted to do…later. Better might never come, and that doesn’t mean I can’t experience joy & achievement wherever I can find it.

I settled on Snail Mail as name of this newsletter because it will take me a long time to post.

It took me two years for me to even bite the bullet and start writing again. I joke that I’m a recovering burnout and people pleaser, but it’s true. I think about Tricia Hersey’s ‘rest as resistance’ anytime I feel the internal pressure to rush something or create for an audience. This will hopefully be a space for me to create and challenge that pressure.

Other nice things lately

• Neurodiversity for Educators workshop organized by Sarah Silverman. This is great for anyone who’s currently/will be teaching students anywhere from K-12 to higher education, and curious about the concept of neurodiversity (and accessibility in general) when working with students. I joined the first iteration of this workshop earlier this month and I highly recommend the next one, which is in July!

• Kyla Jamieson’s poetry,

  “The thing they don’t tell you about coming back to life is how scary it can be to walk through the world knowing how precarious life is. To be fearless about everything except the ways humans fail to care for each other. To feel like a foreigner amongst the people who crowd around your light, oblivious to what you carried the flame through. Who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, go looking for you if you became a ghost again. It’s euphoria and uncertainty, joy and rage. Culture shock. To miss life so much, and get to live it again, but without the people who know that hunger there alongside you. Still, you love every hand you hold. You want to say something. You open your mouth but no words come out. Language flies overhead, a winged body disappearing into the distance.”

Until next time,

Josephine