Are you living or just surviving?

'We're merely surviving. Very few people actually live; don't just survive, be one of the people that actually live."

It's not an original quotation, I believe it's from Oscar Wilde, but a teenage friend of mine posted it this week on a website for strokies.

Of course, she's right (as was Oscar). Most of us drift through life, commuting to work, dealing with our daily family crises; it takes something like a stroke to make us realise how swiftly life can be snatched from us and how important it is to live, not just survive.

How do we do that? Lots of strokies decide that they are going to get out of their comfort zone; do something they have always shied away from previously. I'm going to be one of them. As a start, this week, I begin a course of introductory training in counselling skills. It's not something I would have contemplated before December 16 2013 but I now feel my experience of life is something I want to share with others who may need it.

My neuropsychologist thinks I can cope with the demands of the course and that I'll be good at it, as long as I remember how to deal with the thing that plagues every strokie - mental fatigue. Tiredness is the brain's way of telling us that it needs rest; ignoring tiredness only makes fatigue worse. So I'm having to break the habit of a working lifetime and accept that when I'm tired, I need to rest. Only then will I be able to live at what is now my full capacity and not just survive.

On a different tack, I've been thinking this week about the different words we use to describe what people go through when they have a stroke. That word itself, 'stroke' somehow sounds mild, doesn't it? Yet, believe me: having a stroke is like having an atomic bomb go off in your head. It's brain damage. I have to tell people that there are parts of my brain which died that afternoon and aren't coming back.
The brain is brilliant at reconfiguring itself by building new neural pathways (I recommend The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge to anyone who wants to know more about brain injury) but the fact is that a stroke is a life-changing event which can strike and kill at any time. That's why those of us who have been through it really know the difference between living and just surviving.