the PDF of her book - National Aphasia Association

Tales from the Other Side of Language 137
I’m sitting at my computer, pondering these thirty years
of personal recovery enduring two different sets of neurological
damage. From the larger perspective of my life, I realize I first lost
most of my sensory observing mind as a baby in a culture that
values words over sensory experience. That is what we do to babies
in this culture—help them lose the gift of sensory perception.
Then I lost the verbal mind of the observing psychologist and woman.
In that loss I was hectic to find a self I could take out into the world to be
seen. And then I lost how to plan, how to move with the music of my body,
and how to envision through my body’s intelligence. The losses gave me
gifts of deeper awareness of myself and of the human condition: the beauty
of finding non-verbal languages from loss of language, the perspectives I
can articulate from living so long inside loss and disability, the capacity to
return to clinical practice once again with those insights and to be of service
to patients in a unique way.
As a clinician I am now looking from three perspectives simultaneously:
from inside my own experience of stroke; from my long experience as a
phenomenological observer, taking theory from what I see; and from the
patient’s situation, all at the same time. I have become a unique sort of neurorecovery
specialist, a hybrid of phenomenological observation, survivor,
clinician, and neuro-developmental educator.
In this long journey I’ve found a sensory mind and a thinking body. I’ve
not only expanded my brain’s functioning, but I’ve amplified the boundaries
of my sense of self. From an abstract mentalist self, I am now a sensate self,
a body-experienced self, with a sensory mind.