The Constant Student

I regained my ability to learn a year ago; here’s what I did with those 365 days.

A little over six years ago I suffered a traumatic brain injury that caused a number of significant problems, including a loss of intellectual and executive functions. The cleanest way I can think of measuring it is with a simple chess app I had on my phone back then. Before my brain injury, I could beat the computer nine times out of ten at a difficulty of 7. After my brain injury, I struggled to compete at level 4.

Of course, strategy games weren’t the only place I saw a decline in skill. My ability to socialize was buried behind a mountain of anxiety, and my critical thinking and overall focus lasted minutes at most. I was actually assessed by a psychologist and told I might never be fit for work again.

He could have been right. I lost as many jobs as I found in the following years, until I put my professional life on the backburner and concentrated all my efforts on managing my illnesses, physical and mental.

Within a year of that, I started to see sunlight again. With much, much encouragement from family and friends, I started learning a few easy to grasp topics like WordPress, and reviewing previous stores of knowledge such as nutrition and exercise.

That was one year ago. Since the first time I installed WordPress on a shared host, I have built websites, overcome a bevy of fears, started a business, found clients on and offline, written guest blogs, and learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

About six months ago I looked at JavaScript for the first time and couldn’t make any sense of it. A few weeks ago I took another crack at it, and had some limited success. While this is no cause for amazement, I feel like it’s actually possible I’m getting smarter again. Maybe some combination of hard work, skill acquisition, and refusal to die trying has actually taught my brain to heal itself.

In any case, I feel like I’m actually good at learning now. I picked up the Adobe Creative Cloud a couple days ago, and I already feel comfortable with the software that will be most useful for my business. There was definitely some frustration and some head scratching, but learning to animate an element in Premiere Pro is considerably easier than hand-coding the same element from scratch… which is what I was doing last week.

My coding adventures have been shifted to the backburner because of a new, important project that I’m incredibly excited about… but more on that soon. For now, here’s a quick title animation I made just for fun with my logo:

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