Recovery

Right now I’m ok, I guess I’m ‘choosing’ to be ok, or deciding to focus on the parts that are ok. Even though nothing has changed externally, my situation remains the same, but I’m ok, because none of what’s hurt me was about me, sure I’ve made mistakes as every person does as we live and learn but what others did to me was more than a mistake, it was cruel, it was abuse, most of it was intentional, it was damaging, it was wrong and it should never have happened but the fact that it did is about them, not me! Yes, I was the one vulnerable to it all, I was the one who couldn’t protect herself, but these are not things I should be blaming myself for, most of the abuse and assaults happened in my childhood, any child would be vulnerable and struggle to protect themselves, it wasn’t a personal flaw or something I did wrong. I survived it all in the way my brain and body decided was best for me in the moment and each time that response was to freeze; be still, be silent, dissociate. I’ve been viewing myself as weak for doing that, but it wasn’t a ‘choice’, it was automatic and it’s purpose was to help me get through really distressing situations that I was unable to run away from or fight my way out of. I did everything I could have and I need to stop beating myself up for being human, for being a victim in the past, and for finding it all so hard to heal from. I am feeling like it’s unfair that I have to heal from it all, I don’t want to have to do so much work on myself or recover from all the things others did. I want to be free from it all, not have to heal from it. So yeah, I am sad, I am angry, and there’s a whole load of grief to untangle when I’m ready but I’m ok. Me, who I am, in my internal world - I’m ok!
#ComplexPosttraumaticStressDisorder #Recovery #MentalHealth #Trauma

People stumble over the name.

Sometimes I stumble over the name.

BestGuessistan.

It doesn’t glide off the tongue. It’s clunky. Awkward. A little broken.

Exactly.

That’s not a branding blunder.

Not one of those names a company spends decades apologizing for.

It’s not incorrect — it’s intentional. Very intentional.

That’s the lived experience.

Because life after rupture — after a brain injury, a diagnosis, a breakdown, a crack-up — is all awkward.

The smoothness is gone, replaced by rough surfaces and struggle.

Things that used to be effortless now require planning. Coordination. Prep.

Extensive prep. A checklist.

Even speaking. Even being.

Before, I could talk my way through anything.

Any word, thought, quote, or reference was within easy reach.

Like silk off a spool, as Thornton Wilder says in Our Town.

Now, I rehearse. I pause. I hunt for the word that used to live right there, on the tip of my brain.

Sometimes my speech sounds halting.

I hear it before my listeners do.

And with every pause, I’m reminded: the old fluency is gone.

This is the after-you.

BestGuessistan slows you down. Makes you work for it.

Just like I have to work for everything now.

It’s not slick.

It’s not optimized.

It’s accurate.

That name is a mouthful — and so is living like this.

Welcome to BestGuessistan.

Try again, slowly. You’ll get there.

Join me.

The water’s not fine.

But it’s where we live now.#TraumaticBrainInjury #Recovery

Just published something I’ve been working toward for a while: a travel guide to the soft, strange place your brain goes after a burnout, breakdown, or brain injury.

It’s called 36 Hours in BestGuessistan.

A satirical field guide for the newly rewired—where the signage is gentle, the coffee is strong, and metaphors are the local currency.

It’s funny, yes. But it’s also real.

Hope it brings a smile, or maybe just a little exhale.

WendyLC | Substack #TraumaticBrainInjury #Recovery #ChronicIllness

Now in Beta

Final_FINAL

WendyLC

May 09, 2025

That’s how I used to think of myself: polished, reliable, fully deployed. Finalized.

I had spent years optimizing—streamlining how I moved through the world, how I worked, how I was seen.

There were bugs, of course. Everyone has them. But I knew the workarounds.

And then something shifted. Not a crash, exactly.

More like a slow system failure—functions fading, connections dropping, synapses misfiring—

until I could no longer trust the interface.

We know (or think we know) how to deal with bad tech:

Reinstall the old version. Restore from backup. Reboot.

Get back to how things were.

But that version is gone.

What’s left is something quieter. Incomplete. Still learning.

Now, I live in beta.

There’s something oddly freeing about that.

I used to think I needed to return to full capacity—

to reclaim the version of myself that once ran clean and fast.

But that version was built on code I didn’t write.

An operating system installed in childhood, shaped by expectation and adaptation—not necessarily by choice.

One of the ketamine therapists put it this way:

your original OS gets installed when you’re young.

And it’s rarely—if ever—updated.

The theory was that the treatment might unlock something.

Let the system rewire. Maybe even overwrite the old version.

It didn’t.

What did, eventually, was the reckoning.

Writing through the static.

Learning to sit with the glitches instead of fixing them.

A friend once asked if I had grieved—

the way you grieve after a loss.

I told him yes.

But it was slow.

Like a seed of grief buried inside a ball of confusion.

It took years—and the hard, necessary work of writing—

to free that seed.

To let it crack open.

To look it in the eye and say: yes, I remember you.

Beta isn’t a holding pattern.

It’s not a failure to launch.

It’s a form of living that doesn’t pretend to be finished.

There’s a strange relief in that. A kind of beauty.

The beauty of a work in progress.

The elegance of still figuring out the right fit.

And—unexpectedly—a new kind of certainty.

Not the brittle kind that comes from being right or complete,

but the quieter kind that comes from no longer pretending.

The old version of me ran fast, but she also ran scared.

Afraid of crashing. Afraid of being found out.

She passed for whole—

but only because the seams were hidden.

Now, the seams show.

The bugs surface.

The system stutters and recovers and stutters again.

And it’s okay.

Because it’s mine.

I know how it works.

I know what it can’t do.

And I know what it can.

I won’t call this the final version.

But it’s the truest one I’ve had.

And for now, that’s enough.

Completion is seductive. Like a false prophet.

It promises peace, applause, a place to rest.

But I never felt at home in completion.

It always came with qualifiers—

a to-do list tucked just out of sight.

There’s something richer—wilder, even—in the incomplete.

Not unfinished as in lacking, but open.

Not broken, but in motion.

To live in beta is to live with room.

For updates. For rewrites.

For patches. For reboots.

For buzz and hum—

but also for stillness.

For days when nothing works,

and days when everything, somehow, does.

There’s dignity in the draft.

In the version that hasn’t been locked.

It doesn’t mean I’m lost.

It means I’m still becoming.

Final is a fiction.

We print it on diplomas.

Etch it into gravestones.

Attach it to software builds and personal milestones as if it signals truth.

But truth often lives earlier—

in the struggle, in the shift,

in the messy middle where meaning starts to form.

If there’s a kind of holiness here,

it’s not in the flawless line of code.

It’s in the human one.

The patchy, the revised, the heartfelt attempt.

This version isn’t perfect.

But it’s alive.

And it’s learning.

People talk about reinvention like it’s a makeover.

Something sleek. Branded. Ready for rollout.

But real reinvention doesn’t look like What Not To Wear.

It looks more like trial and error.

Like holding your breath while the new code runs.

Like failing quietly and adjusting—

mid-sentence, mid-self.

I used to think reinvention meant becoming someone new.

Now I think it means finally becoming someone true.

There’s an intimacy to living in beta.

It strips away the buffers.

You learn what your system can tolerate.

What overheats it.

What brings it peace.

You stop optimizing for scale and start optimizing for soul.

That might mean slower load times.

Less polish. Fewer shortcuts.

But it also means more room for wonder.

For presence.

For something approaching joy.

Because here’s the secret:

perfection never delivered what it promised.

Not really.

It kept me busy. It earned applause.

But it never let me rest.

Now I rest.

I recalibrate. I revise.

And in doing so, I’ve started to trust something I never did before:

the version of me that doesn’t need to prove anything to run.

I used to run as vFinal_FINAL—

the one with the clean edges, the performance specs, the illusion of completion.

Now, I run in beta.

Still glitchy. Still evolving.

But present.

The updates come slow.

Some days, not at all.

But I’m learning not to fear the pause.

Not to treat quiet as failure.

Not to confuse stillness with stalling.

I don’t know if there will ever be a “final” again.

And for the first time—

I don’t need one.

#TraumaticBrainInjury #ChronicIllness #Anxiety #Recovery #MentalHealth #Grief