Drawing

Since the days at the hospital, I didn’t try to draw or paint. I am a visual person. When I sit down to explain something to another person, after a few attempts I usually I find myself getting out a pen and paper, drawing the the thing. It may be a flowchart, a picture, a list, partially to clear my own mind and partially to for the other party to haven easier time to decode. Expressing myself visually is very important to me, almost as important as writing. That said, although it is such an important part, I do not work on it.

My priority list is:
1) Talking
2) Talking
3) Talking
4) Writing
In that order.

Besides, like with the computer, I am afraid broaching that subject again, what if I keep disappointing myself. Then suddenly it happens. On the Third week after the stroke, as I am waiting for my husband, to pick me up from the lobby of the Adventist Rehab Hospital, I pick up a paper and pencil and begin to draw, just like that…
I draw one picture.

I am so so so happy! I can jump up and down!, I want to shout to the whole wide world! I can draw again! I want to do summersaults! Of course like any self respecting person I don’t do them- besides I don’t even know how. Instead, I draw another picture… As my husband comes, I am on my third picture already. I tell him the news. He says, wonderful! But I can tell that he has other things in his mind. At home I tell my mother. She is absolutely, positively impressed by the news. Because she knows my life, how important visual art was for me ever since I was a child. She also wants to share the news and tells it anyone who can listen. In the afternoon, my friend Zeynep comes for more speech therapy. My mom tells her that now I can draw beautiful pictures. Zeynep is utterly shocked. From reading internet stories about aphasia – since my stroke – she has found out that, strange things happen to people with aphasia. Like the one woman, who suddenly started to speak in a foreign language, or people who started to speak in a foreign accent. She thinks that it has also happened to me; that I can draw and paint all of a sudden, with no precedence.When we understand what she means, we all fall down with laughter. No, no, no parapsychology here, just normal progression after brain injury. Like addition and subtraction it all comes back to me gradually.