Thread by @CorbeauCrypto

Finishing this book presents a major milestone in my life. You see, approximately 6.5 years ago I was found in a pool of my own blood in a parking lot. I ended up in the ICU with a traumatic brain injury. Here’s what I did to reclaim my cognitive function - a 🧵 1/n

The thing about brushes with death (my particular TBI has a ~90% mortality rate) is that they have a powerful clarifying function. Some of the initial thoughts I had was that I :
a - wanted to achieve fluency in French
b - wanted to really embrace Infosec

2/n

There was a small problem though. I was dumber than a bag of hammers. After about six months of recovery - I could barely read a children’s book. It’s not that I didn’t know the words. It’s that they all came at me at once.

3/n

I used to get so mad at my wife for insisting I read to our children. My brain would assemble nonsense sentences from pieces on both pages and then I would have to disassemble them and replace them with the correct sentence. All while trying to keep the girls’ attention.

4/n

Eventually I became self-aware of the issue. And I realized I needed to make a concerted effort. So I built a small program to overcome this issue and achieve my goals.

5/n

The first phase was to rebuild my ability to order and enframe symbols. So I went on a reading spree. For the next year, I would average a book a week. Everything. Technical, mathematic, literature, poetry, young adult, philosophy. If I get my hands on it, I read it.

6/n

Note - rétention was not a core goal. Reading was. So when I read a book on combinatorial geometry - I did not care about learning it. Just get through it and onto the next.

7/n

I also had this French thing going on - so I started with @duolingo every day.

My routine was this - every day 20 minutes of:
- meditation
- reading
- Duolingo

8/n

After approximately a year of this - the next step was to move into professional certification. So I reduced the frequency of book completion and moved over to pursuing @CompTIA certifications and a little bit of @Cisco as well.

9/n

For the French aspect - I added the @Pimsleur CDs (yes, CDs) to my daily routine. Whenever I was driving - I was practicing. Petit à petit, je suis devenu plus en plus efficace.

10/n

Once I got my Sec+, CCENT, CySA+, and CASP+ - I moved into working on learning memory forensics, Python, pcap analysis, and penetration testing.

Learning to read and write code had been hard work. My brain, even now, still makes jumps. But it’s manageable.

11/n

And that’s why this book means so much to me. Because I could read (and retain!!) the code. I had to wait years to get to this book. It was on the shelf waiting for me to get to a place where I could actually ingest and process it’s knowledge.

12/n

So there it is. My journey. A couple take aways - routine matters. If you find yourself in a similar situation - build a program with small achievable goals but with lots of them.

And, of course, memento mori.

13/n

My brush with mortality has happened twice directly in the past 6+ years. And in that time, I lost a parent in a sudden and violent way. Go confidently in the direction of your goals. Build upon your successes. When you waiver (I sure did) - remind yourself.

14/n

It’s later than you think.

n/n

A friend suggested I add tags for others to find this thread. I guess people still use those? I must not do Twitter good.
#TBI #recovery #traumaticbraininjury