I feel like I was hit by a truck

...or quantifying my cognition

I feel like I was hit by a truck. That is because I was hit by a truck. They test my head hundreds of times and find things have disappeared. Like the file that remembers locations and the “lay of the land” so you don’t fall off your chair or fly down the stairs. Rather, so I don’t fall off my chair or fly down the stairs.

This is called Brain Training. They quantify my cognition, calculate my consciousness and assess my potential to contribute anything of value – ever – to anything. One tester keeps patting her cheekbones as if to make sure they’re still there. One keeps crinkling her nose.

The nose-crinkler shows me “action pictures” which show people doing things I am supposed to name. Like “pulling,” “pushing,” catching,” “throwing.” I can’t. I can’t say who’s doing what or what’s being done. That is called aphasia.

Cognition gets stranger stronger wronger moment by moment. I imagine my brain as a jigsaw puzzle with pieces falling out. The “means” fall out. Then “ends” fall out. The in-betweens fall out. Random pieces, random times.

This was before Ukraine and Gaza and Israel and Covid and thousand-year floods every few weeks and hundred-year droughts every few days and too little kindness and way too much war.

I was chucked out of Brain Training when I encountered an engineered Catch-22 at the Esteemed Institution which parked people at the tables where we kept rolling Play-Doh balls, smashing them into “cookies,” and, as we progressed, pounding wooden pegs in boards.

The head guy (pun intended), who looked like the Wizard of Oz, said I was too screwed up for some parts of the program and not screwed up enough for the rest.

At home, I started painting paper and creating very small works of collage. They measured 2 1/2 inches by 2 1/2 inches which I pasted in place. I liked things that stayed themselves, didn’t get broken or bashed. One of them is on this post. Hope is a thing with wings.

paint and collage by Judith Hannah Weiss