If you have just arrived at Half a Mind To, welcome.
This blog began as an attempt to document life after neurological injury. In 2008 I underwent treatment for a brain tumour. In 2024 I suffered a stroke. Together they left me dealing with a mixture of cognitive and physical challenges that are often difficult to explain to people who have not experienced them themselves.
Some of those challenges are obvious. Others are subtle. A task that appears simple from the outside may require a surprising amount of planning, memory, concentration or adaptation.
Over time I realised that I was constantly developing small strategies to make life easier. Sometimes these were deliberate techniques. Sometimes they were accidental discoveries that happened to work.
Half a Mind To is where I record those discoveries.
The blog is organised into several types of post:
Challenges describe a difficulty or problem.
Strategies describe a practical way of dealing with that problem.
Scenarios describe real situations in which those challenges arise.
Insights explore ideas and observations that help make sense of what is happening.
Full Stories bring several of those elements together into a single narrative.
Although the subjects vary, many posts have a common theme: cognitive load. Much of life after neurological injury involves managing the amount of mental effort required to perform everyday tasks. The techniques described here are often attempts to reduce that load and make life a little more manageable.
This is not a medical site, nor is it intended to offer professional advice. It is simply a record of one person’s experiences, observations and experiments.
If any of these experiences sound familiar, I hope you will find something useful here.
A few suggested starting points are listed below.
If you are following a thread using the little embedded summaries for “related posts” be sure to click on the title or the little image, not the summary text.
Half a Mind to .. 
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