below is a snapshot of the subjects I plan to cover in future posts, separated into my usual categories. You’ll probably want to just skim read it, to get a feeling for the scale of what I hope to cover.
Challenges yet to be explored
What follows is not a list of advice, nor a catalogue of solutions. It is a glimpse of the ground still being navigated — recurring difficulties, persistent frictions, and familiar knots that shape daily life.
Vision, perception, and spatial awareness
- Poor spatial awareness and mental rotation
- Crossing roads safely
- Navigating unfamiliar places
- Getting lost — even on familiar routes
- Remembering navigational steps
- Forgetting where rooms are in my own home
Memory, attention, and cognition
- Short-term memory failures
- Brain fog
- Losing focus
- Concentration difficulties
- Restarting tasks by mistake
- Picking up old work after a break
- Forgetting meetings — and forgetting that I’ve forgotten
- Absorbing and retaining instructions
- Being responsible for receiving and relaying information
- Error-prone thinking
- Unreliable recall
Fatigue, energy, and shutdown
- Lethargy and persistently low energy
- Needing excessive sleep
- Energy dropping sharply during the working day
- Rapid brain shutdown
- Reduced productive time compounding other difficulties
Sensory processing and overload
- Sensory integration difficulties
- Heightened startle response
- Vibrations felt through the feet
- Head-down activities triggering brain fog
Physical effects and bodily changes
- Poor balance
- Limb weakness
- Muscles not firing reliably
- Hyper-extension
- Neurological shakes
- Low immune system
- Digestive disruption and imbalance
- Dehydration
- Difficulty maintaining physical fitness
Medical treatment and its consequences
- Brain tumour and its aftermath
- Radiotherapy
- Chemotherapy side effects
- Late-onset radiation necrosis
- Stroke
- Epilepsy and jamais vu
- Medication side effects
- Remembering to take medication
Decision-making and problem solving
- Choosing between options
- Choosing between treatments
- Analysis paralysis
- Unpicking cause and effect
- Understanding “the new normal”
- Rationalising the situation
- Handling curve balls
- What happens when…
Work, identity, and professional life
- Desire to return to work — too early?
- Retirement on medical health grounds
- Needing clarity about expectations during a phased return
- Poor netiquette and misinterpretation
- Ambiguity
- Depressing unread email counts
- Public misinterpretation of hidden disabilities
- Colleagues who don’t understand
- Closed minds among acquaintances
Daily life, independence, and participation
- Planning journeys
- Travel insurance and medical cover
- Insurance after leaving the job
- Managing money
- Losing things
- Getting appropriate rehabilitation support
- Lack of appropriate occupational therapy for high functioning employees
- Lack of independent mobility
- Limited local amenities and transport
- Attending social events
- Keeping up hobbies and pastimes
- Activities I enjoy becoming harder
Emotional and psychological weight
- Mental health strains
- Loss of confidence
- Depersonalisation
- Outliving the prognosis
- The past becoming hazy, and losing special memories
- Stories that feel either too complex — or too simple
Strategies yet to be explored
These are not prescriptions or productivity hacks. They are working practices, adaptations, and small design decisions — many arrived at slowly, some borrowed, some improvised — all aimed at making daily life more navigable.
Seeing, moving, and physical safety
- Registering as partially sighted
- Blue Badge use
- Adjusting limb and forearm orientation
- Heavy cutlery and drinking glasses
- Multi-function sticks and walking aids
- Hanging a walking stick on the banister
- Improving stick visibility
- Fall detection
- Safe ways of getting out of the bath
- Fold-out shower seats and unobtrusive grab rails
- Rotating to stand safely
- Staging items up the stairs
- Clearing the dishwasher without moving my head
Energy, recovery, and pacing
- Allowing disproportionately large amounts of time
- Afternoon naps
- Optimising recovery
- Fitness circles
- Gym membership
- Rehabilitation exercises
- Marginal gains
- Knowing when to eat, rest, or take medication
Memory, thinking, and problem-solving
- Standard memory techniques
- Mind maps as a primary thinking tool
- Mind map visitor patterns
- Resolving complexity
- Critical thinking
- Reading long numbers quickly
- Remembering routes using features and waypoints
- Taking photographs, videos, and screenshots as records
- Organising and labelling photos
- Standard lists (packing, town visits, routines)
- “How to eat an elephant?”
Organisation, projects, and self-management
- Project-managing myself
- Current task lists
- In-trays
- Kit lists
- Harvesting ideas and actions
- Keeping a master map updated
- Subject-based to-dos
- Open → needs → propose → close
- Managing parallel projects
- Being precise about file naming and versioning
- Not confusing backups with current versions
Communication and work life
- Reasonable adjustment documents
- “Help you to help me” explanations
- Workplace adjustment agreements
- Managing expectations during phased return
- Email handling systems
- Editing subject lines and embedding context
- Email etiquette and netiquette
- Asking groups to observe communication norms
- Single-person Zoom meetings for clarity
- Instant communication groups
- Handling ambiguity
- Saying no early when constraints aren’t met
Phones, watches, and everyday technology
- Using smartphones and smartwatches together
- Watch torch and alarms
- Managing medication with a watch
- Phone and watch navigation combinations
- Voice control on phones, tablets, and computers
- Soft mouse and accessibility tools
- Speak-selection and read-aloud features
- Timers, reminders, alarms, and calendars
- Alarm music and early-warning cues
- Home screen sets for different focuses
- Scheduled focus modes
- Cinema and do-not-disturb modes
- Device grips and physical handling aids
- Foci and app pages
- Cygwin find
Email, files, and digital housekeeping
- Auto-labelling incoming emails
- Filters for deletion, snoozing, and follow-up
- “From me to me” email systems
- Gmail search as memory support
- Tracking settings changes
- Prime and delivery notifications
- Downloading voice memos and photos
- Transferring files via USB or SD adapters
- FreeFileSync
- Scan-to-PDF with OCR
- “Scanned” stamps and document trails
- Wireless HDMI for presentations
Audio, dictation, and capture
- Voice memos
- Quiet places for dictation
- Transcription hardware and software
- Transcription foot pedals
- AI note-takers
- Having pages read aloud
Travel, independence, and participation
- Driving licence decisions
- Rail discounts and travel assistance
- Recruiting drivers
- Walking directions home
- Planning journeys
- Geographical navigation apps
- Supporting independent mobility
- Recumbent trike
Well-being, calm, and enjoyment
- Calming familiar music
- Music services that learn preferences
- Cooperative board games
- Wordle and Quordle
- Personal “puddle” as opposed to cloud
- Keeping hobbies alive, even in adapted form
Administration and support
- PIP and free prescriptions
- Headway cards
- Support groups
- End-of-life planning (quietly and early)
Meta-strategies
- ChatGPT as a thinking partner
- Designing systems, not just tools
- Innovating gently rather than starting over
Some of these strategies will warrant a full explanation. Others will remain as footnotes to lived experience. Together, they show not cleverness, but adaptation over time — the slow accumulation of things that help.
Scenarios yet to be explored
Scenarios are where challenges and strategies meet real life. They are ordinary moments — often small, sometimes awkward — where something quietly goes wrong, or just as quietly works better than it used to.
Work, purpose, and contribution
- Crowdsourcing material for this blog
- Returning to work after time away
- Linking a return-to-work decision with urgency versus importance
- Understanding what benefits are available
- Reviewing and refining personal workflows
Travel, movement, and planning
- Checking the hopper bus timetable for the gym
- Getting the train into London
- Buying an e-bike
- Packing for camp
- Planning journeys where timing matters
- Working out who is home — and when
Home, routines, and the everyday
- Setting the table
- Trimming sideburns
- Moving an item to a new “home” — and remembering that you did
Communication and information handling
- Sending yourself an email to preserve a thought or action
- Managing long-running email threads with long gaps between replies
- Labelling emails to keep dormant issues alive
- Retaining reference information temporarily without losing it
Social and shared moments
- Family board games
- Eating a meal with a group of associates
- Marking a familiar occasion such as St George’s Day
Some of these scenarios will become short illustrations. Others may grow into fuller accounts. A few will simply remain as touchstones — reminders that it is the ordinary moments, repeated often enough, that matter most.
Insights yet to be explored
Insights are not solutions. They are the things that became clearer only after living with a problem for long enough — the realisations that change how the next difficulty is met, even if they don’t remove it.
Understanding the brain and body
- Three-dimensional spatial reasoning
- Acquired dyslexia
- Forgetting on two levels
- Navigating places learned long ago
- Musculature, weakness, and neurogenesis
- Prioritising the weaker limb when rebuilding strength
- Understanding low blood pressure
- Anxiety as a real, embodied state
- The palliative word — and what it carries
Treatment, medicine, and consequences
- The impact of radiotherapy beam angles
- Radiotherapy planning
- Genetic markers for chemotherapy response
- Long-term effects emerging years later
- Technology advances since my original treatment
- The absence of occupational therapy at this level
Thinking, tools, and mental models
- Problems have shapes
- Mind maps as the Swiss Army knife of strategies
- No single place to “park” information — only partial solutions
- Forgetting to clean up source material after capture
Technology as extension, not cure
- Fitness ecosystems: phone as hub, watch as sensor, apps as feeders
- ChatGPT as a thinking partner — more than a novelty
- Technology helps most when it reduces friction, not when it adds features
Systems, work, and institutions
- Workplace insurance — and its limits
- Leaving employer-packaged health cover and the fine print
- Citizens Advice not always equipped for complex neurological cases
Perspective and identity
- Being fortunate not to ask “why me?”
- Increased empathy
- This is my trip to the South Pole
- Literature as a quiet companion
Some of these insights will stand alone. Others will thread their way through multiple challenges, strategies, and stories. A few may remain unnamed influences — present in the work, but never centre stage.
Full stories (so far)
Full stories are different in kind. They are not fragments, tactics, or moments. They are longer arcs — situations that unfolded slowly enough, and mattered deeply enough, to justify being told in one piece.
At present, there are only a few.
- Visual field loss
A sustained account of how losing part of the visual world reshapes movement, confidence, safety, and identity over time. - Nephew John and the South Pole
A story about perspective, comparison, and pride — and how other people’s journeys can quietly reframe our own.
These stories exist because they asked to be written. Others may follow — but only when enough time, distance, and clarity have accumulated.
There are many challenges, because difficulties recur in different guises.
There are many strategies, because adaptation is incremental and often provisional.
There are many scenarios, because life keeps presenting ordinary moments where things either falter or quietly work.
There are fewer insights, because understanding takes time.
And there are very few full stories, because not everything benefits from being wrapped up and narrated.
This is why the site is structured around cross-linking rather than completion. Most progress here happens sideways, not forwards: a strategy sheds light on a challenge; a scenario tests an insight; a story quietly recontextualises them all. Nothing arrives fully formed, and nothing stands alone for long.
What follows, then, will not be a steady march of finished pieces. It will be a growing, interlinked record of lived experience — partial, revisited, and occasionally revised — shaped by the belief that small gains, clearly named, matter more than tidy conclusions.
That, in the end, is the scale of what is still to come.
Half a Mind to .. 