Recovery

First rule of recovery from a catastrophic medical event: assume nothing from the systems around you. Social, institutional, and community services can offer only a faint outline of psychosocial or emotional support because they understand only a faint outline of themselves — their own roles, goals, and the long tail of unexpected consequences that accompanies every organisational framework.

Their internal (as operational) models are sketches of sketches, drifting far from the lived reality of complex trauma, exclusion, or the fragmentation that follows a stroke. They respond to surfaces, not depth. Expecting them to comprehend the full field of experience invites further injury; accepting that you will be navigating without their understanding is, unfortunately, where recovery actually begins.

It seems harsh to say that those who seek to assist rarely manage to do so, but this is the long tail of a broader, distributed sociological constellation of fact(s). Organisations built to support the community are, first and foremost, trying to secure their own continuity in the epistemic and socioeconomic ecosystem that sustains them. Their structures optimise for self-validating survival under contemporary bureaucratic paradigm, not for depth of understanding, and the gap (as phase lag) between those two aims is where people (like any and all of us) fall through.

I’m still falling. Support is sparse, difficult to access, and while this inflects more significance and value to whichever minimal assistance you have (or ever will) acquire or benefit from, the essence of this sociopsychological failure is systemic. That is: the service delivery fails itself by presenting interfaces and documentary rubrics designed by (and arguably for) those who have not had to navigate through this particularly intractable terrain of embodied, lived human experience.