Having a stroke in your early thirties is a lifestyle altering event, let alone when you are a person who was born with the additional skills of a multi-talented sensitive. Jan Toomer is such a person and when she suffered an event that saw her in a coma for two weeks, returning to everyday life seriously unable to remember much of her former life, unable to understand what had happened to her and unable to continue life as a ‘work-aholic’, her life changed dramatically.
In Re-Writing My Future: A Stroke In Time she documents her journey, her frustration at remaining undiagnosed for many years and the incredible help and hope she discovered on her healing journey. Intimate times in her life are shared, not in self-pity but as a means to reach out to others caught in a similar situation, offering her journey and understanding to all in an effort to help others.
Beginning with her abusive childhood as a child with unusual abilities and a parent who did not understand filled with fear and hatred, she details her life as her various skills developed, not for one minute understanding that not everyone could ‘talk’ with the frogs in the swamp at the end of the garden, and that trying to fly down the stairs was considered as seriously dysfunctional.
Her teen years were spent trying to escape from these ‘gifts’ and once she really began to understand just what she had been given, her life pathway changed dramatically. As she notes several time, be very careful what you wish for because more often than not, it is eventually granted!
She shares rebuilding her life, learning to accept the damage done and then working to find ways to rebuild her neural pathways, which have allowed her to once again accept and work with the many gifts she was given as a newborn child.
Philosophical and very grounded Re-Writing My Future: A Stroke In Time holds out a helping hand to accepting the new you, accepting that what has happened can be overcome and lived with, but in a different style than before the event occurred, which in many ways, from an emotional perspective is and was one of the hardest lessons she had to learn and accept
As she says the most important aspect of what she learned is to be herself- her full self, quirks and all, which is a work in progress and one that is ongoing. Jan Toomer hopes that by sharing her journey, she has ‘helped others through their life journey’.
