Archive for July, 2010

Feel safe

Experience pleasure

Experience a sense of control over their environments, people around them, themselves, their today, and their tomorrows.

Experience a sense of self-respect, self-value, self-esteem

Experience a sense of control of their privacy

Experience a sense of their own abilities to solve problems

Experience a sense of self-consciousness (being “non positional”) people come to know themselves as compared to others

Experience a feeling of right and wrong, entitlement vs. earned, a right vs. duty, obligation.

Experience a sense of themselves – beliefs, attitudes, dreams, values, self, individuality

Maintain a sense of time, of tomorrow, of yesterday, of today

Experience a sense of control and participation in positive interactions

Experience love giving it and receiving it

Experience stimulation in each of their senses.

Experience reminiscing, reflecting and its value, and control

Experience being in charge of planning their own activities, choices, lives

Feel like they own these experiences. It is a right, a responsibility, and a duty.

Stand up! Speak Up! Do not become a victim of your own silence.

Speak for yourself and those who will follow. Ask Carers and Friends to do the same. Today

will never be here again. Time is of the Essence!! Use it wisely!!

Tell as many people as possible your perceptions of your interactions with pro

fessionals, with carers, with friends, with strangers, with your government.

They won’t change unless they know, and they can’t know unless and until you SPEAK UP!

Seek to create a Palpable Sense of Change and of Urgency!

Join a Crusade, Now!
Be a Crusade, Now!
Lead a Crusade, Now!

In the eyes of many others, sometimes even the eyes of caregivers, I am seen as less than a complete someone. Just because my memory is failing me, just because a region of my brain is failing, just because I don’t always think like you do, nor do I remember as much or how you do, please, please know that in my own eyes, and I hope your eyes,  I am still a whole and complete someone. I am still me.  I am still Grandpa, and Dad, a friend, and whole and a complete Human Being.  I am in my mind still and have always been a complete person.  I am not becoming any less a person simply because I cannot remember like you, talk you do, or think like you do.   I know many of you want me to be who I was yesterday, or last year, or the last time they saw me, but I cannot be, nor do I any longer want to be.  I have ceased looking back over my shoulder at who I was, and now spend most of my time working on who I am , one day at a time.

Please help to enable me to be all that I can and should be.

Thank you!

Richard Taylor
richardtaylor.com
richardtaylorphd@gmail.com

“Aim above morality.
Be not simply good,
Be good for something.”
Henry David Thoreau

continue