Time Lord█
This started as a running joke...
I've always tried to find a way to describe my eccentricity
to others, usually to no avail. My way of solving problems,
of thinking and creating, of seeing the world, are so
fundamentally different from nearly all my friends. So, I often
found myself trying to describe how my mind worked...and usually
managed to confuse my friends further.
The way I think has a lot of advantages...but it has its
challenges as well. For one thing, I tend to solve programming
problems from binary-up, not abstractions-down as
most programmers do. This is usually an advantage, but it also
means I'm prone to miss the obvious at times.
Then, while watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
(my favorite show...I offer no apologies), I happened across
this joke...
The familiarity was not lost on me. This was literally my
first instinct on simple problems.
The pony in question, Doctor Whooves, was named thus by fans
who recognized his resemblance to the 10th Doctor Who
(David Tennant); the animators of the series made that joke
official in this episode.
That led me to start watching Doctor Who, something I'd only
seen in passing prior. Before long, I started to see a striking
resemblance between the Doctor and my own personality.
I found that "time lord" was a handy shorthand way of introducing
my eccentric mind to the world.
I discovered shortly after that revelation that I enjoyed
wearing bow ties (which really are cool). Yet that fashion
statement is more than just a reflection of my eccentricity.
It has given me a basis to tell my story, which continues to
inspire many people I meet.
Bigger On The Inside...█
I was fairly content with letting "time lord" stand as a
running joke, but it was about to take on a much deeper meaning.
I've had two significant head injuries in my
life: one at age two, and one at age sixteen. Both fundamentally
altered my personality, my abilities, my strengths, and my
weaknesses.
Before age sixteen, I was decent at math (although
I hated it with a passion), but I could not understand
programming to save my life. I much preferred the natural
sciences, and had intended to go into medicine.
Then, at the end of my sophomore year of high school, I fell
down a staircase in our house and hit my head on the bannister.
I suffered a "grade three" traumatic brain injury, going from
college-level reading and a straight 4.0 GPA to failing pre-K
level material. It took four years of hard work to regain my
abilities and graduate high school. I soon discovered that my
proficiency in the natural sciences was gone. Chemistry and
biology were now a struggle. Even today, I deal with
some lingering deficits from the head injury.
Yet, somewhere in the midst of my recovery, I found that I
loved math...and it loved me back. Algebra and pre-calculus
just made sense. A desire to make educational
software led me to try programming again, and this time it stuck.
I learned three different languages in the course of a year.
Programming was like breathing! I had discovered that, since the
head injury, I had gained the ability to visualize in
six dimensions (yes, seriously), and to work out complex
problems in my mind.
In mid-2018, it struck me: because of the brain
injuries, I have practically regenerated twice!
My core identify has never changed, but how that
expresses itself in my personality and abilities has.
...and then I saw this, which said everything I felt during
those first few years after the second head injury:
The Doctor█
My name, Jason, means "healer," something which I
have always known was also my life's calling. Yet when I
was younger, I was quite I wanted to be a doctor,
specifically a "pediatric trauma surgeon," as the six-year-old
me would enthusiastically lisp.
The second head injury ended that dream. While I recovered much
of my academic ability, I never regained the natural proficiency
for biology that I'd once had. Math and computer science
gradually took its place in my life.
My identifying with "The Doctor" was an ironic twist to
my story. I wasn't a physician, but I was still a doctor of
sorts: a communicator, a healer of hearts and minds, an
enigma solver. I rediscovered my lifelong passion for
teaching, something else I had in common with the character of
The Doctor. I wanted people's lives to be better for
encountering me.
And yes, that also meant I was, at times, a warrior. You cannot
really claim to care about justice if you won't stand up against
injustice. You cannot really be compassionate unless you're also
willing to stand to protect those who need protecting.
The Doctor doesn't fight with weapons — neither do I — but
rather with words, ideas, and at times, good old-fashioned
psychology.
So yes, I'm eccentric. Outright weird, even. I'm passionate,
definitely (though don't mistake that for "nice"). I may
sometimes lose you in my flights of intellectual wandering,
although I swear I'll come back down soon enough. I am most
certainly a madman with a box...or at least a typewriter.
But at the end of the day, I'm just a traveler, helping where
I can, putting things right again.
