What do you include in your personal narrative?

"Author | Hacker | Speaker | Time Lord." That's been my tagline for almost two years now. It summarizes all the essentials.

And that last part is the most important.

"Time Lord" has allowed me to broach the single most defining characteristic of my adult life: I am a traumatic brain injury survivor.

To help explain what this means, I have to tell the whole story:

At age 16, I fell down a staircase, hit my head on the banister, and went from being a solid 4.0 high school sophomore at college level reading, to failing pre-K material. I had to rebuild all my academic, social, and emotional skills. Before that, I'd wanted to be a doctor, but this detour ended those dreams: I all but completely lost my natural flair for natural science.

However, it opened up a new pathway: I gained my abilities in coding, math, and problem solving because of the brain injury! Based on the circumstances, I determined I'm a minor traumatic savant. Within a year of the injury, I discovered that I could inherently understand mathematics and logic in a way I couldn't before. I could think in six dimensions (dead serious) and visualize complex algorithms. At age 18, I created a scoring algorithm that allowed calculating more realistic grades when fewer questions were involved (7 out of 10 is practically better than 70 out of 100). Not only did the algorithm work flawlessly; I still use it today; but two mathematics MAs were unable to work out the proofs for the algorithm, despite verifying that it absolutely worked.

This "glitch" left over from the head injury is what enabled me to become a programmer, IT, and project manager. But, although it enables me to do some amazing things, it still affects my memory and my ability to communicate clearly; something it will likely do for the rest of my life. I have to fight for both every single day!

That's what Time Lord means! If anyone is even remotely familiar with Doctor Who...the personality of the doctor is literally me in a nutshell.

• I have my moments of brilliance, but because I think from binary up, I can sometimes over-engineer a solution. The upshot of this is, my code is performant and memory safe more often than not! My ideas either work spectacularly or fail spectacularly.

• I don't think like most people. I can visualize multiple timelines, switch logic systems at will, think in six dimensions, and generally grok all things "wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey". But whether I can explain any of this to those around me really depends on the day.

• I sometimes struggle to communicate with others, especially verbally. That's why communication is such a passion for me: because I have to work at it, I seek to understand and master as much of it as I can. Like the Doctor, when I'm not adventuring, I'm a teacher...in any form or capacity needed.

• My TBIs (I had my first at age 2) both fundamentally changed my personality, habits, likes, and dislikes. But it's still me in here! I've literally "regenerated" twice.

All of that wraps into two little words: Time Lord. From there, I can expound as needed into whichever components are relevant to the conversation.

And yes, that is half the reason I wear bow ties. (The other half of the reason is because bow ties really are cool.) When I get asked about my fashion choice, it gives me a platform to tell a little of my story.

As a public speaker, that lets me share one other inspiring point with my audience: no matter what challenges you face, you can turn them into your superpower.

I always go with honesty. I'd tell them:

I come from a small island in the caribbean ocean. Didn't know what to study and the fourth year of studying something called systems engineering I found in love with database design. I understood how software solves and can help with businesses problems.

Also all I know currently is because I decided to learn it on my own time. I found some books about HTML, CSS and JavaScript, read them and feel in love with web development. Doing it since then :)

Fun fact: when in high school I didn't like and used to skip computer classes 😆

Sort of :)

When I interview people, I like to be more specific than that. All my social skill tells me that that's a terrible ice breaker, so why would it be any better in interviews than at a party? The question I tend to ask therefore is: What have you been doing recently and can you give me some examples of that?

Similarly with the open ended question I tend to just start off in reverse chronological order what I've done. Starting out with the biggest current thing I'm working on and then gradually working myself backwards. After 3 or 4 sentences it's also ok to ask more info about the job description so that you can better tell examples of how you've been doing something similar in the past.

Constant traveller, future dog and cat parent.