Hello lovey humans,

Some people can tell you exactly where they were in March of 2020. But Jenny can't. She has no memory of that time. That is the month her life started. This is her story.

Shattered Life

Jenny was one of the first Covid patients in Minnesota. At the worst of her illness, her fever spiked to 106. She was immediately admitted to hospital. By day eight she was starting to feel better. This was the peak of the pandemic when hospitals were stretched thin and lots of new staff. It was her nurse's first day of interning. When she walked into Jenny's room for what was supposed to be a routine discharge, she found her face down on the cold floor. Jenny had already been there for about two hours.

Her first memory of her life is being lifted off that floor by people in full protective gear. Garbled voices behind the masks. Wide eyes behind plastic screens. One voice asking about her shattered teeth. "I didn't know that I didn't know who I was." He memory had been completely erased by the severe head trauma of the fall.

Nobody at the hospital mentioned her lost memory, because she didn’t know to tell them. In hindsight, Jenny realizes that this is the conundrum of memory loss. How do you know what you don't know? So they discharged her. Her phone showed where the car was parked. The key fob beeped and told her which one. Her address was printed on her mail. How could she drive but not remember where she lived? How could she use a phone but not remember who it belonged to? Amnesia has more questions than answers.

She sat on the floor with their photo albums, trying to will the memories back. She found photos of three kids she knew were hers and couldn’t remember. The harder she tried to remember, the more her body resisted. Even speaking was taxing on her fragile brain. Several times she pushed too hard and passed out or seized. Apparently, memory loss is not something that can be fixed with force.

This is how Jenny navigated those first few months. Her memory was gone but her ability to piece it all together was still there. She read the clues and reconstructed her world. She was about to find out that this inherent sleuthing was her superpower.

Human Centered

To start, any cognitive effort was exhausting. Even talking or thinking. But with practice, she could manage fifteen minutes on a screen before blacking out. Unfortunately, it was during the pandemic and all her therapy was on video. So she joined each therapy call with a timer to alert her when her brain would give up. Some lessons were learned the hard way.

As she researched ways to understand her fragile mental framework, Jenny found a lifeline in the form of human-centered design. Human-centered design is a problem-solving approach that puts real people and their needs at the center of developing products, services, and systems. What made this so attractive to Jenny was that instead of starting with external goals, it starts with curiosity. And she had more than her fair share of that.

In design, questions are the keys that pry open stubborn problems. Jenny realized she could be the subject of her own research and be an expert at teaching others to do the same. Constructing experiences from clues was what she was already doing, so why not make it her thing.

What Came Back

The memories never did return but the framework for constructing new experiences became the foundation for her new life. What she built was a strong relationship with her family, based on what mattered rather than on her own inherited stories. She found that her Sherlock Holmes instincts for collecting clues were never forgotten and very valuable in the world we live in.

What started as a trickle of insights has become a wave that put Jenny on a new course. She secured a state grant, completed a Johns Hopkins Applied AI program, and launched a consultancy that combines the thinking models of human-centered design with the new AI tools.

She jokes, "I haven't found my way back to small talk, but I can hold my own in any conversation about designing meaningful experiences." She sees her adventures with amnesia as a rare gift. Jenny's experience is a constant reminder to be present and to decide who she is going to be in every moment. Something we can all learn from.

Why We Love Jenny's Second Harvest

Most of us are running an identity assembled from family, culture, or the last podcast we listened to. Jenny has no choice but to ask what makes sense for her in this moment. If you've read the domestic propaganda essays or been to our retreats, you'll recognize this theme: we are not our stories. We rarely take a moment to audit our identities and decide what should stay and what needs to go. You don’t need a head injury for this. You just have to choose to begin.

You can find Jenny at whiterockroad.org and on LinkedIn. She also co-hosts the podcast, The Missing Manual, with Julia Levy.

More stories like this soon. Until then, take care of each other.

-Richard & Devon.