Thank you, MP Hanley. It's really good to be here with you.
I'm going to make a quick reference to my speech here, where I noted that we have brain injuries including stroke and people recovering from and living with the long-term impacts of stroke, electrical injury, concussion and survivors of severe TBI from car accidents and things like that. It's such a wide range of injuries.
In the beginning, we had caregivers and everybody attending but then quickly realized that to have both parties attending at the same time was actually not in service of the best interests of everybody. We realized it would be best to separate the parties to have caregiver supports as well as people living with impacts of brain injury themselves, first-hand.
It could be anything. I referenced this moment of lying on the floor because people had been sent my way to talk about their experiences with brain injury, and they had asked me about mine, and we were just so in need of the connection that comes from and is deeply impacted by these conversations with each other. We would share stories, and there was this understanding across the room without having to say almost anything, regardless of the type of brain injury, of this one string of universal experience that we could all understand without having to name it. To have that space to be together was so powerful. I realized that even if sometimes I was still not well enough to show up in the way I might have wanted to, to be there in any way and promote showing up exactly how we are was a really important way to lead. Someone said, “Be the cleanest dirty shirt”, so there I was just trying to be the cleanest dirty shirt to hold that space.