- Lewis Bartelle
- Apr 6
Updated: May 2
Finding Your Voice in a World Built for Texters
Hey everyone, Lewis here.
I want to talk about something that a lot of us are quietly dealing with every single day — and dealing with alone, because it does not come up in therapy and nobody put it in the discharge folder and the people around us have no idea it is even happening.
I want to talk about trying to communicate in a digital world when your body and your brain are working against every tool that world offers you.
Because here is the reality that most people outside of this community do not see: many of us — stroke survivors living with dysarthria, ataxia, double vision, cognitive fatigue, and all the other daily companions of the unseen 80% — are fighting just to stay connected. Fighting to reach the people we love. Fighting to participate in conversations that the rest of the world has effortlessly moved into digital spaces where our specific challenges follow us in new and creative ways.
The phone call is hard because of the dysarthria. The text is hard because of the ataxia and the double vision and the cognitive load. The voice to text turns our words into something unrecognizable on a bad speech day. The autocorrect rewrites our sentences into nonsense. And underneath all of it the crushing fatigue sits waiting — ready to arrive by the third corrected typo and your frustrated, ready to end the whole thing before anything ever gets sent.
I call this Digital Dysarthria. And I want every survivor who has ever deleted a message they spent ten minutes trying to compose to know — you are not alone in this. Not even close.
This Is the Reality Many of Us Are Living
I want to paint a real picture here. Not a clinical description — a real account of what a single text message can actually cost a survivor navigating these challenges simultaneously.
You think of something you want to say to someone you love. A simple message. Something that in a previous life would have taken ten seconds to fire off without a second thought.
You pick up the phone. Your hand is not entirely steady — ataxia has its own schedule and today it showed up early. The screen is slightly doubled — your eyes working to reconcile two overlapping images into one coherent target.
Your thumb goes for the T. It hits the Y. You correct it. Your thumb goes for the H. It hits the G. You correct it. Autocorrect helpfully rewrites the word you just fixed into something you never intended. You correct that. By the time the first word is right your working memory — already carrying more load than it was designed to carry after the stroke — has lost track of the second word. You pause to reconstruct the sentence. The effort of that reconstruction costs something. You can feel the fatigue beginning to arrive at the edges of your focus.
You try voice to text. Today is not a good speech day. The words come out slower and more slurred than usual and the phone hears something completely different from what you said. What appeared on the screen is not a message — it is a collection of random words that share no relationship with your original thought.
You correct it manually. Third typo. Fourth. The fatigue is no longer at the edges. It is in the room. Your focus is narrowing. The message that started as a simple connection attempt has become an endurance event and you are running out of the energy required to finish it.
You delete the whole thing. Put the phone down. The person you were trying to reach never knows you tried.
That invisible attempt — that silent, exhausting, completely unseen effort that ended in a deleted message and a connection that never happened — is happening all around us every single day. In living rooms and hospital rooms and rehab centers and at kitchen tables across the country. Stroke survivors trying and failing and trying again and sometimes succeeding and sometimes not, in a digital world that was not built with any of this in mind.
This is what Digital Dysarthria actually looks like from the inside.
The Voice to Text Trap
Let me talk specifically about voice to text because I think a lot of us arrived at it with real hope — the idea that if the keyboard is the problem then speaking the message is the solution — and discovered a more complicated reality.
On a good speech day voice to text is genuinely useful. It removes the fine motor barrier and the double vision challenge and lets the message get composed at something approaching a normal pace. On those days I am grateful for it.
On a bad speech day — and bad speech days are real and they are not on a predictable schedule — voice to text becomes what I call the double edged sword.
The dysarthria that is already making verbal communication harder makes voice recognition less accurate simultaneously. The slurring that increases on difficult days is exactly the condition that voice to text technology handles worst. So on the days when you most need the alternative to the keyboard — when your hands are least cooperative and your fatigue is highest and the manual typing option is most difficult — voice to text is also at its least reliable.
What I said: “Are you free this afternoon? I wanted to check in with you.”
What appeared: “Are you free this after known? I wand it to check inn with ewe.”
What gets sent when you are too tired to correct it: something the person on the other end reads with genuine confusion.
What happens next: a misunderstanding that requires its own energy to resolve. Energy you do not have.
The tool designed to help us sometimes creates more work than the problem it was solving. And that is not a complaint — it is a reality that deserves to be named honestly so survivors stop feeling like they are doing something wrong when it happens to them.
You are not doing something wrong. The technology has not caught up with what we need from it yet. Keep going anyway.
The Mood Interpretation Problem
Now I want to talk about the layer of Digital Dysarthria that goes beyond the physical challenge — because even on the days when a message actually gets composed and sent successfully there is still a fundamental problem waiting on the other end.
Text has no tone....
When I speak — even with dysarthria, even on the hard days — the words carry context. Warmth. Humor. Concern. The pause before something important. The laugh that signals I am not being serious. The softness that signals I am. All of that travels alongside the words and tells the listener how to receive them.
Text strips all of that away. What remains is words on a white screen divorced from every piece of context that makes them mean what I intended.
And here is what that produces in daily life for those of us who are already fighting to communicate:
The message written with genuine affection reads as distant.
The joke that was obvious in my head lands as an insult.
The simple checking in message reads as passive aggressive depending on the mood of the person receiving it.
The I’m fine that was genuinely meant becomes an enigma that the other person spends energy trying to decode.
They fill in the blanks with their own current emotional state. Which has nothing to do with mine. And suddenly a simple attempt to connect has created a tension that neither of us wanted and both of us now have to spend energy addressing.
For survivors who are already spending significant energy just getting words from brain to screen — this additional layer of managing how the stripped-down digital version of our communication gets interpreted is genuinely exhausting. And it is largely invisible to the people around us because they only see the message. They do not see what it cost to send it or how far it traveled from the original intention by the time it arrived.
How Many of Us Are Actually Navigating This
I want to take a moment here and just acknowledge the full picture of what the dysarthria community is up against in terms of daily communication — because I think when you lay it all out honestly it becomes clear why so many of us go quiet rather than keep fighting the tools.
Some of us cannot use the phone at all on bad days. The combination of dysarthria making speech unclear and the anxiety of real time look misunderstanding makes the phone call feel impossible. So we text. And then the ataxia makes the keyboard a battle. So we try voice to text. And then the dysarthria makes the voice recognition unreliable. And then we try to manually correct the mess and the fatigue ends the attempt.
Some of us have developed our own workarounds — imperfect, creative, hard won solutions born entirely from necessity because nobody handed us a communication guide that accounted for the specific combination of challenges we are navigating.
Short messages to conserve energy. Emoji as context carriers when words run out. Voice notes on the days speech cooperates. Letting typos stand rather than spending the energy to correct every one. Calling instead of texting on good speech days even when the text would have been easier. Asking trusted people to be patient and ask for clarification rather than assume.
These are the adaptations of a community that refuses to go silent even when every tool available makes noise. And that refusal — that stubborn, exhausting, daily insistence on staying connected in spite of everything — is one of the most Gladiator level things I have ever witnessed.
What Actually Helps — Real Tools for Real People
Here is the practical side. Not theory — things that actually work for people navigating this daily.
Give yourself the Gladiator Note first.
Before anything else. A message sent with typos is still a message sent. A voice note that sounds slurred is still a voice note sent. A response that took you twenty minutes to compose is still a response sent. The connection happened. The imperfection is evidence of the effort not a reason to judge the result. Say this to yourself every single time before you hit send on something hard won.
Find your best communication window.
Most survivors have times of day when the fatigue is lower, the focus is sharper, and the communication tools cooperate more reliably. Identify yours. Save the important messages, the complex conversations, the ones that matter most for those windows. Do not spend your best communication energy on low stakes messages and then have nothing left for the ones that count.
Build a short phrase library.
On the phones that allow it — and most do — build a library of frequently used short phrases that can be inserted with minimal typing. The responses you send most often. The check in messages. The I am having a hard day messages. Having those ready to go removes a significant portion of the physical and cognitive load from the most common communication moments.
Tell your people directly.
The single most effective tool available to the Digital Dysarthria survivor is an educated communication partner. Tell the people who text with you regularly exactly what is happening on your end. Not as an apology — as an education. My thumbs have their own ideas. Autocorrect rewrites my sentences sometimes. Voice to text produces word salad on my bad speech days. If something reads strangely please ask rather than assume. Most people — given this information — will become significantly better communication partners immediately.
Use video when it matters.
For the conversations that carry real emotional weight — the important check ins, the things that need to be felt not just read — video call is worth the effort. Keep your hands visible. Use your gestures. Let your face carry the context that text cannot. The dysarthria is present on the video call too but so is everything else — the warmth, the humor, the you that the text message cannot fully convey. I love these!
Let the imperfect message stand sometimes.
Not always. But sometimes. The typo that changes nothing essential about the meaning. The autocorrect substitution that is close enough. The message that took twelve minutes to compose and is not perfect but is real and true and came from you. Let it stand. Send it. The person who loves you will receive it in the spirit it was sent — especially if they know what sending it actually costs you.
To the People Receiving Our Messages
This section is for the family members, friends, and colleagues who text with stroke survivors — and I am asking you to read it carefully because it matters.
What arrives on your screen is the end result of a process you cannot see.
The fine motor battle with the keyboard. The double vision making every letter a target. The voice to text attempt that failed and had to be corrected manually. The fatigue that arrived mid-composition and almost ended the attempt entirely. The three previous drafts that got deleted before this one made it through.
What you received is the message that survived all of that. And it deserves to be received with that understanding.
Do not be the silent nod in digital form. Do not read a message that seems off and say nothing. Ask. A simple — I want to make sure I understood you, can you help me with the tone here? — prevents more misunderstandings than almost anything else and costs you almost nothing.
Do not assume withdrawal is disinterest. If someone who used to text you regularly has gone quieter — reach out. Not with pressure. With an open door. Sometimes the silence is not a choice. It is Digital Dysarthria winning a round.
And when you receive a message with typos, strange autocorrect, or a tone that does not quite make sense — extend the benefit of the doubt immediately and generously. The effort that message represents is almost certainly more than you know.
Your Voice Still Reaches
The challenges of Digital Dysarthria are real. The deleted messages are real. The word salad is real. The mood interpretation disasters are real. The exhaustion of fighting every communication tool simultaneously just to stay connected to the people you love is real and it is significant and it deserves to be named and acknowledged and never minimized.
And your voice still reaches.
Through the typos. Through the autocorrect chaos. Through the stripped-down tone-free medium of a text that cost twenty minutes of effort to send. Through the imperfect voice note on the hard speech day. Through the emoji that carried the warmth the words could not. Through every imperfect, hard won, Gladiator-level attempt to stay connected in a world that was not built with you specifically in mind.
Your voice reaches. Keep sending it.
Come find us in the Beyond The Shatter community on Facebook — a room full of people who understand exactly what Digital Dysarthria costs because they are paying it too. Every day. And if you are ready to let your story reach further than any text message ever could — the Army of Warriors program at BeyondtheShatter.com gives you a dedicated page, a shareable link, and a certified voice that carries. Always free. Always yours.
A message sent with typos is still a message sent.
Never let perfectionism steal your connection.
— Lewis
- Lewis Bartelle
- Mar 26
Updated: Apr 2
Embracing Your New Reality
Hey everyone, Lewis here.
I want to talk about the part of stroke recovery that happens not in the physical therapy room but deep inside your head and your heart. The part that does not show up on a progress chart or get celebrated at a follow up appointment. The part that is invisible to almost everyone around you — and yet shapes every single day of this journey more than almost anything else.
The emotional life after a stroke is a turbulent ride. Non-stop, intense, unpredictable — and completely normal.
I know that might not feel reassuring right now. But I mean it. Every overwhelming feeling you are carrying, every moment where the emotions seem completely out of proportion to what just happened in the room — your brain and your heart are doing exactly what they are supposed to do when something enormous happens to you. They are processing. They are trying to make sense of an event that fundamentally shattered your world.
The problem is nobody gave you a map for this part of the journey. Nobody sat down with you before discharge and said — here is what the emotional road looks like, here are the stops you are going to make, here is why you cannot skip any of them.
That is what this article is. Consider it your map.
The Stops on the Ride
These are the emotional stops I made on my own ride — and that most survivors make on theirs. They do not always happen in this exact order and they do not always announce themselves clearly. But they are coming. And knowing what they are makes them survivable.
Shock and Denial
This cannot be happening to me.
This is your brain’s necessary shield — protecting itself from the full magnitude of what just occurred.
On October 7th 2012 I went from planning a Sunday morning pancake breakfast with my daughters to waking up in a hospital six weeks later with an eight inch scar on my skull and a body that would not cooperate with a single thing I asked it to do. The shock of that is not something the mind processes all at once. It cannot. So it protects you — wraps you in a layer of disbelief that gives you breathing room while the reality slowly becomes real.
That shield is necessary. But it is temporary. You cannot stay in denial forever because denial burns energy you need for recovery. At some point you have to face the truth of where you are — and that facing, as hard as it is, is where the real work begins.
Anger and Frustration
Why me? Why is this so hard? This is not fair.
This anger is real and it is valid. It is often directed at yourself, your body, the stroke, the universe, or the sheer injustice of a situation you did not choose and did not deserve. It is exhausting. It can come out sideways at people who do not deserve it. And it can make you feel like you are losing control of yourself on top of everything else you are already dealing with.
But here is what I want you to understand about this anger: it is powerful. It is fuel. The key is acknowledging it without letting it consume you — and eventually learning to redirect it. That energy that wants to rage at what the stroke took from you? That is the same energy that gets channeled into the Hustle. Into the grinding daily work of building new neural pathways. Into becoming the Gladiator.
The anger is not your enemy. Unexamined and unmanaged anger is. There is a difference.
Deep Sadness and Loneliness
This is where the grief hits. Full, heavy, unavoidable grief.
You are mourning the life you had. The career you built. The abilities you took for granted. The future you planned. The version of yourself you spent years becoming. All of it looks different now and some of it is genuinely gone — and the sadness of that is not self pity. It is the honest, human response to a real and significant loss.
The isolation that comes with this stage can feel crushing even when you are surrounded by people who love you. Because they cannot fully feel what you are feeling. They have not lost what you have lost. And that gap — between being loved and being truly understood — is one of the loneliest places on this entire journey.
This is exactly why community matters so much. Why finding people who have walked this path — who nod when you describe something you thought was only happening to you — changes everything. Come find us in the Beyond The Shatter community on Facebook. You should not be sitting in this particular kind of loneliness alone.
You Cannot Skip These Stops
I want to say this as directly and as lovingly as I can.
You cannot bury these feelings and expect to move past them. Trying to perform gratitude over unprocessed grief does not make you stronger — it makes you stuck.
The emotions you refuse to feel do not disappear. They go underground. And underground they become the anchor that weighs down every effort you make toward forward movement.
This is what therapists call trauma processing — the work of making sense of a traumatic event and integrating it into your story rather than being controlled by it. You do not have to be in a therapy room to do this work. But you do have to be honest. You have to let yourself feel what is actually there.
Name it. Own it. Move through it.
That is not weakness. That is the bravest, most therapeutically sound thing you can do on this road. And it is the foundation on which everything else — the goals, the hustle, the progress — gets built.
Why Acceptance Is Not a Destination
The word acceptance gets used a lot in stroke recovery — and almost always gets misunderstood.
I used to think acceptance meant throwing my hands up and saying — oh well, I guess this is my life now. That felt like surrender. Like giving the stroke the last word. I wanted no part of it.
But that is not what acceptance is.
Acceptance is not passive. It is not resignation. It is not giving up.
Acceptance is the most active thing you can do.
It is the courageous, daily choice to look at your reality exactly as it is today — the limitations, the struggles, the unexpected challenges — and say clearly: okay. This is where I am. Now how do I move forward from here?
It is trading the draining, exhausting energy of fighting against your reality for the powerful, focused energy of building within it. It is stopping the war with what is — so you can start winning the fight for what can be.
Acceptance is not a destination you arrive at once and never revisit. It is a practice. Some days it comes easily. Some days you have to choose it deliberately, multiple times, before noon. That is completely normal. What matters is that you keep choosing it.
Moving Forward — Three Things That Actually Help
So how do you manage the turbulent ride and start building your new normal? Here is what worked for me and what I share with every survivor I sit with through the Army of Warriors program:
1. Acknowledge and name the emotion.
Do not just feel angry — say it out loud. I am angry that I cannot do this simple task right now. Name it specifically. Naming an emotion does something real in the brain — it activates the prefrontal cortex and reduces the intensity of the feeling. It gives you a handle on something that felt uncontrollable. This is trauma processing in its simplest form and it works.
2. Give it a time limit.
If you are having a sad day — and you will have them — give the sadness its time. Tell yourself you can sit in it until 4pm. Then when 4pm comes, redirect that energy into one small deliberate action. Drink a glass of water. Make one movement. Send one text to someone who gets it. This is not about suppressing the emotion. It is about choosing when you are done being driven by it. That reclaiming of choice — even a small one — matters enormously.
3. Focus on right now.
The only thing you can truly control is your effort in this moment. Not where you will be in a year. Not whether you will ever fully recover. Not what you lost or what might still be ahead. Just — what is the next rep. The next step. The next word. Living in the now is not spiritual advice. It is a practical strategy for keeping the future from crushing you before you have had a chance to build it.
You Are Not Broken
I want to close with something I need you to really hear.
You are not broken. You are recalibrating. There is a profound difference between those two things and it matters more than I can fully express in a single article.
A broken thing cannot be fixed. A recalibrating thing is in the process of finding its new alignment. Your brain is rewiring. Your heart is processing. Your spirit is doing the hard, slow, unglamorous work of integrating something enormous into a life that is still worth living — and will be more than worth living on the other side of this.
Every emotion you feel on this ride is part of that process. Every hard day is the work happening. Every moment you choose to name it and own it and keep moving anyway — that is you building something the stroke cannot touch.
God put something in you that is stronger than what tried to take you out. I have seen it in myself over thirteen plus years and I see it in every survivor who walks through the doors of this community.
If you need the complete roadmap for the emotional and practical journey of stroke recovery — Beyond Shattered is on Amazon and it was written for exactly where you are right now. Every chapter was built for the person who needed a guide and could not find one.
You are strong enough for this ride. I promise.
— Lewis
- Lewis Bartelle
- Mar 25
Updated: May 2
Get Out of Your Own Way
Hey friends, Lewis here
I want to say something today that comes from a place of complete love and zero judgment — because I have been on both sides of this conversation and I know exactly how it feels.
Some of us are playing the stroke card. And it is time to talk about it.
Some of us are playing the stroke card. And it is time to talk about it.
Some of us are playing the stroke card. And it is time to talk about it.
Now before I go any further let me be clear about something. I am here for every single survivor on this journey. The ones who are grinding every day and the ones who are struggling to find the motivation to start. I have nothing but love and respect for anyone who is still in this fight — because just surviving a stroke and waking up every morning to face what comes after it takes a kind of courage most people will never be asked to find.
But I would not be doing my job — and I would not be your friend — if I did not say this out loud:
Some of us are using our stroke as a reason to stop trying. And that is the one thing I cannot get behind.
The Stroke Card — What It Actually Looks Like
The stroke card is not always dramatic. It does not always look like someone throwing their hands up and declaring they are done. Most of the time it is quieter than that. It sounds like this:
I can’t do that because of my stroke.
That’s too hard for me so I won’t even try.
Poor me. What’s the point.
It is the slow, gradual surrender to the idea that your limitations are permanent. That the ceiling you can see right now is the ceiling that there is permanently . That trying = falling/failing and that = DONT TRY. And once that thinking takes root and you stop challenging it — it becomes your reality. Not because it is true. Because you told yourself it was true often enough that your brain stopped looking for another way.
Here is a quote I love and carry with me: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t — you are right.” That is not just motivation poster language. That is neuroscience. What you tell yourself shapes your narrative. Your narrative shapes your effort. Your effort shapes your outcome. It starts in the mind every single time.
I See You — And I Want More For You
I want to be honest about something personal here.
It is harder for me to watch a survivor give little to no effort on their recovery than almost anything else on this journey. Not because I am judging them — but because I know what is possible on the other side of deciding to push. I know what the brain is capable of when you give it the consistent, effortful stimulus it needs to rebuild. I know what happens when you get out of your own way.
And I know what gets left on the table when you don’t.
I spent six weeks in a coma. Nine months in inpatient rehab. Three and a half years in a wheelchair. I shuffled ten agonizing feet in a pink gait belt with my daughters waiting at the end of the hall. There were days — plenty of them — when my body was screaming at me to stop and my mind wanted to agree.
But here is what I kept coming back to: how bad do you want this?
Because that question — answered honestly — is where everything begins.
The Warrior Scale — Which Level Are You At?
I believe Warriors operate on a scale of one to ten. And every single survivor reading this is already a Warrior — just by showing up, just by still being in this fight, just by getting out of bed and facing another day of this incredibly hard new normal. That baseline is real and it matters and DO NOT let anyone take it from you.
But there is a difference between surviving the arena and owning it.
Think about what it actually takes just to function on a daily basis with stroke limitations. The energy required to put on a smile and act like everything is fine while you are managing fatigue, double vision, dysarthria, ataxia… and everything else living in the unseen 80%. That is warrior level work and most people around you have no idea it is even happening.
So the question is not whether you are a Warrior. You already are.
The question is — are you going to stay at a level one or two because the stroke card is easier to play? Or are you going to dig into what is actually in you and find out how far up that scale you can go?
That is where Warriors become Gladiators.
A Gladiator does not just endure the arena. They master it. They are defined not by the stroke that brought them there but by the ferocity of the comeback. The blood, sweat, and tears it takes to rise up and — pardon my language — seriously kick that stroke’s ass. To look at the life you have now and refuse to let this be the whole story.
Get Out of Your Own Way
Here is the truth about limitations that took me years to fully understand.
Some limitations are real and they deserve to be honored and accommodated. Owning your disability — naming it, understanding it, working with it — is part of the journey and I talk about that throughout The Word. Pain is just weakness leaving the body, and there is a difference between the productive discomfort of pushing your limits and ignoring genuine signals from your body.
But a lot of what we call limitations are actually just untested assumptions. Things we decided were impossible before we tried. Ceilings we built in our own minds and then stopped looking up at.
The brain does not stop building new pathways because you hit a hard day. It stops building them when you stop giving it the stimulus to work with. Neuroplasticity is always available to you — but only you can activate it.
Consistency is the currency of recovery and you are the one holding the wallet.
So try. And fail. And try again and fail less. And try again and stumble. And try again and own it.
That chain — that persistent refusal to let the stroke have the last word — is what progress is made of. Not the dramatic breakthroughs. The quiet, daily, stubborn decision to try one more time.
I go deep on this in Beyond Shattered — the full mindset framework, the tools, and the honest account of what choosing ownership over victimhood actually looks like across years of recovery. If you need the complete roadmap it is on Amazon and it was built for exactly this moment.
The Choice Is Yours
I want to close with this because I mean every word of it.
I love you. All of you — the ones who are grinding and the ones who are stuck and the ones who are somewhere in between on any given day. This journey is hard in ways most people will never understand and you deserve grace and patience and a community that has your back.
And — you deserve someone who believes in you enough to tell you the truth.
The stroke card is a trap. It feels like protection but it is a ceiling. And you were not built for ceilings.
Get out of your own way. Put your mind to it. Do the work. Show the stroke who is boss.
How bad do you want this?
Because I promise you — the answer to that question, chosen deliberately and acted on consistently — changes everything.
Come find us in the Beyond The Shatter community on Facebook where survivors who are choosing to push show up for each other every single day.
And if you are ready to let your comeback story inspire someone else who is right where you were — the Army of Warriors program at BeyondtheShatter.com is waiting for you. Always free. Always yours.
— Lewis
