- Lewis Bartelle
- May 10
THE POWER OF NAMING YOUR DISABILITY
Hey everyone, Lewis here — and I want to ask you something before we even get started.
When someone asks what’s wrong with your speech, what do you say?
Do you wave it off? Say “I had a stroke” and leave it there, hoping they stop asking? Maybe you mumble something about a medical thing and change the subject as fast as you can? I did all of that. For a long time, I was fluent in vague. I had a whole vocabulary built around not quite saying it — and I didn’t even realize it was costing me something every single time.
Then one day, I just said it plain.
I have dysarthria. I have ataxia. I have double vision.
And something shifted.
What Happens When You Name It
There is a thing that happens in the space between knowing something and saying it out loud. Knowing it keeps it inside you, where it can grow and mutate and take up way more room than it deserves. Saying it out loud — clearly, without apology, without a lowered voice — that does something different. It makes the thing real, yes. But it also makes you real in relation to it.
I stopped being a guy with “some speech stuff from the stroke.” I became a man with dysarthria — which is a neurological motor speech disorder, by the way, not a personality quirk, not nervousness, not something a glass of water fixes. I became a man with ataxia — which is why my hands do what they do, why my balance works the way it works, why some days are harder than others for reasons that have a name now. I became a man with double vision — which is why certain environments light me up like a pinball machine from the inside.
Naming those things didn’t defeat me. It freed me.
Here’s what I think is actually happening when we refuse to name our disabilities: we’re trying to protect ourselves from the weight of other people’s reactions. If I say it, they might look at me differently. If I say it, it becomes more real. If I say it, I’m admitting something.
But here’s what I know after 14 years on this road: the shame doesn’t live in the word. The shame lives in the silence around it. Every time you dance around your diagnosis, you’re sending yourself a message — this is too big, too ugly, too much to say plainly. And you deserve better than that message.
And let me tell you what was happening during all those years of vague vocabulary — I was apologizing. Constantly. Every conversation where my speech drew a look, a pause, a confused expression — sorry about that, I had a stroke, sorry, I know it’s hard to understand, sorry. Over and over. Like my voice was an inconvenience I was inflicting on people.
That went on for a while. And then one day I just decided to stop.
I decided to stop apologizing for something I have no control over. This is dysarthria. I live with it now. There is nothing anyone can do about it — it is what it is. It goes on the list with ataxia and double vision and post-stroke fatigue and everything else in that Unseen 80%. It has a name. It belongs to me. And I will not waste one more breath apologizing for it.
That was the shift. Not some big dramatic moment — just a quiet decision that enough was enough. The apologies were gone and something that felt a lot like dignity walked in to take their place.
Name it. Take the power back.
Own It — Name It — Move Through It
This is something I talk about a lot in the Army of Warriors community, and it applies here as directly as anywhere: you cannot move through something you won’t look at.
This isn’t just motivational talk — there’s real psychology behind it. When we acknowledge a stressor clearly and specifically, we activate the problem-solving parts of our brain instead of the threat-avoidance parts. Vague fear spreads. Named challenges get managed. The moment dysarthria became a word I said out loud, it stopped being this formless thing following me around and started being a condition I could research, explain to others, advocate around, and yes — even laugh about when the moment called for it.
Watch out, I talk funny: Dysarthria. That line is in my book. I put it there on purpose. Not because it’s a punchline — because it’s mine. I named it. I own it. It doesn’t own me.
The Unseen 80% — all those invisible symptoms that nobody sees when they look at you from across the room — gets heavier when you carry it unnamed. Post-stroke fatigue doesn’t look like anything from the outside. Neither does the cognitive fog, the word-finding delays, the sensory overload, the emotional dysregulation that catches you sideways on a random Tuesday. But when you name them, to yourself and to the people who need to understand — something lightens. Not because the symptoms change. Because you change in relation to them.
Warrior to Gladiator is exactly this. A Warrior survives. A Gladiator claims the arena. You can’t claim ground you’re pretending isn’t there.
The Picture on the Wall
There’s another piece of this I want to talk about — and it might be the most practical thing in this whole article.
Take a picture. Or find one from the beginning.
I am absolutely serious. One of the most powerful motivational tools available to any survivor costs you nothing and requires zero equipment beyond the phone already in your pocket. Go find the earliest image you have from your recovery — day one in the hospital, first week in rehab, first time back home. Wherever your starting line was. Look at that person.
Now look at where you are today.
That distance is real. That distance is yours. And on the days when recovery feels like it’s going nowhere, when The Long Middle has stretched so far you can’t see either end of it — that picture is proof. Not proof that you’re fixed. Proof that you are moving. Proof that the work is working even when you can’t feel it working.
I have a picture on the wall at Methodist Hospital now. I go back there with Stroke INSPIRE and I walk those halls that I once couldn’t walk, and I talk — with my dysarthria voice, out loud, unapologetically — to people who were where I was. That picture, that distance, that proof — it matters more than any pep talk I could give.
Your Victory Journal is built on this same idea. Every S.T.E.P.S. you log, every day you show up and write something down — that’s you building a record of distance covered. Month one versus month six. Page one versus page sixty. That’s not just journaling. That’s evidence. That’s the case you’re building against every voice that says nothing is changing.
Document the journey. Look back often. That’s the fuel.
A Declaration, Not a Defeat
I want to be clear about what owning your diagnosis is not.
It is not giving up. It is not reducing yourself to a label. It is not resigning yourself to a ceiling.
When I say I have dysarthria, I am not saying dysarthria is all I am. I am saying: this is part of my real life, I am not ashamed of it, and I am equipped to deal with it. There is a world of difference between I am broken and here is exactly what I am working with. One of those sentences has nowhere to go. The other one is a starting line.
The worst day of your life became the first day of the strongest version of yourself. That sentence only makes sense if you’re willing to look at what that day actually handed you — by name, out loud, in the light.
Name it. Own it. Move through it.
That’s the hustle.
That’s all I’ve got for today, Warriors — and I genuinely hope something in here landed for you. If you’ve been doing the vague dance around your own diagnosis, I want you to try something this week. Just say it. To yourself in the mirror if nobody else. Out loud. By name. See what it feels like on the other side of that sentence.
Then come tell us about it. The Beyond The Shatter Facebook community is exactly the place for that conversation — find us there and bring your whole honest story. And if you’re ready to go deeper on the identity and recovery work, the Army of Warriors program at BeyondtheShatter.com is waiting for you — always free, always yours.
The complete roadmap — every piece of this, start to finish — lives in Beyond Shattered on Amazon. If you’re navigating this without a guide, that book was written for you.
See you out there.
— Lewis
- Lewis Bartelle
- Apr 19
Updated: May 2
Finding What the Stroke Moved, Not Took
Hey everyone, Lewis here.
I want to talk about the moment that stopped me cold somewhere in the middle of my recovery.
I was sitting at my puzzle table — the same one where the occupational therapy sessions had first introduced me to what would become the central metaphor of everything I have built since — and I was staring at a gap. A section of the puzzle where several pieces clearly belonged together but none of the pieces in front of me seemed to fit. I had tried every piece within reach.
Nothing worked.
And for a moment the thought crept in that maybe those pieces were simply gone. Lost under the furniture somewhere. Missing from the box before it was ever opened. Just — absent. With no replacement coming.
I almost moved on and left the gap there.
Then I looked in the corner of the table where I had pushed aside a small pile of pieces I had already sorted through and dismissed. And there they were. Right where I had left them. Not missing at all — just waiting in a place I had stopped looking.
That moment taught me something about stroke recovery that I have never forgotten.
Most of what feels missing has not disappeared. It has moved. And the difference between those two things is everything.
The Inventory of Loss
Before I go further I want to acknowledge something honestly — because this article only works if we are telling the truth about the full picture.
Some pieces are genuinely different after a stroke. Some capabilities have been altered in ways that are real and permanent. My cerebellum sustained damage that affects my balance, my coordination, and my speech every single day thirteen plus years later.
The career I spent eleven years building ended on October 7th 2012 and did not come back in the same form. The physical ease I moved through the world with — the running, the wrenching on cars, the rapid fire conversation — those pieces look different now than they did before.
I am not going to tell you that everything comes back if you just believe hard enough. That is not honest and it is not useful and you deserve better than that from me.
What I am going to tell you is this: the gap between what the stroke took and what feels missing is often much larger than reality. We tend to look at the altered pieces and the genuinely changed capabilities and then — in the exhaustion and grief of early recovery — we start labeling everything we cannot immediately see as gone. Permanently absent. Not coming back.
And that labeling, done too quickly and too broadly, closes doors that are still very much open.
What the Stroke Moved
Here is my own story. And I am sharing it not because it is dramatic but because it is specific — and specific is what makes this real.
Before my stroke I was building a custom lowrider. This was not a hobby. This was a passion that went back to my earliest days in the car audio business, that ran through eleven years of building some of the most head turning rides on the road, that was woven into my identity as completely as anything I have ever done. The truck in my garage was an expression of who I was — the craftsmanship, the precision, the pride of building something remarkable with your own hands. I would call it “my rolling resume”.
The stroke took that.
Not the love of it — the ability to execute it in that specific form. The fine motor demands. The physical requirements. The version of me that could spend a weekend under a hood without my hands shaking or my balance failing or my vision doubling at the wrong moment. I eventually had to sell the truck. And for a long time that felt like one of the most significant missing pieces of my entire recovery. A gap in the puzzle I did not know how to fill.
Then I discovered high end Lego car kits.
Intricate. Precise. Technically demanding in exactly the ways that stroke recovery was asking me to rebuild — fine motor coordination, focus, sequencing, problem solving, the executive function of following complex instructions step by step. My occupational therapist would have assigned it as therapy. For me it was passion. My love of building, of cars, of the deep satisfaction of something complex coming together piece by piece under my hands.
The piece was not missing. It had moved. From a full scale custom lowrider to a three thousand eight hundred piece Lego Technic set. Different form. Same soul. And building those kits — every click of a piece into place, every section completed, every time I looked at what my hands had made — was the puzzle piece of who I am clicking back into its spot.
That is what I mean when I say the stroke moved things rather than took them.
The Three Types of Pieces
In my experience there are three kinds of pieces in the post stroke puzzle and learning to tell them apart changes everything about how you approach the assembly.
The pieces that came back.
These are the capabilities, the relationships, the aspects of your identity that the stroke disrupted but did not permanently alter. They feel gone in the early stages — sometimes for months, sometimes for years — but with consistent effort, neuroplasticity, and time they return. Not always in exactly the same form but recognizably yours. The word that finally came out clear. The step taken without assistance. The conversation held without losing the thread. These pieces were never gone. They were in the corner. And the work of recovery is largely the work of finding them and placing them back where they belong.
The pieces that changed shape.
These are the ones that require the most creativity and the most patience. The capability that will not return in its original form but whose essence — the passion underneath, the identity it represented, the need it fulfilled — is still completely present and waiting to find a new expression.
My lowrider became Lego kits. A surgeon whose hands can no longer operate might become a medical educator whose knowledge saves lives in a completely different way.
A runner whose stride has permanently changed might discover that the discipline and the solitude and the physical challenge of running were always what mattered — and find them again in a different movement. These pieces did not disappear. They are waiting for you to stop looking for their original shape and start looking for what they were always really about.
The pieces that are genuinely different.
These deserve honesty and they deserve to be honored. Some things changed permanently on October 7th 2012 and they are not coming back in the original form no matter how hard I work or how long I wait. And part of the work of building this new puzzle is making peace with those pieces — not in a defeated way, not in a giving up way, but in the clear eyed way of a builder who looks at the pieces available and says: okay. This is what I am working with. Now what can I build?
Honoring real limitations is not the same as accepting the Permanent Ceiling Trap. One is wisdom. The other is surrender. The difference is whether you have actually tested the limit — consistently, specifically, over time — or whether you decided it was permanent before you truly found out.
How to Find What Moved
So how do you actually look for the pieces that seem missing? Here is what I have learned works:
Stop looking for the original shape.
This is the hardest one. When we look for missing pieces we tend to look for exactly what was there before — the same form, the same function, the same feel. But if the piece has moved it has almost certainly changed shape. You will not find it by looking for the original. You find it by asking a different question:
what did that piece actually give me? Not what did I do — but what did it mean. What need did it fulfill. What part of who I am did it express.
Answer that question honestly and you start to see the new shape the piece might be taking.
Look in the corners you dismissed.
Early in recovery when everything is overwhelming and the energy for searching is limited, we sort pieces quickly and move on. We make fast judgments about what fits and what does not. And sometimes in that speed we push pieces aside that we have not actually given a fair look.
Go back. Look again. With fresh eyes, more time, more information about who you are becoming. The piece you dismissed six months ago might be exactly what the puzzle needs right now.
Pay attention to what lights you up.
Passion is a GPS signal. The things that still make your eyes light up — even in their current limited form, even if you cannot fully access them yet — are pointing you toward the pieces that moved. Follow that signal. It knows where things went even when you do not.
Give it time.
Some pieces do not reveal themselves on your timeline. I did not discover the Lego car kits immediately. It took time, experimentation, and a willingness to try things that felt like pale substitutes before I found the thing that was actually a genuine replacement. Be patient with the search. The pieces are there. Not all of them reveal themselves at once.
The Gap Is Not the End of the Picture
I want to close with something I need you to hear if you are sitting in front of your puzzle right now looking at a gap that feels permanent.
A gap is not the end of the picture.
Some of the most beautiful mosaics in the world have deliberate spaces in them — not because the artist ran out of material but because the space itself is part of the design. What you lost, what changed, what looks different now — those spaces are part of your picture too. They are evidence of what you survived. They are the cracks where, as someone once said, the light gets in.
The puzzle you are building now is not supposed to look like the original. It is supposed to look like what you built after the original shattered — and that picture has something in it that the original never could have had. Resilience woven into every piece. Intentionality in every placement. The deep, hard won beauty of something assembled piece by piece by someone who had every reason to leave the pieces on the floor and chose instead to keep building.
Keep looking in the corners. Keep asking what the pieces were really about. Keep building with what you have while staying open to discovering what else is there.
The missing pieces are not as missing as they feel.
And the picture you are building — I promise you — is worth finishing.
If you want the complete framework for this process — the full roadmap for rebuilding life after stroke piece by piece — Beyond Shattered is on Amazon and it was written for exactly this moment. Every chapter is a stage of the assembly and the puzzle metaphor runs through all of it.
And when you are ready to share the picture you are building — when the story of what you found in the corners of your own recovery is ready to become a light for someone else — the Army of Warriors program at BeyondtheShatter.com is waiting. Always free. Always yours.
Keep building.
— Lewis
- Lewis Bartelle
- Apr 12
Updated: May 2
Navigating Stroke Recovery Without a Roadmap
Hey everyone, Lewis here.
I want to tell you about a puzzle.
Not a metaphor yet — an actual puzzle. One thousand pieces. Dumped out of the box onto a table in my occupational therapy room during the early months of my recovery. My hands were shaking. My vision was doubling. My fingers, which had once installed custom car audio systems with precision and confidence, could barely pick up a single piece without dropping it.
My therapist suggested it as fine motor work. What it became was something I never expected.
It became the most honest picture of what stroke recovery actually feels like that I have ever found. And it became the foundation of everything I have built since — the book, the platform, the community, every article on The Word. All of it grew from the lessons of that puzzle on that table in that therapy room.
Here is the first lesson — and the one I want to talk about today.
The box had no instructions.
The Box Arrives With No Instructions
When a stroke hits, here is what you get: a diagnosis, a team of professionals doing their absolute best with the time and resources they have, a period of intensive care that feels both overwhelming and strangely structured, and then — discharge day.
And on discharge day, someone hands you a folder.
Maybe it has some printed sheets about medication schedules. Maybe some general information about follow up appointments. Maybe a phone number or two. And then the door closes behind you and you are standing in the parking lot — or being wheeled to a car, or riding home in an ambulance — and the full weight of what just happened settles in.
You have been handed a thousand piece puzzle with no picture on the box and no instructions inside. Every piece is unfamiliar. Nothing looks the way it used to. You have no idea where to start. And the people who were just surrounding you with expertise and equipment and round the clock monitoring have sent you home to figure out the rest on your own.
I remember that feeling. Not just the physical disorientation of nine months in inpatient rehab followed by the transition home — but the deeper, more unsettling disorientation of realizing that nobody had actually told me how to do this. Nobody had sat down and mapped the road. Nobody had explained what the next chapter looked like or how long it would take or what I should be doing on a Tuesday afternoon when the therapist was not there and progress felt invisible and the pieces on the table looked exactly the same as they did the day before.
I was not doing it wrong. There were simply no instructions included.
And here is what I want you to know right now, wherever you are in this journey: that is not a flaw in your recovery. That is the reality of this experience. And understanding it — really understanding that the absence of a clear roadmap is not your fault and not a sign that you are lost beyond finding — it’s the first step toward building your own.
What the Puzzle Looked Like Before
Let me back up for a moment and talk about the puzzle before the stroke.
Your life before — like mine — was a finished picture. Every piece in its place. A complete, coherent image built over years of effort, experience, and choice. For me that picture included eleven years building a career I was genuinely proud of. A top installer/store manager with a custom lowrider in the garage. Daughters I could chase around the yard. Words that came out of my mouth rapid fire and clear without a second thought.
Then suddenly the pieces are everywhere. Some land face up and you can still recognize fragments of the original image. Some land face down and you have no idea what they are anymore. Some roll under the furniture and you cannot find them at all — and you spend months wondering if they are gone forever before you finally discover them waiting quietly in a corner you had not thought to look.
And you stand at the table looking at the chaos and you think — how do I even begin?
The Pieces That Seem Missing
Now I want to address something that I know is sitting in the back of your mind right now because it sat in the back of mine for years.
Some pieces seem to be missing entirely.
The ability to do something you used to do with ease. The career path that got interrupted. The physical capability that has not come back the way you hoped. The version of yourself that could walk into a room and communicate without effort. These feel like missing pieces — gaps in the puzzle where something important used to be and now there is just empty space.
I want to offer you something I discovered over thirteen plus years that genuinely changed how I see this.
Most of what feels missing has not disappeared. It has moved.
My dream before the stroke was finishing my custom lowrider I had been building. The stroke put a stop to that — the fine motor work, the physical demands, the version of me that could spend a weekend under a car were all significantly altered. For a long time that felt like a missing piece with no replacement coming.
Then I discovered high end Lego car kits. Three thousand eight hundred pieces of intricate, precise, technically demanding assembly that requires exactly the kind of focus, coordination, and problem solving that stroke recovery was asking me to rebuild. My occupational therapist would have loved it. My love of building — of cars, of craft, of the satisfaction of something complex coming together piece by piece — was not missing. It had just moved to a different corner of the puzzle.
That is what I want you to look for. Not the piece in the exact form it used to take. But the thing it represented — the passion, the identity, the capability underneath — showing up in a form you have not recognized yet because you are still looking for the original shape.
The missing pieces are often just waiting. In a corner you have not searched yet.
Building Without Instructions — Where to Start
So if there are no instructions in the box, where do you actually begin?
Here is what I have learned works. Not theory — lived experience across thirteen plus years of assembling this puzzle one piece at a time.
Start with the corner pieces.
Every puzzle builder knows you find the corners first. They are your anchor points — the stable foundation that gives the whole assembly structure. In stroke recovery those corner pieces are your Cornerstones: Faith, Love, Family, and Friends. The people and beliefs that bear the weight of your trauma with you. You cannot build on a shaky table, and you cannot assemble a life without stable anchor points to work from. Find your Cornerstones first. Everything else gets built outward from them.
Sort before you build.
You do not grab random pieces and start jamming them together hoping something fits. You sort. You look honestly at what you are working with — the physical realities, the emotional landscape, the changed capabilities, the remaining strengths. This is the inventory of loss we talk about in this series. Not dwelling in it — but being honest about what the pieces actually are before you start trying to place them.
Set SMART goals for each piece.
Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Not get better — but walk twenty feet with my cane by Friday. Not improve my speech — but practice my articulation for ten minutes before I call my grandkids on Saturday. Each piece placed is a SMART goal completed. Each SMART goal completed is the puzzle growing. That is the entire framework in one sentence.
Accept that some pieces take time.
The interior pieces of any puzzle — the ones without obvious edges or distinctive colors — take the longest to place. They require patience, repeated attempts, and the willingness to pick up the same piece multiple times before it finally reveals where it belongs. That is not failure. That is the process. Consistency is the currency of recovery and the interior pieces are where most of it gets spent.
Visualize the finished picture.
Not the original one — the new one. Close your eyes and see yourself functioning in the life you are building. Moving, speaking, connecting, contributing. That mental picture is not wishful thinking. It is a neurological tool — visualization activates the same motor pathways as physical action and keeps the brain oriented toward the possibility of progress even on the days when the physical work feels impossible.
You Are Already Building It
Here is the thing about the puzzle that I want to leave you with.
You are already building it. Right now. Every therapy session, every repeated attempt, every day you get out of bed and face this journey again — you are placing pieces. Some days you place ten. Some days you place one. Some days you pick up the same piece fifteen times and put it back down because it still will not fit and you are too tired to keep trying.
Every single one of those days counts. Every single attempt is part of the assembly. The puzzle does not stop being built on the hard days. It just builds more slowly. And slow is still forward.
I could not have told you on October 7th 2012 what the finished picture would look like. I could not have imagined the book, the platform, the community, the hospital visits, the warriors I would sit with and the stories I would hear. I could not have seen any of it from that table covered in scattered pieces.
But I kept picking them up. One at a time, on the days when I had the energy, and one more time on the days when I did not. And the picture kept growing.
Yours will too.
If you need a complete guide to this process — every stage of the assembly laid out in a framework built from lived experience — Beyond Shattered is on Amazon and it was written for the person standing at the table with no instructions and no idea where to start. That is exactly who it was built for.
And when you are ready to share the picture you are building — when you are ready to let your story become a light for someone else standing at their own table — the Army of Warriors program at BeyondtheShatter.com is waiting. Always free. Always yours.
The box had no instructions. But you have something better.
You have thirteen plus years of someone who figured it out the hard way, handing you everything they learned.
Pick up a piece. Let’s build.
— Lewis
