My Beautiful Broken Brain

As a survivor of multiple strokes including a major hemorrhagic stroke in 1999 just 13 days after my 37th Birthday and a massive hemorrhagic stroke 2011 just before Christmas I can relate to the lady in this film, I went through and I am still going through a lot of what she had experienced from her stroke. I found this movie very good at explaining what we as stroke survivors are going through. I would highly recommend this movie to people who are interested stroke experiences and want to understand what we are going through because it is truly hard for us to explain to others what it is like to live life with our beautiful broken brains.

This film is an amazing and positive glimpse into the area of brain dysfunction. Although it is specific to a stroke, I found the symptoms very similar to those I suffered with Lyme and a separate incident of oxygen loss. I recommend it to anyone who knows someone with Alzheimers, Lyme, stroke or any brain disabling illness. The subject of the film is young, intelligent, beautiful and most importantly positive as she struggles to find her way through the situation she's in, pockmarked with the fear and loss of herself and her future from her disability. It's her positive traits and the telling of this as a human story, not a medical document that makes this a revealing glimpse into this world.

It must have take some bravery from Lotje Sodderland to make this documentary, or better to be the guinea pig for this documentary about her brain after she suffered a hemorrhagic stroke. It must not have been easy to do that as she must have thousands of other more important things to do, learning basic things that we take for granted from scratch again. The documentary is well made, with some emotional passages that make you think it could happen to all of us. In one second your life could take a complete turn so we should enjoy every moment we have here. That's the lesson I learned after watching My Beautiful Broken Brain.

It seems people who have had experience with strokes or other brain injuries are the first to be weighing in about this film. I thought it was an excellent, commendably honest look at the confusion and frustration which are common components of the injured brain. (In my case, I experienced a fractured skull with subdural hematoma when I was just entering my teen years. It took a full year of therapy for me to fully recover.) I was spared aphasia, yet I experienced hemi-paralysis and remember vividly the cognitive distortions and unreal-seeming surprises that occurred, much as they to do the brave Lotje in the film.

All in all, I thought this was an outstanding film, and wish nothing but the very best for the brave young lady who documented her experience.

A trip through a lost mind trying to find oneself, would be David Lynch also a lost mind, I just know that his films make me look lost, definitely, the documentary is beautiful and makes us realize that we can lose everything from one hour to the next, without explanation , without reason... Exciting...