This is Mark Ormrod, a triple amputee trying to deadlift 105 Kg. As you can see, he fails at the beginning and he succeeds only after a struggle with the barbell and the gravity acceleration. His struggle is painful even to watch and yet this is a powerful accomplishment of Mark’s will.

But the real reason why I want to share this video is that this is a perfect allegory of the struggle that I do every day to perform cognitive tasks. I fail most of the times and yet I’ve never given up. I’ve spent most of the last 20 years in this struggle. You can’t see the amputations in my brain, and there is no way to record the fight that happens all inside my skull. I have to make one hundred times the effort of an average person, to obtain one hundred times less. This can be really discouraging, it has in fact been devastating, considering also how competitive I was (and I still am). 

At present, there isn’t an explanation for these amputations of the brain, there isn’t even a way to clearly measure them. And of course, there is no prosthetics. Nothing beside pure, brutal will.