kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dyscalculia and the dog on my back Recently I was writing an endorsement for a friend's new jewelry book. My friend was writing a beginner's how-to manual, and she had a specific agenda in mind when she had me review it for her--we share some of the same spectrum of learning disabilities. Mine is dyscalculia, which is a form of dyslexia. Dyscalculia interferes with your ability to do mathmatics, to picture anything from a diagram into 3-d, screws with your ability to read a map and know your left hand from your right. My friend figured if her instructions could get through my scrambled brain, then she'd done well. If you want to read more of the spectrum of difficulties this can cause, there are some good descriptors here She did, indeed, create something I could "get". If you have an interest in making wire jewelry, I suggest that you acquire her book--This is one of the few books that made sense to me. But I digress. Shortly after my endorsement of the book went up, someone from one of my discussion groups wrote to me. They were in tears, because they were fairly sure that this was the dog that had been riding their back forEVER, and they had never heard of such a thing. And my god, it zapped me straight back to when I was twenty-two. Now, I do NOT want to give the impression that I "suffer" or "struggle" with this learning disability in every way every day--it's more like the background noise of my life. Without even realizing it, I had acquired a vast number of coping mechanisms that are now fairly automatic--but I remember--OH how I remember--the first time I ever heard of dyscalculia and the utter relief that I was not stupid or crazy and the world was not in a conspiracy to keep me dumb. But I was the "lazy kid" in math. Night after night I would sit at the kitchen table, struggling with problems. At the beginning of every school year I would promise myself that I would "be good" this year and do okay with math. Finally in high school, after one disastrous asshole of an algebra teacher, I gave up on math forever. Yes, I have a calculator now. And there were whole hosts of little things that nobody seemed to have problems with but me--following directions, reading maps, reading diagrams....driving to strange places and then trying to get home (it looked DIFFERENT coming back! Reversing directions was like pulling my brain out my ear) and I wondered, vaguely, what the hell was wrong with me until one day when I was 22 and realized that I was actually reading numbers out of order. Not carelessly screwing them up, but I was actually SEEING them that way. Shortly after that, someone mentioned dyscalculia being the math-related version of dyslexia, and a monster weight lifted off me. I had a name for what kept happening to me. Further inquiries into dyscalculia confirmed that a number of things that I was just plain "not good at" were actually core symptoms. Of course, by now I was an adult and could avoid a great deal of the things that caused me discomfort--no one was standing over me at the kitchen table anymore--but suddenly it made sense. Knowing that I wasn't just dumb or crazy opened out the world. Knowing that I had a "thing" that I couldn't just outgrow or work through gave me the impetus to work around it--to find new ways of learning, and new ways of understanding, and new ways of explaining to my students. Frustration is heavy. I think I lost a thousand pounds in the course of reading one lousy symptom list. So when this person wrote to me, I remembered all of this. And when they mentioned some specific terrors-- driving being one of them--I thought about my own relationship with driving. Because if you're dyscalculic, it can be goddamn terrifying. I used to get actual panic attacks at the thought of getting lost right from the git-go. It is all to possible for someone with the perceptual difficulties that I do to get lost, and get loster trying to go home.... For local stuff, I had to drive it over lots of times until it was familiar. I had to pick out one small thing at each part of the route to tell me I was on the right track. For instance, I would look really hard at a funky tree on one corner, and the next street had that Catholic school, and then if I turned towards the house with the pink shutters, at the end of THAT street, I could find the place I was going to. I also tried not to put time pressure on myself for anything--I would explore when I knew I had the time to get screwed up and turn around if I had to. But I might even write down the steps--tree, catholic school, pink shutters turn, end of street...and concentrate on one of those at a time. I would say to myself "The only job I have right now is to look for the tree" Then, once I passed the tree, I would say "Okay, now the only thing I'm looking for is the school". I would keep the list on the passenger seat right beside me. I also called them lists---if I even called them "directions", I would panic because I "knew I couldn't follow directions!" I would look at maps (no matter how long it took me) and figure out the straightest-line route to where I was going, even if it were longer, because then I could at least be sure of getting there. I still don't ever take someone else's shortcut unless it's totally visible to me. I rarely if ever take verbal directions to get somewhere. In that respect, Yahoo maps and Mapquest.com were an absolute godsend. They give you turn-by-turn, exit-by-exit directions. And better yet, you can also get a set of directions BACK. Because it looks totally different coming from the other way.... Using that kind of method, I can actually go pretty well anywhere I want now, including highway driving, which scared the snot out of me for years. I still don't like to drive in heavy traffic--and it's AWFUL when I don't know the area and have to deal with heavy traffic--but if I'm just thinking about watching the other cars and that ONE THING that I have to get to next, I usually do okay. The Darling Husband does Boston duty, however. I used to make excuses for not driving out of "my area" for years. I mean, some of them were legitimate--I had really crappy beater cars that broke down all the time, so not leaving the "towing zone" of the city made a lot of sense. But I hated, hated, hated trying to find somewhere I didn't know without extensive lists of how to get there. When we started to do more jewelry shows at towns further away, though, the Darling Husband did all the driving at first. I would print the directions from Mapquest, and then I would tell him where to turn and which exits to take...And telling him to turn often involved hand motions. It was just like my "list method"--I could check turns off with a pen as we passed them, but I didn't have to think about driving while I did it. When I was driving, and dividing my attention, everything came up TOO FAST--I couldn't make the signs sink into my head AND think about driving AND maybe hold a conversation. Something had to give. As time went on, and I learned the highways a little better, I did more of the driving, still with that checking-off-the list method, with the Darling Husband navigating for me. I would say to him "What are we looking for next?" and he'd say "The next turn is at Exit 38." I used to watch every exit like a hawk, even if I KNEW I was at Exit 54 and we still had twenty-some exits to count down--now I can say to myself--look for an exit with a three in it, and then you really have to pay attention. Now, this spring, in two weeks I'm going to be doing a show in one location and the Darling Husband is going to be doing a show in another, and I have to drive 2.5 hours by myself to a town I don't know. I never, never would have considered this even two years ago. It's still something that makes me nervous, but not incapacitatingly so. The other part of driving is trusting what I call my "muscle-memory" more. One of the things I found was that you can learn certain things "physically". It's like turning on your stove--for people like me, for the first month you have a new stove, you have to read each dial, then figure out which way to turn it on to heat your teakettle, and so forth. But after a month of making tea, you know which knob to reach for, at least most of the time, without thinking about it. Or like touch-typing-- If I think about how to spell each word, forget it. Meep snorfle glurg. I've learned to drive using my muscle memory. Instead of thinking "I have to turn on the left blinker for this left turn", I think something like "need to go THAT way, put blinker on for that side." Instead of thinking left pedal brake, right pedal gas, I think "put my foot here to go, here to stop". My dad was the most patient person in the world teaching me how to drive, and I suspect he may have some of this himself. The thing is, though, once your "muscle memory" kicks in--it may take a while, but it almost always does, as long as you don't THINK about it too much, you do the right thing automatically. You may still screw up occasionally--rev the engine while it's in neutral, or whatever--but those mistakes are NOT the end of the world. Now that's terribly long, so if you've reached this far, dear NonScheduled Reader, my congratulations. But part of the reason for spelling all of this out is so that you have some sense of what every single day is like for someone with dyscalculia. I've always had HUGE trouble doing what I call "holding things in my head". It's like having a shot glass full of marbles. Only so many fit in. And when you hit capacity, if you need to shove another marble in there, another one WILL come popping out. Which is part of why following directions is so hard--I can hold maybe one, two steps in my head at a time, and then if I try to think about the third step, or an overview of the project, I get lost where I am and panic, or get frustrated and quit. I really had to learn it was okay to a couple of steps, let my brain rest a bit, and then go on from there. (No jokes about losing my marbles, please!) But the biggest component, I sometimes think, of ANY learning disability--is shame. It's better now for people than it ever was--they're getting better at diagnosis all the time in the schools--but for people of my generation and older, there is an overwhelming shame attached to these things that you just plain can't do. You don't want to make a fuss, it's embarrassing that you just don't get it, and chances are you've been punished for it in many ways, little and big. Most of us were not diagnosed until later, if at all. And the overwhelming sense of HALLELUJAH! when you finally, finally have a name for it is like nothing else on earth. To finish an hour-long drive to a concert venue or a show is exhausting. And exhilarating. I've looked on the web and elsewhere to see if there are many practical guides-to-living for the dyslexic and dyscalculic--unfortunately, most of the material is geared towards diagnosing and treating children. But there are bits and pieces, and once you understand, as a dyscalculic, that you need things broken down one step at a time--and broken down in step-levels that most folks don't need or want--that finding a way to work around is just as legitimate as finding a way to work through-- --there is a way. Instead of a brick wall. So I wrote a little paragraph for my friend's book, and someone wrote to me, and I hope that person finds some of what I said useful, and finds their own way around. On one other occasion I mentioned it on a discussion forum, and someone else went "wow! that's me!". And I thought, if mentioning it casually in two different places has made some small difference for two people, even if it's only "Oh, so THAT's what that was about"... time to write an entry. So if you're reading through this, dear NonScheduledReader, and think "wow, that sounds difficult, can't imagine it being like that", well, you're not the NonScheduledReader I was writing it for. If you are reading this and following the links and thinking "oh, my GOD, that's ME!" and you're feeling a thousand pounds lighter and calling the library and bouncing in your chair-- I wrote this for you, and I just want you to know: There is ALWAYS a way around. And if you can't read them...make your own goddamn map. 5:35 p.m. - 2003-04-10 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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