My fellow obsessives: I’m not asking that you stop trying to improve. Or that you not try to be better. Or even that you don’t keep a vigilant eye on your faults and defects with an eye to minimizing them.
I wouldn’t dare.
But I’m going to ask you to set aside the flagellum just a second, let the stripes on your back heal a little and consider this: What if it isn’t your fault?
No, I’m serious here. Hear me out.
What if that thing that bedevils you, that you seemingly can’t get over is organic? Something you can’t just use will power to pull yourself out of?
Not saying that you shouldn’t still fight it, but perhaps you need to assume there’s something physical/physiological causing it and you’re going to have to give yourself grace and work around it, instead of keeping hitting your head against the glass like a heat-dazed fly.
See, my assistant — hi Holly — is face blind. During a conversation yesterday, she said it was a great relief to find out she was face blind. As in there was a reason she couldn’t remember anyone’s face, and therefore couldn’t recognize people. And it wasn’t just that she was evil or just didn’t care enough.
Now if you’re me, you’re scratching your head going “How can not remembering faces mean you’re evil and don’t care enough?” But I can almost see how one would get there. Sort of. Through a glass, darkly.
You see, it never occurred to me when I was face blind: from birth till about 40, when I fell and hit my head so hard it rewired a lot of things. I just thought I was an alien, and it was very important that the people around me not find out. No, I’m serious. This was the central assumption of my childhood, because people around me seemed to do/think/be able to accomplish things that to me were utterly opaque. So, I must be an alien, and I’d best be very quiet about it, so they didn’t realize it.
I had tricks to get around it. One of them was to memorize the clothes someone was wearing before we left the house. (I still do it, out of habit.) Which is why I almost went away with a completely different woman from the cemetery on All Saints Day when I was 6. Everyone was wearing a black dress; she was about mom’s height and had the same hairstyle. More importantly, she was wearing the same perfume. Because until I was 41 or so and the thyroid issues kicked in, I had a nose that would rival a scent dog’s. And so I identified people PRIMARILY by smell.
First thing I noticed, after the concussion is that all of a sudden I could remember actors. I still don’t bother to remember their names — why would I? — but faces are sometimes familiar. And at this point all that remains of the face blindness years is a frantic fear when I’m going to meet someone I’ve only seen pictures of or haven’t seen in a few years that I just won’t recognize them. I do, though, so that’s fine. Also people still don’t have faces in my dreams. Just little clouds. BUT I know who they are, so that’s okay.
BUT the point is, as a kid, I knew I was different, but I didn’t think it was something I’d done. I guess because no one ever figured out how utterly face-blind I was, so they couldn’t blame me for it.
They did however blame me for transposing digits. Which I do unless I’m being very careful about it. Which is why, when wood working, I cut a paper template of the wood piece I need, before I go out and cut the piece. (I buy scratch paper by the truck load, yes) because 243 432 and 324 are really the same number. That is, if I’m trying to transcribe one of those and look away for a minute, I’ll transcribe it wrong.
Now, since I liked math, and was always fairly advanced, imagine my bewilderment when I hit the more complex equations. I completely understood the mechanics of the operations. And I enjoyed it. But the result I got defied description. And teachers and adults told me I was stupid, lazy and just not paying attention.
It was the most frustrating thing. Because I tried very hard to beat myself into not doing the stupid. BUT IT STILL HAPPENED.
The problem started with the fact you had to copy the original problem from the blackboard to the paper. Or the book to the paper. It was very rare for the digits to be in the same order once I copied them.
Look, I understand the adults. In a kid who was smart and did understand the operations, to make that kind of error must mean she was just being a spazz because she didn’t care. Or maybe she was sullenly defying you. Meanwhile there was me, endlessly flogging myself over not being able to do this very SIMPLE thing.
I never had that with directions, because mom was there before me. Directions… How do I explain this. You can tell me “Go North” till you’re blue in the face. I don’t “sense” north. I also don’t know what direction I just walked in from. This is endlessly amusing to the nurses at my labyrinthine doctors’ offices, as I try to walk in the completely wrong direction, barge into the blood lab trying to fine the waiting room, or other ill-advised adventures. Now they know me, the question starts as soon as I leave the exam room. “Where are you trying to go, Sarah?” And then someone points. But as I said, I kind of knew that was a disability, because mom had it, and SHE WAS WORSE THAN I WAS. After 50 years of living in the village, mom could still get lost, if she wasn’t very careful. I’m not that bad. Close, but not that bad. But anyway, the family knew it was a brain glitch and it was inherited, so I used work arounds. I wrote myself lists of directions, because words work for me. (Maps don’t.) The only problem I had with this was that husband, who has a precise and unswerving sense of direction, truly couldn’t understand why I “insisted” on going the wrong way for about 10 years. After ten years, he assumed that I wasn’t actually doing it on purpose. (Sometimes he still slips up and yells things like “learn” while I kind of gape at him in confusion. This is usually when he’s handed me a map and asked which way we should go. I don’t know WHY he does it, since it always ends up with him having to pull into a parking lot to look at the map himself, but I guess hope springs eternal.)
Anyway, it was the greatest and weirdest relief when, at a writing workshop 30 years ago, the lady leading it said “Oh, yeah, I’m digit dyslexic” and explained what it was. And I went “Oh. I’m not stupid and lazy. I have a brain glitch.” After which I watched out for and compensated for it, and I was fine. This was also timely, as both the boys inherited the glitch. But since they know what it is, and were forewarned, they just learned the work arounds. And both did fine.
But I do this with all sorts of things. Most recently with having a weird infection (yes, that’s all it is, diagnosed and horse-pill antibiotics brought home, with an appointment in ten days to check and make sure it’s gone. And yes, it’s apparently sequella to the massive ear infection. (Ain’t this year been a barrel of laughs?))
I’ve been beating myself up for not even keeping up with this blog, much less trying to make any progress on the novels, or even attempting to post on my substack. (Whose subscribers probably think I died!) Because it must be laziness, right?
Um…. No. Apparently it was a very, very, very bad infection, whose side effects meant I was ready to fall asleep at six pm and really didn’t even want to do dishes, much less anything more demanding.
Oh, and the weight problem might not be my fault either. I mean, of course I assumed it was. My weight has trended upwards since I got married, and I have to make immense efforts to avoid being gravity-distorting heavy. At one point I lived on 800 calories a day for years. The weight still crept up.
Turns out in addition to the thyroid deciding not to work, which only kicked in at 40, I have apparently been celiac my whole life. (Short form: apparently what I thought was eczema was celiac rash? WHO KNEW? Not me.) and the inflamation has weight-gaining side effects. (Or to be fair, weight loss. But I’ve said I never lose weight when I’m sick, haven’t I? Only gain.) Which explains why the only time I got thin was when I cut ALL carbs. Like, extreme carb reduction. It wasn’t the carbs. it was the bread. And crackers. (I can take or leave the bread, but I love matzo crackers. Better than cookies.)
So you know, when I kept trying harsher and harsher diet and exercise regimes, and hating myself because they didn’t work, it might have been a wee bit insane. Because it was organic. (Yes, it’s creeping off. VERY slowly. Not aided by the fact the thyroid is being stupid, and…. well, the usual, right. If it’s weird, it’s what I have. Have we considered I might actually have been right as a kid? That I am an alien?) Not something I could power through with will power.
So, other than a long whine about my issues — it really isn’t. Other than the digit transposing and the weight, the rest doesn’t bother me. And at this point those only minorly bother me. Except I’d like not to be so heavy because I like pretty clothes. — what is this all about?
Well, fellow obsessives: I KNOW YOU. I am you. We are kin.
So…. That thing you’ve been punishing yourself for, where you’re doing everything right and it refuses to work? That thing you can’t defeat?
Consider the cause is not merely psychological, not something you can power through by beating yourself harder.
Consider it NOT so that you stop trying, but so that you can try more effectively, with workarounds and compensating for what nature didn’t give you or is trying to keep away.
I know it’s very hard for people like us to remember we’re not just minds, but bodies as well.
The truth is that the body — like the enemy (which it often is) — gets a vote. You can’t just override it.
Stop beating yourself, and try more sneakily.
And — this is very hard — learn to live with what you can’t change.
Note, I’m still working very hard on all of this. This is not so much “do as I do” but “Do as I’m trying to do.”
And honestly, I wish you all the luck in the world. It has to be better than beating yourself endlessly.
According To Hoyt 
I remain pretty sure that I can fix it this time.
There’s a stupid joke that goes “well, you addressed your ‘fellow obsessives’, and I am not obsessive, so it has nothing to do with me”. (I am a little obsessive.)
Anyway, off to stuff.
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It’s not “my fault”.
It’s the fault of “those people” who are “out to get me”. [Very Big Twisted Grin]
More seriously, I’ve gotten the idea that the old “men don’t ask directions” thing comes from the fact that men are more likely to “know where they are and where they are going” than women.
IE “Men don’t ask directions because men can read a map”. [Very Big Crazy Grin]
Note, I’m aware that some women “can read a map” and some men “can’t read a map”. [Wink]
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Sometimes I’m amazed that we have any kind of language or technology. For allegedly being the smartest critters on this planet, we’re not that much farther ahead of the other great apes. We just effectively breed and kill faster.
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Then again, selection pressure and imminent lethal danger have a way of separating the sheep from the goats. Human beings are tinkerers with reality. Absent the plethora of diverse distractions now available to man, the focus on real life problems becomes paramount.
TLDR, stupid survives because of water wings society rules.
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Yeah, but in evolutionary terms, that diversity is a plus. There could be a coming (or past) bottleneck event that selects for stupid. The species does not care if it survives by having enough stupids, only that it survives.
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“Stupid” is incredibly culturally coded.
Dude, do you sweep without a face-mask?
You’re dead of hantavirus, and stupid on top of it. (for an example I didn’t realize wasn’t widely known…and also insanely localized)
Ignorant, stupid, and “different culture” overlap in ways that are very hard to separate.
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Look, at one point I dang near LITERALLY froze to death because the ranch hand didn’t know that “Truck” meant A FREAKING TRUCK, not the tiny little toyota pickup, so he brought the “can fit two motorcycles in the back” vehicle to get 8 humans on horseback.
Because nobody at any point thought to say “hey, here is why you’re doing this.”
It was all assumed.
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Oh, and one of my favorite jokes.
“There’s nothing more terrifying than a Marine 2nd Lieutenant with a map and a compass.”
And it doesn’t matter if they have internal or external genitals.
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I should have read all the comments before posting mine. You beat me to it.
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That’s a joke?
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I remember a study my alma mater did and discovered that, on average, men are good at finding places by direction and maps, and women are much better at finding things by using landmarks. Yes, I emphasize on average because that’s how all these things work. Just because the average woman, or oriental, or tall person, does something doesn’t mean you’re not different from the average. The average woman is worse at math than the average man, but there have been many genius female mathematicians. There are also lots of studies showing that men tend to have a less normal distribution than women when it comes to many things, so there are more male geniuses and more male morons than there are women geniuses and morons.
People are different, and that’s one of the things that makes them interesting, and there’s usually a lot of things we don’t know about ourselves. My father was color blind, and my mother used to just make mild fun of the way he chose to dress. My wife, who had the color sensitivity of an artist, sorted his clothes into things that went together for him, and the problem went away. I have eyes that change color based on what color shirt I’m wearing, and I didn’t know until I was 21 and a girlfriend pointed it out to me. I’m not face blind, but I do have trouble remembering people until I know them well. I also recognize people more by their voice and their gait than by their face.
May the Man Upstairs help us appreciate people for their differences and free us from the tyranny of the average!
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Big categoreis, and small categories of human.
Bigger categories have less thing common, necessarily and in essence. Smaller is closer to being able to accurately say that there is a common factor.
Biological sex is a large category.
There is a feminist claim that Erika Kirk’s complementarianism is ‘pulling up the ladder’, and taking advantage of previous feminist results in allowing her to be successful.
This is actually untrue. It would be a lie unless someone is entirely convinced of the feminist ‘just so’ narrative on what women were allowed to do historically, before feminism.
What Erika Kirk had advantage of was growing up and marrying within a Christian culture, and not the culture of, say, the pagan Greeks.
In Christian cultures, well before feminism, it was pretty routine for a married couple to be in business together, and for one partner to take full control after the death of the other.
The feminist might then be diminishing Erika’s complementarian role in enabling Charlie to do what he did.
The pretense that only the ‘biggest’ and most widely known positions matter is maybe a way of thinking that dehumanizes quite a lot of people.
Biological sex is a big category, and so any way we slice it, we are likely to see significant mental variation.
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Have a friend who cannot tell left from right. For directions, she could use ‘turn toward your side as you are driving’. Eventually quit driving.
Wife used to be frustrated I didn’t know about things between known points. Drive by it for years, never knowing it was there. That was because, unlike the things actually ON the road, the stores and businesses off to the side were not actively trying to kill me, and were best ignored.
And, I like maps – but North better be at the TOP or I Don’t Get It. I would certainly be the 2nd LT with a map, or as in the Judy Collins song ‘with no sense of direction and they send him in the jungle alone!’
My son had a variant (seems to be fixed now) – he’ll want to go someplace by car, and needs to use the freeway. But he never wanted to go to the place on the freeway sign, and didn’t know place-desired was in the same direction as place-on-the-sign.
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Took me until very recently to realize that “lift left finger to see if that makes an L, k, that’s left” wasn’t normal. I kinda attributed it to my family being a little iffy on what they yell vs what they mean, and which hand they shake while yelling “turn right.” (to the point one flat stated “ignore my words, look at my hands.” Which works better if they’re using aviation signals vs waving to the left with their right hand.)
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I also don’t instinctively know my left from my right, but I just pretend I’m about to write and my right hand moves, so that’s how I know.
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I used to do that, before I had a wedding ring to navigate from.
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Took me until very recently to realize that “lift left finger to see if that makes an L, k, that’s left” wasn’t normal
… It isn’t? How do other people teach kids to distinguish between left and right?
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They just KNOW.
Like WEIRDOES.
:snicker:
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Complicating factor, some folks who are “off of direction” are going off of landmarks.
…. mountains. I DON’T KNOW DIRECTIONS WITHOUT MOUNTAINS. Neither does my dad, which oddly helps, although he can still find from point A to B if he’s been to both.
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“Men don’t ask directions because men can read a map”.
Well, unless they’re Second Lieutenants…. ;-)
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XD
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I have face/name integration problems. I can remember faces, I can remember names, but combining the two is a problem. And it’s become worse after all the radiation to the head.
After all the effects of the cure, maybe the cancer wasn’t so bad after all?
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Latest problems? Pretending to be normal too well so they think I’m one of them, forgetting that deadlines are a thing (with calendars, alarms, the whole bit too), forgetting to eat for days at a time, and losing my place in the writing. That last one is the most annoying of late.
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It’s really hard though to retra
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Especially the older one gets. Constant practice in adapting to changing circumstances can help up to a point, though.
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“Maybe it’s not your fault” is going to apply to a lot of things.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thecapitalistmag/p/the-ai-grim-reaper-just-came-for?r=6em1o&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
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I spent last week at a folk school (Dan might recognize it, it’s in Applalachia), where my beloved learned about woodturning and I struggled with Fair Isle knitting. The class was composed of upper-middle class college educated white women – the school is earnest about diversity, equity and inclusion, but the student body this time, as usual, was 99% white with maybe a few Asians, and 60-70% female.
At any rate, one young woman came to class wearing a baseball cap with the following embroidered motto: LUDDITE. You can note the exquisite irony of wearing a factory-made cap almost certainly embroidered by a computer-guided sewing machine, but I wasn’t really amused and said so.
This resulted in a quiet, mutually respectful discussion. I pointed out the inventors who got their homes burned down. She pointed out the female bobbin-lace makers who lost their sole source of income when machine-made lace became a thing. (Of course she’d had a course in Women’s Studies). We would up agreeing that we each had valid points, and neither of us was going to change our minds. But it was a reminder that the last Industrial Revolution had its share of casualties before the benefits took full hold.
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we went through a similar thing in the early ‘90’s. The 91/92 recession was quite mild as those things go, but it was deadly for entire categories of middle managers and other white collar jobs.
number two son is going through hell job hunting because AI has them paralyzed. It’s not actually going to do what they say as it’s the single most over hyped thing in my lifetime, and I’ve seen hype, but they’re all paralyzed over what it might do. IN the meantime, he’s training at options trading and he might end up working for me and, later, himself but I think k he’d prefer not to work for me. Can’t blame him, really but that’s how it goes.
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to steal a line from Bujold, which I also got from my Da: “ you go on, or you go under.”
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The current effects of “AI” are not actually because of AI. They are because of human decisions using AI as an excuse made by people who should not be managing a taco truck. The true positive effects will come later, in much more limited areas, and will be slow to be adopted because the idiots gave AI adoption a bad reputation.
There will be much negative fallout, but it ain’t the AI’s fault. For the moment.
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glad for the quotes round AI ‘cause what we got ain’t AI. I suppose it’ll change things, what it won’t do is give the returns on capital expense that it seems to require.
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Yup. It’s a particularly complex Mad Lib machine at best. Too many people don’t get that, they think it’s some magic genie that will do the work of ten people. Which it will if they’re untreated schizophrenic, but still.
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Something something bubble bubble… Ye globs and leetle beetles, I’m not a money guy and I can see it.
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I think I saw a substack once that explained that it was not a bubble…it was, in fact, three separate bubbles. Oh yeah. No possible way that comes to tears.
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I was thinking over whether integrated circuits were the single weirdest series of developments in engineering history.
There is an argument that agriculture belongs in engineering to a teensy extent. The agricultural developments are definitely significant.
Norbert Weiner in chapter two of ‘The Human Use of Human Beings’ uses economic thinking of his time and place, but also makes a point about how forecasts of improvements in machines may be invalid.
The forecasting relating to AI has a lot of things going on, but one of them is that some of us now think that integrated circuits are normal, and are a good estimator for other technologies.
It absolutely makes sense that the laptop/lanyard people could get machines extremely wrong now, at a time when they have documented themselves getting the ideas about human beings so very wrong.
Whether I or Satya Nudella is closer to correct on neural nets, our errors on machinery are part and parcel of the degrees crowd getting things so very wrong in 2020, and et cetera incidents.
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For those that are not CS or programming bros, in his Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks explicitly makes the argument that ICs are unusual when comparing them to software.
Photolithography is very good, and had a lot of room to improve.
Software has long been limited by things of human scale.
LLMs may be a one off tool, like others mentioned by Brooks, that makes a single generational improvement to programmer productivity.
Nudella is maybe depending on compounding improvements.
The actual consequences may be in whether the tools are used to help pay down technical debt, or to make the technical debt worse.
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What makes it tricky is all the cultural gaslighting that makes it difficult to impossible to sort out what is and isn’t your fault. It’s been driving me to tears for decades now.
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Years ago I read (maybe on slashdot back when it was useful or at least entertaining) of a belt that had a set of modules that could buzz/vibrate (so you felt it, but it didn’t bother anyone nearby) as well as tiny computer and fluxgate magnetometer (I think). The set would activate the NORTH module for a moment everytime you turned. A fellow described how after a short time, it was amazing how much of a sense of direction he “felt” (beyond the literal vibration). And also how suddenly lost he felt when stopped wearing it for a while.
I suppose such things are still around, but I’ve not heard much of anything since that initial article. So was it a flash in the pan, or bunch of…. hooey… or.. something overlooked and underappreciated?
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Also: Moo!
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I can understand this, tend to blame myself for things I really have no control over. Been that way since I was a kid who didn’t really fit in all that well. Got better about as I grew older but it still lingers in the back of my mind.
As to being “face blind”, my problem was always the opposite. I’m great at recognizing faces, I just can’t put a name to them, even when it’s someone I’ve known or dealt with for years. Has to be something that makes their name stick with me or I won’t remember what it was 5 minutes later. Of course, now that I’m much older, I can just blame it on failing memory even though I couldn’t remember names when I was 20 LOL!
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I forget my cousins’ names. Granted, I have a LOT 30 something just in or near my home town when I was a kid . . . and now we got their kids, their kids’ kids etc) New people? ha!
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I also forget people’s names. It is very embarrassing since my own name is memorable and I hate when they remember my name and I don’t remember theirs.
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We may very well be the same species.
I don’t do faces, to the point that I taught myself to draw portraits so that I could memorize what people look like line by line.
I don’t do numbers, they don’t stick in my head. Words stick, I remember everything I read, but numbers are slippery as fish. I’ve worked hard to memorize the important ones.
And whyyyy are doctors’ and dentists’ and opthalmologists’ offices built like rabbit warrens? Opthalmologists’ offices are especially cruel. Let’s take my scrambled sense of direction and also dilate my poor astigmatic eyes – it’ll be fun!
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Normalcy bias seems like an attack when you’re anything but.
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Look, I’m sure I can get it right this time. Something like abnormal bleeding, seasonal allergies, or a damaged limb shouldn’t stop one from making improvements. And if I can just find a bigger stick, I can make my body and mind behave…
…stop laughing.
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Trust me, we’re laughing with you, because Word.
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Sarah, did you write “year infection” on purpose? It was so perfect I had to read it a couple times to make sure I was seeing what I thought.
Time isn’t out of joint, we just have a year infection!
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No. BUT Lord, it’s true.
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We’ve been having recurring ‘year infections’ since 2009. ☹️
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I’ve had a year infection since 2020.
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I am just an asshole, no matter how hard I try not to be, I always come off wrong, So I just accept it.
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Faking non-assholeish mannerisms is possible for brief interactions that do not include terminally stupid people. The only problem is finding sufficient numbers that do not include the latter with which to practice.
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I try to stick to “Never be an asshole first.”
Retaliatory assholery is acceptable, even commendable, depending on circumstances. 😛
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Sometimes, the right asshole in the right place at the right time can save lives/projects/job sites/relationships from the brink. Effective, competent assholery is the underappreciated antihero of grunt level blue collar history.
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“I’m surrounded by Assholes!” – Dark Helmet
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Face-blindness, as a subset of galloping aphantasia, FTW.
“Keep practicing, my colorblind friend, and you’ll be telling red from green in no time!”
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My favorite (in a sense) is “You could be an extrovert if you just tried harder!”
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What if those traits were instinctual rather than learned, clothing/uniform awareness, a survival trait when dealing with multiple armies and soldiers. Face blindness a way to deal with constantly changing soldiers or clerks?
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Traits seem to have been driven the other way – that’s the principle reason for the development of heraldry, though later ‘progress’ made things worse, IMHO.
I’ve read that the Texas flag is the heraldrically correct version of the US flag.
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I just wrote a speech on the Assumption of Normalcy and how horribly wrong it is – but it’s also incredibly helpful. If we had to evaluate everything “from scratch” the cognitive load would be paralyzing.
I’m fine with faces; can’t do names (the memory trick “pick a feature and associate” kind-of works, but cognitive load). I’m fine with reading (not dyslexic), but I don’t retain or really even read names at all (Aragorn was “Argon” until I saw the movies).
I swear you could spin my dad blindfolded in a basement and he could point north. I’m very relative direction (left/right) not absolute (north/south) oriented. I _can_ do directions, but it’s hard. Whenever I use a map, I turn “up” to be “forward”, just like GPS; I love that.
Like JohnS above, I generally don’t notice landmarks. If it’s not moving (and not in front of me), it gets filtered out. I’ve also never understood people who wave at other cars. What are you doing paying that much attention to detail (either car details or worse, looking through the windows)?!? Pay attention to driving. You need to not run into things; you don’t need to analyze them in depth.
On the other hand, what about serial killers, pedophiles, and kleptomaniacs?
On the gripping hand, after having just filled out ridiculous amounts of paperwork and copies of documents to prove I am myself and my husband is both a real person and my husband, I’m firmly of the opinion that anyone committing fraud should be shot out of hand; I don’t care if it’s “your fault”, “your culture”, or “you just felt like it.” On the one hand, I’m glad the private sector is trying to prevent the sort of fraud that is destroying our government. On the other, I lament the loss of our high-trust society.
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It does help to look at the drivers in other cars. Are they paying attention to their driving or their phones? I don’t care who is behind the wheel, I’m trying to determine who, if anyone, is in control of the vehicle.
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I need to fill ridiculous amounts of paperwork to prove I’m me. And the Portuguese ain’t buying it.
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Having had rapidly deteriorating vision in my youth, it was challenging for my mother to keep up with my eyeglass prescriptions. I learned early on to recognize people by gait at a distance, and even now that my vision has more or less stabilized I still use that means. Has occasional benefits, as I can identify people who are behind machinery just by seeing them from the knee down.
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I loved it when it was copy stuff off a paper, because I can put a finger behind each one and copy the numbers one at a time– when someone says three or four numbers and then you need to write it down, that gets jumbled.
If I’m keeping numbers in mind for myself, I can just turn them into words and that works better, especially if I can make it sing-song.
The habits I developed to make it work happen to line up really well with being absolutely sure of the instructions, rather than going off of memory.
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C. S. Lewis was a brilliant man in most respects, but he had digit dyslexia too. He was only able to go to Oxford because, as a war veteran, he was exempt from the normal entrance examination – which included mathematics.
Lewis may have been plain old dyslexic as well. His spelling was atrocious, which is why he had his brother type all his manuscripts for submission.
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Most writers are.
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Have you been riding with hubby and I in the car? Seriously, this describes us to a T. What is hilarious, is I can read a map. But I can’t read a map going down the freeway at 60 (er, 80) MPH, or any road at any speed. More cluttered of roads, the worse it is. Worse when taking that correct exit ramp also means getting into the correct lane to insure getting going in the correct direction. Only a few places in Oregon (I-5 bridges over the Willamette or into downtown Portland). But California? Other locations? Right now? Thank you GPS!!!! FWIW, this hasn’t improved from year 1 to year 47 of our marriage. I guess hubby hopes it will someday.
On the flip side, put me in the wilderness with a map and compass? I do fine. I do better than hubby, and at least one other adult male scoutmaster (former military). Why? I know I can not look around and know where I am, where I need to go. I cannot. So, when the map is consulted, I believe the map. I do not try to make the map conform to what I think is correct. I’ve witnessed in live time, that exactly happening, more than once. They both were doing this. If I hadn’t *asked a leading question, we’d have missed the trail we needed to take off the PCT.
(*) Even knowing I was probably correct. Never, ever, make a declarative statement. Question with “doubt”.
Remembering peoples’ description? Please. I’d make the absolute worse witness, to anything. Co-worker names? Or anyone in any group? I have to write them down. Have them handy. Eventually I’ll start properly remembering. But it always took a while. I always have to write them down. Numbers are the same way. There is a reason why I am so methodical, organized, and make lists. Granted my organization and lists do not make sense to anyone else, but they make sense to me.
The senior assessment test, medicare insists on every year from 65+? “Three words, draw a clock face”, plus general chitchat? “Now what were the three words?” I couldn’t do this at 25, let alone 65. So far my PC and his PA’s have been very accommodating. Can do a clock face easily. Don’t know how the procedures will change with the generation who don’t know what a clock face is.
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Why remember actors’ names? I can think of one reason: to look them up on IMDB (or other sources if you prefer) and find out other movies they’ve been in. Which you would only do if you liked their performance and want to see them performing in other roles, because you enjoy watching them as actors. There are a few actors who fall into that category for me, such as David Tennant. When my wife and I found out that Tennant played Macbeth in a 2025 movie, we said “Ooh, we gotta watch that!”
Do I think his acting talent translates into wisdom in other things? Nope. I neither know nor care about his opinion of Brexit, nor of US politicians or any other hot-button issue. I just enjoy watching his performance on stage. (If you haven’t seen him in Much Ado About Nothing, that one’s well worth the time to seek out and watch).
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Also, to avoid their future works.
“He’s in it? Well, skip that then…”
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I was 57 years old when I was diagnosed with MS which I was told, based on my history, I had been suffering and fighting off with varying degrees of success since I was 23 years old. I was given a list of symptoms and disabilities associated with MS and sent home to look it over.
As I read through the pages of fun things to look forward to as my disease progressed, I started crying. In relief. Suddenly the last 30 years made sense. I WASN’T lazy. It really is hard to function at a reasonable level when you feel like you are swimming in a full length fur coat against a fast moving current.
So now I cut myself a little slack and let each day’s health dictate the activity level and don’t expect too much if I know i am not up to it. It’s very freeing.
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I was told that I should stop expecting that when I meet God in the afterlife, He’s going to scold me for not being hard enough on myself.
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Dear Sarah, you are the only person I’ve ever heard of who had face blindness as bad as my husband’s. (He once described how flattering it was to see a lovely woman smiling at him flirtatiously in the grocery store, only to realize *slightly* too late that it was me, in a new blouse…) He is intrigued by your remedy but not sure that he doesn’t prefer the face blindness. :)
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Of course it’s my fault.
It always is.
I’m bouncy. Anxious. Curious. Energetic. I jump into things with both feet and as near to verticle as possible.
Which frustrated all of my (almost always female) teachers. My parents (after I pushed one button too many trying to figure out What Does This Do?). The few friends I had-and the few that I have now. The very few girlfriends that I had that stayed longer than the second date.
And my peers immediately picked me out as a target. Which was my fault because if I only Just Got Along With People, this wouldn’t be a problem. Oh, and over-reacting to bullying was My Fault as well (okay, I admit that I probably went overboard biting one kid, but it made sense at the time).
Unable to get a good job? My fault, because I didn’t apply to the right places for the right things.
Unable to stay at a job? My fault because I got bored, because I didn’t listen, I didn’t do things they way they wanted…
Unable to be in a relationship? My fault, because I was a misandrist, transphobic, homophobic white heterosexual male with delusions of adequacy.
My fault.
My fault.
My fault.
And it’s hard to scream that it isn’t when the whole world thinks that it is your fault.
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I’m told I threw a kid over a desk in third grade. I don’t remember it, but based on everything I do remember (including the time kids broke my arm), odds were he deserved it.
But of course, I was the problem.
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Not face blind, but definitely face visually impaired. Also directionally impaired, which ironically often means I end up a navigator – as long as I have the map, I can get places. But I get lost in buildings with annoying regularity. I had to ask for a new map of my HS every year because I could not figure out how to get to my classes without one.
And I have an eczema problem and similar symptoms that could fit celiac… but I cut all wheat and its relatives from my diet at least 10 years ago after realizing I had a skin allergy to wheat flour. (Long story very short: it was much, much worse than just a skin allergy.)
I don’t know what’s causing it, it’s exhausting, and very frustrating.
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