On Incompetence

Today I was in search of distractions and ended up on a website for a learning disorder called Dyscalculia, which I'd only heard the name of. I always assumed it was just like dyslexia except with numbers. This has turned out to be semi-accurate.

I never expected reading about the condition would startle me so badly or sound so much like a list of a lot of the ways in which I secretly consider myself to be a big fucking failure at life. This is a harsh thing to say, and to be honest I didn't even know I felt so bitterly about myself until I had to sit back and examine the issue.

I've spent the afternoon reliving Painful Backstory (TM) and it's lame. Today is a grief sort of day and I'm more or less feeling low already, so it's even lamer.

The various nasty symptoms of Dyscalculia go way beyond that I consider math-related. Problems with measurement or estimating distances, chronic lateness due to trouble conceptualizing and managing time, inability to accurately recall names and faces, getting lost easily due to poor sense of direction, inability to follow sequential instructions, and so on.

Suddenly all this bad stuff was neatly spelled out as a list of genuine impairments rather than personal failures that could have been remedied if only I'd tried harder.

I've never hidden the fact that math's had me basically waving a white flag ever since double digit multiplication tables. Society doesn't even bother to chide me for this--it's acceptable in the US to be female and hate math (Boo, hiss). I run into people who hate math every damn day and they never put pressure on me or make fun when I'm trying to calculate a tip.

Except I don't hate math. I love the concepts and usefulness and logic of it, but it's the love of a battered spouse who's gotten used to always having a limb in a cast. By the time I quit high school, my stance on math was "Why bother?" I'm never going to go anywhere in life with incompetence as my guide, so why learn how to count all them benjamins I won't be earning?

I can't handle money, I can't make change. I have no grasp of 'math facts' and rely on a primitive counting system called touchmath that my retarded Oregon public school drilled into us around second or first grade. Math, for me, is like trying to read Braille with your eyes.

Watch me try to handle money at a convention sometime; you will be witnessing me at my most confused and flailing. All it takes is one tiny complication and I'm all over the place. It's the single thing I hate most about working conventions. And I have never even successfully completed a tax return.

These are just a few examples. What I'm getting at here is that math and organization are massive problems for me. I always thought the only plausible explanation was that I was stupid and just covered well. And that's where the real problem lies--the slow destruction of confidence and ambition. When your very best isn't good enough, what's the point of trying at all?

I know it's the fashion these days for people to be all cute and make much of their little neurological eccentricities. Who hasn't met a person who identifies as a sufferer of OCD and whose symptom boil down to "liking to keep my kitchen clean, LOL?"

So I am not diagnosing myself with anything here. But I've never been proud of these failures. Not being able to read a clock or tell right from left without looking at your hands is just plain embarrassing. I don't like having to question my own intelligence over something as basic and daily as balancing a checkbook.

I learned early to eschew activities that might expose my incompetence. I was like a ninja, making my brain work overtime to avoid situations where I'm likely to fail in front of other people.

When you're falling behind, you eventually quit asking questions because you wouldn't understand the answer anyway, and asking would expose your ignorance. You do your best and hope it will at least be enough to fool your teachers into eventually letting you leave with some scrap of your pride still attached. Thanks to our overtaxed school system, this behavior works, especially if you're a very timid person. That's probably how so many illiterate people manage to get their diplomas.

The counselors I had in school tended to think precocious communication skills meant I was doing okay because hey, smart kids figure things out for themselves. It's the psychotic tantrum-throwing freaks who get the attention.

And then you enter the job system, where your incompetence and meekness and self-doubt gets your ass canned so spectacularly that you give the fuck up and spend the rest of your life leeching off people who contribute to society, unable to see any way out that doesn't involve skills you don't possess or education you cannot obtain without someone sitting over your shoulder walking you through it.

You eventually die in a gutter somewhere, singing a sad sad song.

It's too late to do anything about the past, but if I take action and seek out help, I can at least try to salvage some dignity and learn to work around my incompetence.

Maybe there's no Big Answer to my problems. But if there is, getting help or learning workarounds would free me up to use that wheel-spinning energy to finish college someday. That would sure beat staring at the class brochures for every Spring and Fall session, knowing full well that I have no place among smart people who have their shit together.

Maybe that's why seeing the insecurities of my childhood broken down into symptoms for a learning disability has put me into such a spin-dive. If there's a genuine reason for all those years I felt inferior and helpless, there's hope I might begin to manage it the way I've been managing the OCD.

But I'm a stumbler, a scatterer, a scribbler on the nice clean wall of Order. I've always dreamed of being something more, but how can I, when I see myself as incapable of success outside of creative fields? The idea of putting my ass on the line all over again, even for a shot at improving my life, is intimidating as hell. What if I fuck that up, too?

Can you teach an old dog new tricks?