Neurodiversity

The Brain

When I was a senior in high school in Oklahoma, a local bank sent toys out to folks in the community as a promotion. The toys didn’t come with instructions. To get them, you had to visit the bank, where they would try to get your business.

The toy was called The Brain. It was a gorgeous thing with a black base, moveable black wedges attached to black pins and transparent layers of clear plastic stacked on top of each other. Each layer had different shapes cut into it. Together, they could either lock or unlock each pin. The goal was to figure out how to move all the pins out and then back in.

It wasn’t easy, but I cracked the code. That’s not what’s important, though. What matters about this toy is that it was the first time I was able to wire up my brain and my muscles and my whole being. I not only cracked the code, I learned how to solve the puzzle in record time. My fingers moved without conscious thought or, rather, so fast my thinking couldn’t get in the way of the movement.

There was a tactile component to the game that was central to the experience. The moving pins clanked like a computer keyboard. To this day, I still look for keyboards that sound like The Brain. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. It wasn’t just one sound, either. The components in each layer of the toy rattled slightly alongside the ticking of the main pins. In the right hands, that toy was a tiny, quivering percussion instrument that sounded like ice cubes rattling in a glass. Its real calling wasn’t being a toy sent out to promote banks. It was being an instrument in an avant orchestra that only performs graphic scores.

The Brain made such an impression on me that, the other day, I noticed I was re-creating its rhythm and sound while taking my vitamins. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. I have a complicated system for retrieving a vitamin bottle, tick, taking a vitamin while retrieving the next bottle, tick-tick, and so forth while also arranging the bottles, tick-tick-tick, in a particular way on the counter and then placing them back on the shelves, tick-tick, following another pattern once I’ve taken them all.

The Brain taught me how to be a better flutist, how to be a writer—how to live in language at all for that matter—and how to process and store information with exceptional efficiency. Runs of notes became compact units that could be compressed in my memory and expanded when I needed to retrieve them. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Language became something I could enter into because I could type at least as fast as my thoughts. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Memory in general became something I could store in chunks without taking the time to think the words I was thinking. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Notice there are eight ticks, one for every pin. The Brain taught me to compress language, music, and thought in packets based in octals, like a computer. The Brain is actually billed as a computer. The side of the box reads, “Can you out-think the computer?” But that’s not what it was about for me. It was about streamlining my thoughts, perfecting my movements, bringing my whole self into unity, into the present, into being-ness, and not having to slow down or get mired in the difficulty of whatever I was performing or creating.

This was profound, and it was my way of making my dyslexia work for me rather than against me. It was an assistive technology that unlocked me as a person. It was an extension of me that led me back into me in ways that had been inaccessible before The Brain. It was a teacher. It was a sage. I will forever be grateful to the bank marketing team who mailed The Brain to my home and to the company that created and sold it.

Someone stole The Brain from me in college. I think it was my friend Terry Holsti. He played the trumpet and had a bag full of teeth and hair and giggled all the time and had a different moral compass from most people. He was fascinated by The Brain. He always asked me to give it to him. I hope it’s making him as happy as it made me. I really do.

O The Brain! It’s smart. It’s beautiful. It’s mysterious. It’s a see-hear-touch explosion waiting to happen with the patience of a lama. And it’s marked sold because it’s on the way to my house in Utah. I shall not navigate this place alone. I shall have The Brain by my side. Together, we will gleefully tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick who live in this area instead of allowing them to tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick run us out of here.

Wet Hair

Good morning. What are you all doing today that’s poetry-related or not at all poetry-related? I have some big poetry plans but first I need to work up the will to wash my hair.

Here’s the impediment: I have a strong aversion to wet hair, including loose strands of wet hair that cling to my hands and arms and legs, wet hair matting drains, the feeling of wet hair as it’s being styled, wet hair stuck in brushes, wet hair on the floor, and so forth.

I just got chills, the bad kind, as I wrote about wet hair. I hate the way it looks. I hate the way it’s so soppy and formless. I hate the way it tangles. I hate the way it drips. I hate parting it. I hate smearing hair products around on it. I hate scrunching it. I hate having to coddle it by wrapping it in a towel until it’s dry enough to allow me to dry it.

I hate the towel. I hate the way the towel throws me off balance like Lucy in that one episode where she has that giant headdress on and can’t get down the stairs and everyone is laughing but she’s mortified because all she wants is to get down those stairs gracefully. I mean, it really is a funny scene. I’m watching it now.

My life with my wet hair is never funny. If I could inject humor into it, things might be different. Maybe if I had some Vitameatavegimen I’d be able to deal with my wet hair or I would stop washing my hair altogether and just lie around writing trippy poetry while my hair grows greasier and greasier, which is also a state I don’t like in hair, but more Vitameatavegimen would probably cure me of that aversion, too.

This is part of my sensory processing differences, which make me love the majority of sensory experiences but detest a few specific experiences, like looking at, touching, cleaning up, and thinking about wet hair. Or greasy air. I like clean, dry hair. I love to touch it. I love the way the strands lie together smooth as bristles in a Purdy paint brush. I love the clean lines, the tapered ends, the glimmering color in each strand, the way it feels against my face. I love the expressiveness of dry hair. I love looking at photos of dry hair. I also love beard hair and have an entire Pinterest board devoted to beards, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.

I just need to wash my hair, then I can focus on poetry.

And no. I’m not going to shave my head to address the issue. (I have both the wrong face and the wrong head for that.) I won’t wear a wig, either. (They’re too hot, and I don’t like the way wig hair feels, even if it’s human hair. I hate how heavy they are and how they feel against the scalp and how the lace has to be trimmed, and the glue that has to be used, and the powder that has to be applied to the part, and the very real possibility that one would become dislodged in the wind. I live in extremely windy areas. Wigs are a no-go.)

So, yeah. What are y’all up to today?

The Subtle Ordering of Words

One thing that was interesting about the first piece she read was the subtle ordering of the words and how each word relates back to the other words even though the whole piece is rather sparse.

My husband just walked through the front door and said that to me. It’s what he was thinking about on his morning walk with our dog, Lexi—last night’s poetry reading by Mary Ruefle. He didn’t even say Mary Ruefle or Ruefle to identify her. He just said her, like he was saying aloud the last part of something he’d already started saying to himself during the walk.

My husband doesn’t write poetry or read poetry or even like poets much because of what happened to me in 2009. He’s still not sure exceptions to the rule in poetry are actually exceptions. He’s not sure there are actually any rules at all where behavior toward female and female-appearing poets is concerned.

I’ve tried to tell him the exceptions are exceptions and that there are ways to stay safe within the poetry community. I’m navigating all of that myself. My initial response was to leave poetry and never write again. But that is not living. I managed to eek along for seven years. I took up birding. I took up weaving. I love birds, and I love fiber, but I also love words. I loved words first—well, second right after classical music—just as soon as I was able to navigate language, which wasn’t easy because I’m dyslexic.

What a joy I found language to be. An absolute delight. A place to play, work, imagine, create, build, live, linger. I was thrilled to see that Ruefle’s reading had an effect on my husband, that her reading helped loosen language up for him. He’s a software engineer who doesn’t have a lot of flexibility with words and finds writing and speech tiresome. He’s also dyslexic but went in a different way in his life: away from language rather than toward it. Or, rather, toward a completely different type of communication, the many languages of code.

We have a safe word for poetry readings and other outings. It’s a phrase, actually. If either of us says the phrase, that means we’ve seen or sensed some kind of red flag, and we need to leave the situation. After what happened last year with the couple at Snow Canyon State Park in Utah, we’ve realized we can never be too careful. We’re especially careful around poets.

I’m glad the safe words weren’t what was rattling around in my husband’s head this morning. Mary Ruefle doesn’t know it, but she and the entire audience at the Poetry Center helped my husband feel like I’m safe, or at least safer, in poetry these days. And he feels safer, too. Now, he can play inside poems like Ruefle’s and find new things to love about language—within those sparse words that do so much vital work.

Two Sleeps

Before the Industrial Revolution, people slept in two shifts. The first was from early evening until sometime in the middle of the night. The second was from early morning until it was time to get up and start the day’s work. The waking period in the middle of the night wasn’t just for reading or sitting by the fire. People played cards, canoodled, had little get-togethers, and more. It was dark and cool and simply a good time to be awake. A romantic time. A playful time. A productive time.

In 2008, when I had one of my bouts of thyrotoxicosis—which made sleep difficult and resulted in severe sleep anxiety—a therapist told me about two-sleeps. She could see my sleep patterns falling into that rhythm and encouraged me to embrace that rather than fighting it. I had charts and graphs and other excessively detailed stuff documenting my personal sleep woes because that’s how I roll. It was a lot, the way my personal wardrobe database, which I maintained for six years, was a lot. (I can be a lot or, as I like to say a lot a lot—think quirky, colorful, dysfunctional.)

Hold up, the therapist said. Maybe, just maybe, instead of being hypervigilant about your sleep, you could try this approach instead. Hers was for sure the better plan. It was hard to let go of my recordkeeping and data management, but I did it at her urging.

The change in perspective and approach got me through those long months until my thyroid function returned to normal. I should note that thyrotoxicosis isn’t like hyperthyroidism in that you can’t treat it. You just have to wait it out. The whole process from thyrotoxicosis (or thyroid storm) to hypothyroidism to a return to a euthyroid state takes about a year.

A long damned year that’s difficult, creatively productive, and hard on a marriage, or at least has been hard on my marriage. It’s not easy to live with someone who has a snack-and-book midden stashed in the bed because they need to eat constantly and must always have reading material ready for those inevitable jolts from sleep. And also a slew of notepads and a handheld recording device so flashes of brilliance can be documented, such as aphorisms that float in on the ether and strange dreams that can’t not be cast in stone or at least scrawled in pencil in feverish, sloppy detail. (Pencil because, while graphite is an inferior writing material, I have a no ink-in-the-bed rule, as should everyone. We have sheets to think about, folks. We don’t need to add fighting ink stains to our list of daily tasks, especially not when we’re thyrotoxic.)

It’s not easy to live with someone who’s in fight or flight for the better part of a year, edgy and jumping at every little sound, balled up at times saying I can’t take it when will I feel normal again, whose OMing her way through moment after excruciating moment, who asks her mother-in-law in Iowa to have a bag packed in case she needs to come take care of her when she’s thirty-six years old and her mother-in-law has better things to do like tending to her gorgeous, gazeboed yard and going to church and keeping her husband from wandering into the back of the garage never to be seen again because he’s finally going to put that classic car together, the one that’s been a tangle of pieces and parts strewn about the property for four decades. In short, someone who’s devolved into a twitchy little miscreant. It wasn’t easy on Jon. I wasn’t easy on Jon. But two-sleeps made a big difference.

I still approach my sleep this way if I wake up in the middle of the night. It’s a two-sleep night, I think. Rather than toss and turn in bed, I get up and do what I do, which is read and write and, sometimes, snack. Tonight, I’m up with GI distress and heartburn because of unfortunate but yummy birthday dinner choices yesterday evening. I came home and crashed, accidentally, at 8:40 p.m. and woke a few minutes ago bloated and nauseated, like a puffer fish that didn’t mean to puff and can’t unpuff and whose innards are on fire.

Is this a good time to write? Who knows. Will I produce anything of value during these waking hours? Based on this journal entry, it doesn’t seem like I will. I just know it’s not a good time to be horizontal. It is a good time to take Pepto Bismol and be vertical. So that’s what I’m doing until my second sleep begins. (Technically, since I’m sitting down, I’m vertical then horizontal then vertical again.)

Metadata paralysis is a real phenomenon, and folks like me live the experience every day. If you see someone with obvious symptoms of metadata paralysis, let them know you care. Take interest in their metadata tree. Say things like, “Good work. What a lovely metadata tree you’re working on. So many branches. I can’t wait to see what it grows into.”

Part two of this essay will be redacted in its entirety because it’s boring. Why? It’s self-indulgent and not self-reflective. The metadata here is value: subset one, possesses; subset two, doesn’t possess.

I’m falling asleep sitting up. Hello, theta waves. Bring on the strange brilliance.

I get it. His name is Jack Tripper and he trips all the time as part of his physical comedy. He also trips out on what others are doing and saying, so he’s also a metaphorical tripper.

Quick on the draw isn’t something anyone’s ever called me with regard to understanding plays on words, but they did call me fast fingers in grade school because I learned to count like lightning on my hands during math drills as a workaround for my dyscalculia and working-memory deficits. I won those drills. Laugh away, children, laugh away. What the world needs is a dyscalculia superhero named Fast Fingers.

Dyscalculia is either part of dyslexia or it’s a separate but similar entity. It depends on what metadata you use, that is, how you organize the information pertaining to each phenomenon.

Dyscalculia. Dyscalculia. Dyscalculia. That looks funny. This calculia. Miss Calculia. That’s Ms. Calculia to you. Dana “Ms. Calculia” Martin. Now there’s a name. A Dana by any other name still can’t count to ten without using her fingers.

They gave me a free dessert because it was my birthday. That’s what happened with dinner. And also a plate of fried everything. That part wasn’t free. I paid for the plate of fried everything. My metadata here is dinner: subset one, fried everything; subset two, dessert.

I didn’t have to eat it. I wanted to eat it. Then I didn’t want to eat it but kept eating it. I’m trying hard to eat. I need to eat. My metadata here is health: subset one, presence; subset two, absence. Or is it life: subset one, congruous with; subset two, incongruous with?

My throat is getting dry. The Pepto Bismol is coagulating, if that’s the right word, near my uvula. One time, a big, hard thing traveled from my sinuses down into my throat. I choked on it for a while, then coughed it into a tissue, thereby saving my own life. It was fossilish and had ridges like the roof of a mouth. This incident (or shall I call it an *indecent*) happened in from of my mother-in-law. The metadata here is mother-in-law: subset one, what not to do in front of; subset two, what I did in front of. Additional metadata is bodies: subset one, amazing; subset two, strange.

As with bodies, also with minds: subset one, amazing; subset two, strange. Or is the main category bodymind: one thing, not two? As in, we mine the bodymind when we should be embodying it. As in, why is the bodying of the bodymind something we mind, whether it’s ours, yours or mine? As in, what’s mine is my bodymind and is not to be mined.

This is a real mindfield. Good night. I’m off for part two of my two-sleeps night. May our collective dreams break the bough, rattle the house, and set free a wee mouse who runs the mazes of our minds. Wouldn’t that be amazing.

Fight

From grade school forward, I was bullied, harassed, sexually assaulted, and raped by my classmates. The lesser infractions started when I was younger, with the exception of the CCSA I experienced at an older boy’s home where my mother had me go every day after school until she got off work. The more serious incidents occurred when I was an older student.

Things got much worse after my father died when I was thirteen. Most of my peers didn’t even know he was dead. His fatal heart attack occurred the Friday before spring break. My mother made me go to school the week after spring break ended. She didn’t like the way it would have looked for me to have taken any time off.

It was around that time that the orchestrated bullying began rather than the sporadic outbursts that had occurred earlier. It was a sport—I was a sport—for a growing group of students, even other students who were LGBTQ+, who were neuroatypical, who had serious health issues that made them the target of kids who didn’t like weakness, paleness, physical differences and the like, or who were scared, marginalized, and unpopular for other reasons. I was the most unpopular. I was everyone’s target and, for some, a ticket to greater inclusion and popularity if they could demonstrate a shared hatred of and derision for me.

In groups, my classmates would call me names, ridicule me, and more: in the school’s hallways, inside classrooms, on the bus. My neighbor across the street, a student I’d been friends with up until my father died, would even open her door and, alone or with her friends who were over, call me bitch or slut anytime she saw me in the yard or driveway.

What was I to them? Prude. A slut. Stupid. Ugly. A bitch. Slow. Retarded. Flat-chested. Boyish. Easy. Gay. (Only they didn’t use the word gay. They used words that were darker, words that catch in my throat to this day. I lived in terror of them finding evidence to back up that last claim. What would they say—what would they do—to me then?)

They were like plaque, those students, the way they gathered, the way they clumped up like something clogging an artery that would otherwise function properly. After my biology class, I’d go to my locker, which was just outside the classroom. It was a lower locker. JL, a tall, funny, wildly adored boy had the locker above mine. One day, he started ramming my face into his crotch and simulating oral sex, holding the back of my head, forcing it into his genital area over and over as he pretended to orgasm. I thought it was only going to happen once, that someone would stop it. A teacher. Other students. School officials. They didn’t. JL repeated the abuse anytime he caught me at my locker. It became a joke most of the students in that building participated in. They’d linger after class, stand in groups gawking, laughing, as he simulated rape.

Though this wasn’t my first experience with CCSA, it was my most public, on display right there in the bustling, glimmering hallway where the floor tile and walls were all paste white, chalk white, as white as the flour babies the girls in some kind of love and marriage class had to carry around to prove they’d one day be able to take care of a child.

I began leaving class early to go to my locker or lingering after the bell rang so I could switch my heavy books out after class had started. It worked for a while until JL caught on.

I went to the school counselor. She told me boys will be boys. The more I resisted what JL was doing, she said, the more he would do it. It was, in essence, my fault. What happened to me was *my* fault, not JL’s. The counselor didn’t do anything. I asked her if I could be assigned a different locker. She refused. I asked her if she could talk to him. She saw no need. JL continued to force my head into his crotch whenever he could.

I got a large backpack. I put all my books in it. The backpack was tremendously heavy, weighed down by my literature, chemistry, physics, biology, Latin, music, and other books. I’d managed to overcome my learning disabilities, which I’d been bullied for in grade school. I fought my way into language, into mathematics, into all the letters and numbers that confused and frustrated and bewildered me all through grade school and early middle school. I knew being smart was my only way out. Education was my way out. College was my way out.

I knew my classes were more important than anything. I didn’t want to end up like JW, who got pregnant and was never seen again. Or like MW, whose entire family disappeared overnight. Or like RY and KA and LL and LB, all of whom ended up addicted to drugs, some of whom were raped, and one of whom was gang raped. (I failed to avoid being raped, twice, but that’s another story.) I forced myself to learn how to read and do math with no help from anyone and without my learning disabilities being recognized. By junior high, I was in advanced classes. I wasn’t going to let JL or anyone hold me back. My backpack gave me the freedom to avoid my locker. My shoulders and back hurt from lugging it around, but at least I could be mobile and move away from any tangles of students forming in or between the school’s buildings, ready to attack me verbally, physically, sexually, or in some combination of the three.

Years later, I spoke with one of those classmates, a brilliant student named PD. She explained why she and the other students did what they did. You were unflappable, she said. No matter what we did, we could never get a response out of you. So they did more. And more. And more. It was a challenge.

They were trying to break me. They never broke me. I’m still not broken.

They didn’t know what kind of family I’d been born into, what I’d already survived in my own home. What I survived every day.

Unflappable. A challenge. The word is strong. The word is a survivor. The word is fierce. I was fierce, but the body and mind can’t take eighteen years of constant abuse from within the family, from within the school, from within the community, without repercussions. We aren’t designed to withstand that kind of treatment. But we are designed to heal. This is what healing looks like, believe it or not. Right now, it’s me at age fifty-one waking from a nightmare in which I’m a teenager being sexually assaulted poolside, writing this down, and processing these emotions and memories on my own terms all these years later, as I have for many years up until this point. It’s a Mobius strip, healing. It’s a process. There’s no clear beginning and no clear end.

It’s life. It’s the life I’ve had up to this point and the one I fight for every day. It’s the me I fight for, and the others I fight for, and the fight I continue for those I’ve known and loved who have fallen because they could no longer fight. My comrades. My kindreds. The ones who didn’t make it. It’s JW and RY and KA and LB and, most recently, KB. And it’s DG. Dana Guthrie. Dana Lynn Guthrie, the name I was born with, the name I got from my father and the parts of him that I still carry with me. He was a boy, too. Boys who’ll be boys. Men who’ll be men. Fathers who aren’t always fathers.

The birds are singing. Wake up. It’s time to wake up.

Yesterday, The Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States and released a guidebook that includes laws it deems discriminatory in each state, information about LGBTQ+ rights, and resources to help people relocate to states with stronger LGBTQ+ protections. Those who are LGBTQ+ are more likely to experience child sexual abuse, sexual assault, and rape. We can live with ongoing bullying, harassment, and discrimination all our lives, including during critical developmental years. We’re more likely to be stigmatized and marginalized, to receive less and poorer healthcare (including care that is neither trauma-informed nor LGBTQ-literate), and to receive inaccurate diagnostic labels when we seek mental health care—labels that are biased and don’t account for the relentless, systematic abuse we’ve faced and survived or that shift the blame for those experiences to us. Conversion therapy, which is legal in numerous states, may even be employed.

My Dog, My Hands, My Buttery Butter-Stick Fingers

I know when my dog, Lexi, is happy. I know when she’s sad. I know when she wants to be tickled. I know when she wants me close but doesn’t want me to touch her. I know when she’s waking me up because she’s scared versus happy versus feeling playful versus wanting a tummy rub versus having to potty really bad.

This morning, my dog had to potty really bad at 5:09 a.m. That was a hard way of entering into today, but I did it because when I have to use the bathroom, nobody makes me wait until it’s convenient for them. And because I don’t “have” a dog, even though I used the phrase “my dog” above: I live with a dog, I love a dog, and I share my life with a dog. She’s family. And my bestest family member had to potty at 5:09 a.m. this morning.

I was sleeping soundly—my mattress and pillows are puffy clouds soundly—when Lexi woke me up. I was dreaming of something. What was it? A subway, glimmering tile, water in the distance, a weaver I know, an unnamable feeling, and some Southern Utah LGBTQ+ community overlord trolling my Facebook page telling me what not to say.

I didn’t want to get up, especially not at 5:09 a.m. in December, which feels the way 1:09 a.m. does in June. So dark. So nightlike it could never pass as anything other than night. Not dusk, not dawn, not the cusp of dusk or dawn.

My hands are cold. My keyboard is loud. My ears are sensitive. My fingers are sliding off keys. I’m writing off-key, too, because I’m typing letters in the wrong order, all of them. (Thanks, dyslexia.) There’s no flow in the writing for me right now, which makes writing unbearable.

My fingers are hard sticks of butter qwertying without finesse. I know my fingers are smaller than butter sticks, but that’s how they feel so I’m sticking with my imperfect metaphor. Do they make miniature butter sticks? If so, all the butter for this hard metaphor spreading across my nearly inoperable fingers at what is now 5:51 a.m.

A writer posted on Twitter yesterday about marriage being for everybody. I thought he said “margarine.” That’s emblematic of the unsolicited gifts dyslexia gives me daily:

Margarine: It’s for all of us, not just some of us!

Hilarity ensued as the writer and I had a good chuckle over the outdatedness of margarine and how, for now, butter has the upper hand, which is funny because we’re back to hands, which obviously makes me think of my hands or at least my fingers. We’re back to my sloppy butter/finger metaphor. (Yes, I went there. Sue me. Puns are a sign of intelligence.) There’s no escaping this metaphor. It’s smeared all over this bleary essay like butter on a slice of toasted bread.

The thing is, margarine has a hell of a story. It rose to fame during World War II when butter was in short supply, so it and other fats were rationed.1 Margarine had been around since 1869, but it had a problem, which was its color.1,2 It was white. It was plain. It was super meh to look at, which made it unappetizing. We eat with our eyes, after all. (That’s actually not entirely true, and it’s an ableist thing to say.) In a word, margarine suffered from oilism.

The solution to the meh-ness of margarine? Dye!3 Margarine was mixed with vegetable dye to make it look sunny, like the butter everyone knew and loved, the color we used to paint our kitchens before beige then gray then greige then white then apparently beige again shouldered color out of our homes.

And here’s the really interesting part: The customer had to do the mixing. Margarine was originally sold in its white state along with a capsule of vegetable dye, which the “home cook,” meaning the woman of the house, had to mash into the margarine until the concoction turned yellow.3

But I digress. I’ll write a proper essay about margarine later. What I wanted to say this morning is that my dog, Lexi, got me up early. I understood exactly why because she came from an abusive situation in Texas where she was bred by an unethical breeder. She’s learned how to overread and overcommunicate with humans in a way I’ve never seen any other dog do. Strikingly, in the year since she’s lived here, she’s learned how to imitate me when she needs to convey something, anything, everything. She can’t use language like I do, but she knows how to use her entire body—from her ears to her eyes to her paws to her tail—in various combinations to say things like, Mom, quit giving me those silly kisses. Please know I still love you, though, and want you here next to me. Just ‘no’ on the kisses, OK?

She talks to my husband and me like this all day long, and it’s the most adorable and endearing thing ever. Dad, why are you close to the back door with that coat on, but you aren’t looking at me like you’re about to take me outside?

Or Don’t you see me lying here like a piece of driftwood, so good and so quiet, but also so hungry? I don’t want to be demanding or anything, but you totally forgot to feed me. You’re at least ten minutes late doing that. Do you want me to be this sad piece of driftwood forever?

Or, a new one she added recently that I had trouble translating: Mommy, mommy, maaaaaaaaaawmeeeeeeeee. I feel weird and have to, like, lie here like this on the rug in the middle of the living room, aimless and foggy. I don’t know what’s going on. Is the floor quicksand? Is it, like, holding me down or something? Am I, like, stuck here forever?

That was the day we gave her one-quarter tablet of trazodone before a visit to the veterinarian to make sure she hadn’t cracked her tooth on a toy that’s not supposed to be capable of cracking a dog’s tooth.

The most intriguing part of all this is that she acts like me. These aren’t generic communications. She tilts her head the way I do. She puts her paw on my chest the way I put my hand on Jon’s chest when he’s rushing up to me too fast and I need to whoa-nelly his overly enthusiastic approach. She mopes the way I mope and lets joy flood her body the way it floods mine. She even dances like me.

Lexi’s asleep now on the flokati rug in the living room that we call her Floofer, not to be confused with my electrophysiologist, who I call Dr. Flvoolr because that’s what I called him right when I came out of anesthesia the other day. (Dr. Flvoolr is not his actual name, but it’s sort of close. I got three of the seven letters right.) Lest you think we’ve relegated Lexi to the floor, that Floofer is on top of a fluffy dog bed which, in turn, is on top of our moderately uncomfortable mid-century-style sofa. It’s nearly a princess and the pea situation, Lexi’s Floofer setup.

My hands are warmer now, but they still aren’t serving me well. My ears are ringing. The keyboard still sounds like someone rummaging around inside a drawer full of Legos. The lamplight interrogating my desk is as taxing as the first general income tax ever imposed in our country, which occurred during World War II, when the number of Americans required to pay federal taxes rose from 4 million in 1939 to 43 million by 1945.4

(All that taxation and a gal couldn’t even get her hands on a stick of butter. I know, I know. It was a war. A big one. I get it.)

I want to go back to sleep like Lexi has, but now I’m staring the day right in the eyes. It’s staring back. I tried turning my head slightly the way Lexi would as a calming signal. The day isn’t averting its gaze. I’m trapped here among the wakeful, at least for now. Time to putter around the house, grab some breakfast, and catch up on the news. Kyrsten Sinema! Britney Griner! Elon Musk! President Biden and Title 42! Fourteen more books designated as “pornographic” by the Washington County School District in Utah—including several by poet and novelist Margaret Atwood! There’s never not news these wide-eyed days. My new favorite pastime is reading the news before my husband or my friend José has, then being the one to break it to them, especially when the news is salient, good, strange, or all three somehow—the perfect news trifecta.

Below, I’ve included a poem I started writing in 1995 about margarine when I was taking Robert Stewart’s poetry class at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. It’s not the best poem, but I like it and it’s relevant, so there it is. It’s my one-thousandth version of the poem and is the best shape I could whip it into. I may not have whipped it like butter, but I like to think I at least whipped it good.

—

Margarine During War

Women keep settling
(oleo, factory jobs)
though they pine for sex
the way they long
for butter on their lips.

After war, they dab
eye shadow and rouge for men
whose war-whores
didn’t teach them to kiss.

But the women
hoist skirts, drop stockings,
for soon the bread they’d break
would be kissed with butter
(real butter).

—

Sources

  1. Yglesias, M. (2013) Guns vs. Butter, Slate Magazine. Slate. Available at: https://slate.com/business/2013/07/butter-rationing-guns-vs-butter-in-world-war-ii.html (Accessed: December 9, 2022).
  2. Vaisey-Genser, M. (2003) “Margarine, Types and Properties,” in B. Caballero (ed.) Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition. Second. Elsevier Science Ltd.
  3. Magazine, S. (2011) Food Dye Origins: When Margarine Was Pink, Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/food-dye-origins-when-margarine-was-pink-175950936/ (Accessed: December 9, 2022).
  4. Tassava, C.J. (no date) The American Economy During World War II, EHnet. EHnet. Available at: https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-world-war-ii/ (Accessed: December 9, 2022).

Two Selves

I meditated for a couple of hours this morning after reading selections from Essential Zen. At first, there was mostly open space in the meditation, punctuated by thoughts I noticed as they made their way in and out of my mind. If I were to compare this particular meditation to a landscape, it would be the scrubby terrain of Eastern Washington, where there’s not much to speak of, not much to notice, until—suddenly—a tree. And so you notice the tree, then move on.

I am now coming to understand that self and other are both inside me. They are both self.

The thoughts that slid past like trees included not taking more than I need, not expecting more than I should, and living in harmony with all the sentience surrounding me.

Then I had another level of experience, not thought-based but rather image-based. In the image, I split off from myself, so that I was two selves. The first self was able to simply be who I am, to feel comfortable and free in my existence. The second self was like the first in all ways, with one distinct difference: She was conscious of herself. This led her to go around apologizing for the first self’s behavior, to loathe the first self—even as she was, in fact, identical to the first self. This means the second self was also engaged in self-loathing.

Self and other have always played a strong role in my life, my thinking and my writing. I never really understood the draw to this duality until I learned I was dyslexic. Dyslexia is not just about reading text—it’s about reading the world. In my opinion, experts and advocates are so focused (with good reason) on teaching dyslexic children and adults to read that they don’t spend enough time focusing on the unique, often dualistic, world those who are dyslexic inhabit off the page.

Dyslexics can perceive the world as differently as we perceive written language. Just as the dyslexic can misread a passage, in turn creating an entirely new text from that passage, we can also read the world in multiple ways, with multiple orientations—some of which others might never perceive or understand. On top of this, we also learn to adopt different minds and bodies depending on the situation. We learn early that we have to be the quiet child, the focused child, the still child—at school, in social situations and often at home as well. But we retain our essence, that other self who never leaves us and is always by our side.

I am now coming to understand that self and other are both inside me. They are both self. Just as self and other are both outside me. They are both other. When I think of self and other, I might be thinking of that duality I carry within, or I might be thinking of the dualities that others, in their own ways, carry within them. But I am not always, and I suspect I am rarely, thinking about self and other in the traditional sense of there being a single, inflexible, fixed self and then everything that falls outside that single, inflexible, fixed self.

As I learn to better attend to the self and other I carry inside me, I hope my second self will be more at ease with my first self, and vice versa. Both might learn to understand and respect their respective self/other. In this process, I might come to meet those I once called “other” in a new light, inside the deepening understanding that everything—and in that I include everyone—I label as other really has something to do with me and cannot be disconnected from me, nor me from everything.

To turn on anyone else in judgment, to create a wall between them and me, will come to seem as unreasonable as the self-betrayal illustrated in today’s meditation. I wish I’d had closure on that image, but instead the scene grew fuzzy and dissipated, my two selves across the room from one another, the first sitting on the ground playing, the second scowling and crossing her arms.

As the image moved farther away, my two selves began to resemble trees. I think now about the idea of souls inhabiting trees until they find atonement. Maybe in some other reality that’s where my selves are: inside trees, waiting.

This is what I sit with, what I pay attention to. I am not sure which of my selves is writing this post, or if both selves are working together. For now, I (whoever the communicating “I” is) embrace them both, love them both and hope they will both learn to embrace and love the world in all its non-otherness.

Attention

The word attention gets a lot of play in the context of aspiration. We seem to want to individually and collectively achieve an unflappable state of “paying attention,” often joining the term with other aspirations, such as mindfulness, gratitude and intention.

I don’t like to call my forms of attention a ‘deficit,’ because that implies a lack, a less than.

Attention also happens to be a charged, and even controversial, word in many respects. An example that comes to the forefront is the way it’s been used in the diagnosis of children and adults who are deemed to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. ADHD seems to be one form of attention we want people to steer clear of, regardless of their age.

As I did some journaling around the question of attention today, the word “choice” appeared over and over. “Is the attention my choice,” I wrote in the upper-right corner of a hot-pink lined page. I also wrote “forced or given” coupled—just below the words—with the heaviest underline my Pilot Precise Grip Extra Fine tip could muster.

Many people who are dyslexic have differences in attention when compared with the norm. Some of us carry the dual diagnosis of dyslexia and ADHD. As an accompaniment to my recent dyslexia diagnosis, I have a provisional diagnosis of ADHD with overfocus, which means I can (and often do) go hours on end working away at something that’s captured my attention.

I also am able to take in a great deal of information all at once, and the sensory input / processing / synthesizing can sometimes be overwhelming, even draining. I actually find this aspect of my attention quite useful, however, as I pull seemingly disparate elements into my writing, in particular my poetry.

I don’t like to call my forms of attention a “deficit,” because that implies a lack, a less than, a “should aspire to be something else”—something feathering the perimeter of what’s considered normal. Instead, I like to refer to my dominant forms of attention as “focused attention” (notice I’ve dropped the “over-” prefix) and “wide,” or “roaming,” attention.

That’s where I am at with it right now, that is. Next year, or even next week, I might conceive of my attention in a new way.

I think “choice” and “force” come up for me when considering what attention is, and how it makes me feel, because I am often asked to perceive the world like other people: to think like them, to feel like them, to work like them, to learn and discover and believe like them. In short, I am asked to have forms of attention that are, or at least seem, congruous with theirs. I feel as if I am being asked to enter into a foreign way of paying attention at the expense of my own ways.

Given my ways of paying attention, my definition of attention will most likely differ from that of others. I don’t necessarily want to change the fundamental ways in which I filter and experience the world. I will probably never aspire to living in a way that depends on focused, central-task attention which neither verges on being “too invested” on the central task nor allows too many “tangential” elements in that could threaten that central task.

Still, my core definition of attention might have something in common with other people’s: something to do with noticing, with letting in, with experiencing, with using all “57 or so” senses in any encounter. Something to do with letting others in, letting the self in, letting mystery in, letting awe in.

My definition also includes staying with something, whatever that something happens to be at the moment, in the connection and expansion of moments: focusing like a camera lens on what’s in front of us, behind us, under us and above us. Focusing on each other and on ourselves.

In a nutshell, my definition of attention, then, seems to center on two seemingly contrary elements: focusing and letting in. I guess that’s in precise alignment with the focused and roaming forms of attention I’ve been blessed with and sometimes challenged by. Fancy that.

Lame Skills and Dreams and Being and Doing (and My Dog, Hayden)

I am sitting here, staring at my screen. My dog, Hayden, snores at my feet in her puppy bed, which we call her butt nest. The term is a misnomer, of course, since her entire body is in the nest, not just her butt, and since it’s technically not a nest.

What I’ve been thinking about lately is the difference between doing and being.

I don’t know. Maybe it qualifies as a nest. I suddenly realize I don’t know the actual definition of “nest.”

I’ll have to look that up.

Later.

I feel like I should write something, since I am here at the computer and all. I can’t go anywhere anyway. Hayden just had surgery, her second procedure in three weeks. I have to watch her until she feels better and gets over her predictable but still unpleasant post-op constipation.

I’ve never cheered for poop the way I’ve cheered for poop with this dog. I’ve been cheering all day to no avail. In response, she looks up at me and wags her tail, as if her very existence is worthy of applause—which it is. She doesn’t have to do anything for me to sing her praises.

I also feel like I should write something because I am a writer, or at least consider myself a writer. I certainly don’t consider myself someone who stares idly at the computer all day, fingers curved over the keyboard as if on the cusp of writing, without actually doing any writing.

But the thing is, I don’t know what to write. And when I don’t know what to write, I usually begin aimlessly and somehow end up with a five thousand-word essay on some unexpected thing that wells up in the not-knowing-what-to-write moment.

I don’t have time for a five thousand-word essay today. That’s not true. I have time. I have nothing but time. Time and love and capacity. That’s all I have and all I will ever have. Even on my deathbed, I will have time. Just not a whole lot of it. But technically I will still have some of it. I hope I will have love and capacity then, too. We’ll see.

I just don’t feel like writing and writing and writing, namely because that necessitates proofing and proofing and proofing. Proofing is not fun, especially when you’re proofing your own work, and you’re dyslexic.

Don’t get me wrong: I proofread like a champ. If there were an Olympic event for proofreading, I would take at least the bronze medal, maybe the gold. I have consistently out-proofed every candidate on every editing test I’ve taken for editorial positions. I even find unintentional mistakes in people’s tests, scads of them. At a large publishing company I worked for, one that produced more than ninety magazines and had an editorial staff in the zillions, I was recognized by the group’s managing editor as the best proofreader he’d seen in his decade with the company.

My ability to proofread is, apparently, only outpaced by my ability to brag about my ability to proofread. It’s not even that hot of a skill. Why can’t I be the best planker or illusionist or dog whisperer? Why can’t I invent some awesome new bobby pin-based hairstyle-enhancing device that sells millions? Or a self-folding handkerchief? Heck, a self-folding everything-that-is-meant-to-be-folded!

Can you imagine throwing your sheets, towels, kitchen rags and the like—even your undies—on your bed or linen table after they’ve been washed and dried, and all of them FOLDING THEMSELVES while you kick back and sip on some tasty pomegranate juice? Can you IMAGINE that? I can. But I can’t do anything beyond the imagining. That’s because my skill lies in the area of proofreading.

PROOFREADING! It’s like reading, only it’s a specific type of reading of a specific type of document, with specific symbols and notes for the printer and whatnot—which 90 percent of writers, editors, designers and printers don’t even know anymore! (If there even are printers involved, which there aren’t when it comes to digital publishing. There often aren’t other writers or editors, either. So who exactly are my symbols and notes for?)

What the hell? My whole world is caving in right here, right now as I contemplate the boringness of my skill coupled with the outdatedness of it. My ability to proofread is like a beige argyle sweater vest for men or a brick of tofu sold the mid-’80s at The Earth Natural Foods in Norman, Oklahoma. (Mid-80s tofu, for those who don’t know, don’t remember or weren’t alive in the mid-80s, was so bland it possessed a nasty nontaste aftertaste. At least the kind sold in Oklahoma.)

I mean, PROOFREADING? That’s what I have to work with, to show off about? That’s a bragging FAIL.

The problem with proofing my own work is that I like to publish my writing as soon as I’ve written it. (None of that waiting around to see if the work is “quality”—that’s not how I roll.) My tight production schedule gives me very little time to go through the entire editorial process before putting the work out there. Sure, this is a self-imposed schedule. I could give myself overnight or something instead, or as much time as I want.

But no. Once it’s written, it must go live ASAP. That’s my compulsion derangement style.

Now Hayden is looking up at me, with that look that tells me she trusts me completely.

Why is it that almost all the dogs and children I’ve met have trusted me implicitly, while few of the adult humans I’ve met have exhibited the same level of trust?

I dreamed last night that someone I care about, a poet, was living behind a crack house in a hole he’d dug in the earth and covered with a rock. One day, he pushed the rock aside, left the hole and fell in love.

He and the woman he loved rented a studio apartment a few blocks away from the crack house. He bought a folding cot that resembled a hospital bed. She said it was hideous. He said the metal frame could be painted bright blue and that the color would really liven up the space. She told him to get rid of it.

Dejected, he ran off, leaving the cot behind.

Nobody could find him. Weeks passed. I knew where he’d gone. Back to the hole.

I made my way behind the crack house and started shifting rocks until I found him under one, lying next to Charles Bukowski. The soil was carved to fit their bodies perfectly, earthen molds designed to accept them and only them.

They were high. Each had a glassy look. Each was close to anger, but the drugs in their systems prevented them from reaching anger, the way water at the edge of a lake is prevented by various forces from reaching the land just beyond its reach.

“This is what people mean when they talk about being blissed out—this look that is so close to rage but does not permit rage,” I thought.

I pulled my friend up into the world and took him back to the woman he loved.

He never wrote another poem, but he became famous for living under a rock behind a crack house with Charles Bukowski. He was all over YouTube spouting off about Žižek. Everyone loved him, even more than they loved Žižek.

He kept taking drugs. He took up smoking and drinking and abusing. He spray-painted hideous folding cots in bright colors and people called them works of art and put them in museums and bid on them at auctions.

When he walked down the street, long lines formed behind him, like the tail of a comet. This pleased him, but not as much as having the love of the woman he loved. And he had that, finally. He finally had that. And cots galore.

What I’ve been thinking about lately is the difference between doing and being. I find myself shifting into the realm of being, as opposed to doing.

Not that being and doing are mutually exclusive. Not at all. But for me, doing has always been the driving force, with the idea that being comes from doing and not the other way around.

I am inside of being right now, and inside of becoming. From this position, the doing will reveal itself, what I am meant to do—assuming there is anything I am meant to do that my being does not accomplish.

Ultimately, I want to not have to do anything for me to sing my own praises. Once I can do that, I can go back to doing, if that’s what I want to do.

It’s all very confusing. I am confused by it. I am sitting inside that confusion. I am petting it. I am trying to make the confusion feel so comfortable with me, and to feel so comfortable with it, that it rolls over and lets me lightly touch its stomach, its paws, its long, graceful arms. I want it to trust me implicitly, as I am learning to trust it.

Confusion. Confusion. That’s not what it is. Not at all. Not that, not that. There’s the pesky trap of language again, and the trap of culture that led me to the trap of language. Confusion is like the hideous cot before it’s been painted a bright color. What I feel is something else: the hideous cot after being painted the bright color.

Uncertainty. That’s what it is. I am sitting with this uncertainty.

Right here. I am right here.

I have a writer’s dog, there’s no doubt about it. She’s sleeping with one eye, watching me with the other. The click of the keys under the direction of my fingers seems to calm her. He ears are up. Her breathing slow and steady.

I don’t think she’d rather be anywhere than where she is right now, beside her writer. Her writer who loves her.

The Problem with Labels

I’ve been thinking a lot about this label of “overfocused” ADHD. I’ve gotten some feedback from advocates and specialists in this area who say they aren’t convinced of my diagnosis. While they agree that I have the qualities described in overfocused ADHD, these experts also note that there are politics involved in framing those qualities as “symptoms.”

Pharmaceutical companies are more concerned about patents than patients.

In their view, many people with dyslexia have these qualities, as well as almost everyone with high intelligence. (Their words, not mine, but I am also not going to pussyfoot around the fact that I am highly intelligent. That would be disingenuous nonsense.) One person pointed out that schools for gifted children see these qualities in their students and begin designing curriculum around those students as early as kindergarten.

In short, what’s seen as a disability by some is seen as an ability by others, as a characteristic to be accepted and harnessed, not obliterated through medication, negative reinforcement, or both.

I’ve also been stumbling a bit over the juxtaposition of the word “overfocused” against the words “attention deficit.” That feels like an oxymoron. Some descriptions of overfocused ADHD say that this subtype is not so much a lack of attention but too much attention and that the medicines typically used to treat ADHD won’t work on the overfocused variant because they will make the focus more intense, including aspects such as worry and rumination, which can in turn make the person with high focus feel worse.

How can you have “too much” attention and still be called “inattentive,” I’ve been wondering. Is there not a better term to describe the qualities of the person who can maintain focus for hours on end? For the mind that can execute a task in this manner? For this level of productivity? Why is this type of ADHD lumped in with ADHD at all? Simply because attention is concerned in some way?

Does the metacategory of ADHD even exist? Or is forcing disparate attention-based qualities under one overarching category an example of rigid adherence to a hierarchical construct, one that might wrap things up in a tidy framework but that ultimately says nothing in actuality about how these qualities are, or are not, related.

I would not have been able to be a music performance major if I had not been highly focused. That educational path requires four hours of practice each day, along with another three hours or so of practice in ensembles and in one-on-one study with your professor. That’s seven hours, at least, of intense focus in both mind and body, seven days a week. (Musicians get no days off, especially not flutists, otherwise the embouchure will fail.) You could easily categorize every single person in a conservatory as having overfocused ADHD, especially compared with the dawdling, low-grade focus many (neuro)typical jobs demand, with two days off each week.

Likewise, as a dyslexic English major, I would not have been able to consume all the novels, plays, poetry collections, essays, theoretical works and other reading materials required without high focus. Yes, it might have taken me four times as long to get through those materials, but high focus allowed me to do so. (As a dyslexic person, the qualities described as overfocused ADHD have allowed me to do everything that I do, and that’s been the case for decades.)

Furthermore, do graduate programs not require outright intense focus? What about those that involve research and lab work? My editorial work has largely been in the field of science and medicine. I believe every scientist and researcher I’ve worked with over the past decade and a half would easily qualify as having overfocused ADHD. One of those researchers even tried to recruit me into the field of biology not too long ago, perhaps because she could see I had a focus similar to her and her colleagues, as well as a mind that dissects ideas in the same way as them. (I tried to explain to her that I dissect language and concepts, not frogs, but she didn’t really get it. For her, talking about biology was so close to doing it, that I might as well have been doing it.)

And who says what’s too much attention, what’s not enough attention, where attention should be directed and, conversely, where it should not be directed? These, too, are political questions. What is championed is almost always what any given culture deems important. That is, what is deemed important is culturally constructed, not immutable. Even what we try to eliminate is important, though, because without those aspects of culture—those fringe aspects produced by the minority as opposed to the majority—culture would fold in on itself.

I suppose my concern is that the words “deficit” and “disorder” are part of this label. That’s the case because those lobbying for these clusters of qualities to be seen as a pathology needed (and still need) that framing in order to secure funding, build alliances and justify treatment options. In short, our health care and educational frameworks are built on, responsive to, and supportive of pathology.

Because medicine is involved in this, big money is involved, and big pharma is involved. I don’t really trust big pharma to define me and my life, or anyone’s life, given that their objectives often run contrary to those involving human welfare, human safety and human expression. Money colors everything, even making medicines unavailable to the masses because pharmaceutical companies are more concerned about patents than patients, therefore only the world’s relatively privileged can afford to get their hands on those medicines.

I’ll close by quoting from the book I recently reviewed, Thomas Armstrong’s Neuodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia and Other Brain Differences:

One of the great disadvantages of the term ‘ADHD’ is that it speaks of a deficit in attention. Children (and adults) labeled ADHD are actually very good at paying attention. They excel in paying attention to what they’re not supposed to be paying attention to! This is called ‘incidental attention’ and is another trait of the creative person.

He continues:

People labeled with ADHD are also very good at paying attention to what interests them. Many parents have written to me saying that their ADHD-diagnosed kids will spend hours focused on building with Legos, dancing, operating video games, or engaging in other absorbing tasks. Unfortunately, the ADHD community has also taken this admirable trait and turned it into a negative. They call it ‘hyperfocus’ and consider it to be yet another ‘warning sign’ of attention deficit. But the ability to focus the mind for hours on a single topic has been considered for centuries to be the trait of an exceptional mind (otherwise, why do so many cultures and religious traditions cultivate the ability to concentrate?).

And here’s the last excerpt I will share:

The fact of the matter is that children and adults with ADHD have a different attentional style than neurotypical individuals. They have a ‘roaming’ attention that can notice many different things in a short period of time and a ‘homing’ attention that can fasten onto one thing of great interest and stay with it for a long period of time. It does a great disservice to those diagnosed with ADHD to say that they have a deficit in attention, when they are acutally good at two different forms of attention and have problems primarily with one other form, sometimes referred to as ‘central-task’ attention, where sustained attention must be paid to routine (and often boring) events that have often been externally imposed.