A Writer's Notebook, Day Nine-Hundred-And-Eighty-Six

As a person whose disabilities are invisible to others, I often feel as if the world is gaslighting me.  I cannot really tell what is or is not true for others, what is unique to my own perception and interaction with the world.  Is this task easy or hard?  If I ask for help, how will I be judged?  Is the problem I have the same as the one another person thinks it is?  To offer an example, I have had times when I try to explain to a person my difficulties using a certain bit of technology and had them respond that they don't like it either and find it hard to use, but the problems I am having may or may not correlate with the difficulties the other person, who is attempting to be sympathetic, may have, and I can't necessarily explain the difference.  Consider that a person who is able bodied might slip on a floor, but that does not mean a person who has a physical impairment won't have more difficulty with the same surface, or that the person who fell know the issues the other individual will face.  I often find it impossible to even depict the issues I am experiencing in ways that others will understand, and it often feels dismissed, or, even worse, as if the solution presented is merely to placate me.  Their have been many times when I was certain a person did not want to help me, and instead was just doing the bare minimum while marking me down as a problem.  This happened with numerous teachers, even through my college experience, and still occurs regularly in my experiences now.  Many times, people will make it clear that my handwriting, to use an easy example, is only bad because I am lazy, that they expect me to write better for them, and even attempt to punish me for bad penmanship (numerous times, as an adult, I've had others force me to write multiple checks until they felt I had written neatly enough).  I am always wondering if I am doing something wrong; I am never certain that I understood the instructions as intended, or that I followed them correctly.  It can be overwhelming, to be honest, especially when you are always finding yourself getting negative results with no feedback.  I just want to be able to figure out what I am doing wrong, but how am I to determine that for myself?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Writer's Notebook, Day Two-Hundred-And-Fifty

Each of the three pieces I wrote today was a bit of a struggle to get going, if I am honest.  That happens, as I have mentioned, and my answer is generally to just wait it out, and the results vary.  A lot of the time, if I am really stuck, I might try to force something out, often it winds up being a bit meta, with me writing about being stuck without much in terms of inspiration, and it feels a bit like I am working scales in a way.  All the aesthetic decisions are there, they just don't always have a lot of purpose behind them, and that is fine in that context.  Essentially, I am just forcing myself to do the work, and getting it done, and I am showing myself that I can and will do it even if inspiration never strikes.  This can often take pressure off, and that lack of pressure opens up creative thinking and inspiration. Now, that is a fine thing for me to do, and I am likely to use that approach again many times in the future, but today I felt that I want...
Read more

Le Guin, Steering The Craft, Chapter Five: Adjectives and Adverbs (Exercise Five, Chastity)

A note of apology for my lateness with this.  I had expected to have time earlier in the day, but it was not to be, alas.  Anyhow, I am still a bit nervous about this exercise, though it is clearly of significant import to Le Guin, as she points out that it is the only exercise that she has given to all of her workshops.  That, of course, does not alter my feelings about it, excepting that I am aware of it as something valuable and worth doing, so the fact that it is a bit daunting might well be seen, through that light, as a promise of reward, perhaps.  The more difficult the task, the more one has to gain, at least by some logic... Exercise Five: Chastity Mr. Torino was in charge.  He had his way.  It was the way.  Desktops are clean.  Nothing but work.  No pictures: not your kids; not your girl or wife; not (as Allen recounted) your car.   None of that.  No plants.  No cartoons.  That is for home, this is work....
Read more

A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-Fifty-Nine

I have been thinking about how I can discuss certain aspects of my poetry and the choices I make as a writer.  In particular, I tend to write without as much reliance on sensory details and descriptions, instead choosing more abstract depictions.  This is something that I know many writers would call an odd choice, as specificity seems inherently to demand the application of detail, but I tend to be a bit hesitant about relying on depictions that utilize the senses, as I find that approach somewhat problematic.  For one thing, sensory description is always going to be less than universal, and not only because of the reality that there are individuals who lack one or more sense.  In many ways, for me, the deeper problem is one related to language itself.  Our use of language creates our experiences in a very real way, though I can't necessarily offer a full explanation of what I mean by that right here, but using a word for an object bestows qualities on it....
Read more