tuckova

Kaninchen und Ente

 

This is a drawing of a rabbit. It's just a sketch and doesn't look very much like an actual rabbit; the ears are wrong and it lacks the endlessly curious bunny nose. I won't go on with rabbit details (soft fur, various endearing noises). I'm not stupid, it's not a real rabbit, it's a sketch of a rabbit, and just a rabbit head at that. What's making me personally unwell lately is that for some reason if I say "that's a rabbit" people feel a real burning need to tell me that it's not a rabbit, it's a sketch of a rabbit, or better yet that it's not a rabbit it's a duck. Yes, I see the duck, too. I'm well versed in optical illusions; wait til I tell you the story about that beautiful young woman in a fabulous hat who turned into a hag overnight. But right now for a minute I want to talk about the rabbit. I don't understand why before I get to talk about the rabbit I have to acknowledge all the different ways of seeing it. I know about those, too. I do! But there is something about the particular brand of my fear that is wrapped up with wanting to have the thing I see validated. Maybe it's not there, the creak of the house, the smell of gas, the cold draft from a crack somewhere, and I ask "Did you...?" because if you didn't then I am, finally, crazy. But I don't think I am. Yes, there's a duck there. But... Did you see a rabbit? It's all I want to know. Do you see the rabbit? Because I see it. 

 

medium roast in a medium town

One thing I kind of love about living in a medium-sized town is that there's always something going on. It's never so little that you're at a loss for ideas, and never so much that you can't manage to find what you want to do or choose (though sometimes choosing can be a bit tricky). When I was little I wrote a porquoi story about an earthworm that wanted to be at two parties at the same time, which is funny because my understanding of myself is pretty consistently that I want to be where I am. This indicates that even as a young storyteller I was working on developing empathy for characters quite different from myself.

Another thing that I love is that if there's a thing you want that doesn't exist, you can create it without too much difficulty. Imagine starting a theater in a small town or a big city. In one, you'd be hard pressed to generate enough interest to keep it afloat. In the other, the competition would be overwhelming. A nice medium-sized town and boom, in six years you've done twelve plays despite a pandemic, and each show is on some level better than the last.

One thing I'm struggling with a bit is that competition, which I have never understood, feels pretty personal on this scale. I don't mind if things are created that are different, but I don't like the unnecessary introduction of conflict. I'm not even talking about people who compete with the things that I'm doing, though obviously that's uppermost in my mind. But there are three hairdressers on my block. Within a few blocks of my apartment, there are at least five cafes, not including the hairdressers, which also serve coffee. I like a hairdresser. I like a cafe. And if the market can support it, I guess those are fine businesses to have. But I don't see a lot of difference between the hairdressers (in fact, they seem to all be one big business in three different storefronts) and I don't see much difference between the cafes, either, though I imagine I'm just not cool enough. How did the hipster burn his mouth? He drank his coffee before it was cool. I wish that there was more diversity and less competition. I wish that one of them would be, I don't know, a fancy cocktail bar or something. I wish people would imagine things that aren't in my neighborhood yet and then put them here.

One year I decided to go to a different place for a massage every month until I figured out what I liked and didn't like about massages. Maybe I should start going to all the cafes around until I figure out what makes them different. And maybe in the course of that I'll think of something else I want and either will it into existence or make it myself, whatever it is. I'm not changing hairdressers though. One shouldn't mess with perfection too much.

see what I mean

I guess several newspapers (notably The Guardian) ran articles in the last few weeks about aphantasia, the inability to picture things in your mind. It affects, they conjectured, about four percent of people, though I don't know how they determined that. Three people in the span of two weeks told me they had it, therefore establishing it in my mind as the new ADHD or autism. It's not actually a disability, it's just an inability. I listened to people telling me this and thought "Okay, and?" and then I thought "Can I picture things?" I'm not really sure. I don't know that I need to. 

 

When I was in university we used to talk about things like this all the time, what was reality and how we perceived reality and what that perception might mean, how it might affect how we feel about it. Are we all seeing the same blue? Then I guess I started thinking about other things. When people tell me "picture this" I understand it as "I'm setting a scene for you" but not as something I'm actually expected to visualize until it comes to life. I understand that I'm expected to imagine something and I sort of do, but it's not, like, an image. It's a shared metaphor, or at least I thought so. Dunno. It's not a medical diagnosis (I'm not even sure it can be diagnosed -- parts of your brain would fire up, I guess?). 

 

I have monopsia, meaning that I only look out of one eye at a time, and therefore only see things as two-dimensional. I didn't realize this was a thing (I thought everybody saw what I saw) until those "magic eye" books became trendy, early 90s I guess. I had a moment where I realized that quite probably a lot of things that I thought were a "personality" for me (like "not liking sports") were just the result of not seeing distances (so, for example, being unable to track a ball well enough to catch it or hit it or whatever I was expected to do). Also, a dread of uneven walking surfaces, such as stairs. It didn't really bother me until 3D movies were everywhere. Suddenly people were grabbing at the air in the theater, which was annoying, and the movies all looked out of focus to me. 

 

I think it's cool that, partly through the magic of the internet, we are able to learn things about ourselves without too much effort. I used to go to libraries more (I believe that I learned that I was only seeing out of one eye in my 20s, before computers were standard, though how common this was and what it might have affected came later and probably from the comfort of my own lilypad jumps across screens). I do worry at the amount of self-diagnosis that goes on, and more importantly the amount of conclusions that get reached. If I've made it this far seeing out of one eye and seeing very little in my mind, does it matter particularly? Not to me. Probably not.

 

I do note that I get a little impatient with some of the self-diagnosis going around, which is not particularly nice of me because empathy and patience really take so little effort. But I feel like sometimes we use these things to excuse us from doing things we might not particularly want to do, rather than as a reason that those things might be difficult and we might take a little longer to learn how to deal in a society set up for people to not have those challenges. Like being left-handed or something I guess. Less visible.

 

I thought I'd have more to say if I let this marinate but it has a ways to go. I'll put it here to remember that I was pondering ability and disability and inability in April 2024.