Any performing art, really, would have to forgive my ability to completely forget the difference between right and left on command. In space and voice.
Yet on a screen, or a flat surface, the difference is clear.
A hug, it hurts when I realize I squeezed extra hard on the shoulder where gramps needs surgery.
A collision with a dancer, going the right direction.
I left home, only to wander around, pinning right to east and left to west. The subway direction helped me do the flippy-floppy north to south.
Still, tell me to hold out my right hand; oops, that was my left hand.
I need a nap most days lately. My naps aren’t for sleep.
A mental sigh from the current moment of zinging from climate change, the multiplicity of wars, inflation, and Roe vs. Wade.
In my naps, my mind wanders, and wonders.
I drive, shell-shocked by all the re-movement. It is a continuation of stillness over the past couple of years, one where even seeing large groups of people or sitting in moving vehicles feels strange, unsettling, where our breath intermingles. To share a breath, how intimate is that now?
Initially, it wanders into the relief of sunset ovaries, and a momentary justification for my proclivity for sugar.
Kids. I knew I didn’t want them when I was 14 and was the oldest of parents who married young and had me and sis, divorced soon after, and had more kids. Kids are a lot of work. Going to a lot of baseball games is even more work, gymnastics meets for sis, grandma care, sometimes I helped, sometimes I resented sitting in the car so much, going here, going there, in transit between my parent’s emerging worlds.
I wonder why my dog can get sterilized at ease, and I have to beg.
When I see an assemblage of words that carry me back to the thrilling loneliness of my 21st birthday on a mountain ridge.
What voice does color have?
Silver, mountains, even though in reality, those mountains were the usual leafy bark.
Do you feel what you are thinking?
All alone, far from home, with a bandana of painting Bears, but a more industrious Care Bear quality with a McDonald’s palette rather than Jerry’s bears. I got it at the fair.
Tone is expansive, right?
Toner for the face, Tone the body, Atone your sins, Visceral tone of lemon cake happens when I see true mustard or even smell lemon peel, and not staring at the color of the sun. Attempts at sweetness, for sure, even if my tone feels self-muted, ambient, at most times. At times.
I have a speech disorder. It has made transitioning to UX and design a unique journey for me, one where what I have to overcome to communicate is a little different than my more verbal peers.
It started at five when I almost got held back in kindergarten because the teacher thought I didn’t know how to count. Even though I hate standardized tests – they test how well you take the test, not all the different forms of intelligence – I can thank the Iowa Skills Test for Basic Skills for helping me pass Kindergarten with some high percentile score.
Apparently, I wouldn’t tell my teacher my name and address on command, even though I had known it since I was 3 (according to my mom). I hated talking in front of people. Or to people I didn’t connect with, the ones who proclaimed their judgments so openly, clearly, and easily. I would daydream, nap at my desk, and feel bored most of the time. So, there are the bad social skills.
There was also the fact that my mom was single at the time, and the kindergarten teacher gave that empty empathy teachers do when parents challenge them. Don’t get me wrong; teachers are awesome. My beef is with the teachers that do that empty empathy voice so well. No teacher, you are crushing dreams! And underestimating what some parents know, especially if they don’t come from apparent means.
Working on data and verbal communication is more of a means to an end of my career goals. If I want to be a designer and researcher, then I have to think analytically and present my ideas in a cogent manner that is digestible to wide audiences. I didn’t have the luxury of starting this career path when I was 15; we didn’t have a graphic design or robust computer arts program where I went to high school, and gender discrimination expressed itself differently in the Southeast than it did across the rest of the country in the late-90s.
Anyhow, I know way more than I let on, especially for folks who primarily look for verbal and spoken cues.
****
Why is my background so topsy-turvy, a story that meanders, one where the rising action still feels like it is happening?
The main difference between me now and me in my 20s is I can string together a sentence or question that is cogent, most of the time. I can also organize, and do it well enough that people think I am good at it. It takes more effort for me than others to do this kind of work, to string a logical sentence together or organize data. Attention to detail and organization are hard learned, and not innate, skills for me because both do require making sense of patterns. And pattern making is how I can make sense of what goes where.
As someone who went to speech classes as a kid because I remained non-verbal at apparently inappropriate times, I find this is ultimately what holds me back in career matters. It is why I love pre-scheduled meetings, collaboration, and organizational order. Some of this helps me be more creative, to know what sentences I have to string together, to not be in the constant anxiety of surprise. Writing jobs are hard for me without a visual component, mostly because all the jargon and structure start to overwhelm me.
And the surprises, and having to react minimally to new information. As I have learned to speak, or have practiced speech, I find rambling, trying to cover every point of the story, gets to me. Sometimes the story just has to cover the arc, and nothing more.
***
I HATED improv in high school; give me a script, and I will give you an artful performance. I loved scripts because I could speak within them, through them, and just play to emotion without being overwhelmed with the intake of new speech. Creating these contained spaces, and telling a story through script, can still move me to this day.
Even though TED Talks kind of make me grumble, I appreciate the sense of theater, and the storytelling aspect.
Of course, I took improv in my adult life, and get what people think listening is. I have come to realize I listen vastly differently because of my experiences, but can mimic listening to the last word said quite well now. It is just one form of listening, a normative one, and one with benefits. Yet I find those who have that innate proclivity to logically string sentences together to be quite judgmental of folks who struggle with logical verbal communication. And I am drained if I have to communicate that way for long stretches of time. Sometimes listening happens beyond the last thing said.
People who don’t have non-verbal tendencies find people like me to overthink, to be aloof, calculating, etc. If I am vocal about inclusion, it is because my ability to express myself becomes a lot easier in environments that care about efforts to difference, and do not have the expectation that women are innately bubbly, effervescent, and smile all the time and good at organization.
If I get passionate about education, then some of it comes from attending NYU and seeing the vast difference in quality of schooling my peers received. While the high school I went to is now award winning, it was still a country school when I attended, rooted in agriculture. Digging deeper beyond my own experiences, the injustices and inequity of the education system became more apparent. Hauntingly apparent, and I am still seeing what I left behind struggle today. I found teaching exhausting; too much of the verbal communication that made me feel alienated in my schooling years.
I guess I have enough experience in both to be good enough at my jobs. I often feel frustrated that UX work seems to come easier to others, and that others find this work so ‘straightforward’. It seems like an abstract puzzle, one that feels like the answers are so simple, but all I see is depth and complexity. People often don’t come to me for straight shooter and smooth talking tendencies. I prefer less talking so I can take in all the ambiguity. Maybe I have fortitude, and I am happy that I am pushing into the skills I need to excel at designing things that help people like me who get overwhelmed with all the vocalization.
Debbie Downer – Disney World (2004) – Saturday Night Live
A tension arises as I look downward Feeling less than romantic staring at the azure dot in the fold of the foam That I can simply let go of someone telling me that I am, again
Well, okay, they didn’t say that explicitly to me, I just read it in the seeming desire to look at anything but me as I gave a two minute, okay maybe five minute monologue about trying to think before I speak so I can maybe seem only partly cloudy to the outside world. Master of my emotions, wizard of my feelings, manipulate thyself to just keep the conversation to puppy memes and taco trucks. That will do it, I will then only show the side of me that everyone thinks is agreeable for all parties.
Well, okay, not exactly like that, I was really talking about the reason why I stay away from plastic bags and ocean pollution, maybe that is why they have the attitude that ‘duh I take my bags to the store, we both already know this, can’t we talk about puppy memes.’
If suffering is the universality of humanity And misery loves company, then dissolute ego, and flaunt my flaws to the world with incessant openness —
Except, company evaporates when I take that route.
Like everyone else, I hom, thankful for a moment to be deeply alone, together.
My shadow, long in the trees, casting over homes from the first world war post-era.
What memory conjures as I stare at this long shadow?
Right now, none, all I can do is appreciate the long contours the odd middle part of my hair, poofing up towards the sky, electric blue headphones don’t show in the shadow, nor do my teeth.
A twirl blob, indistinguishable in motion, enters the surface of each house with a few pounds of pavement.
Plop plop plop
If I knocked on your door, you would wonder what sweaty mass of wide-eyed middle hair parted would bother you at such a quiet moment, make your dog bark, interrupt a mid-afternoon snack on a day of rest.
Plop plop plop
When I make a right turn, the shadow enters back into me.
The dance where I avoid talking to anyone today if I can help it.
There are at least 5, maybe 20 others with their headphones on, faces soft behind florescent glows.
I find comfort in our mutual silence:
Why would I want to talk to people who think they know me so well? With their comments that I have nothing to say, that I lack ideas. Well, they come, but not to y’all, ones who point the finger at an easy target Day in, and day out.
Forgetaboutit. Is all I have to say in my head to you, as you mistake my silence for lack of passion. I don’t want to share it with you until maybe you stop telling me how much you can’t stand someone that is more similar to me than you will ever know.
I wonder how often you say the same about me, to others.
Until then, I will keep the sensory channels down, my appearance aloof, and do my best to not think about any of you at all in the natural glow.
I don’t want to be part of this nation-state one I am not from one where the people from here get disappointed if you didn’t go to school in the area
One, where even people who are from here but don’t go to the right school in the area don’t get attention because they don’t have people in high places
It isn’t in their manicured lawn of roses that their landscaper maintains
It’s like there everywhere here, I suppose but here, since I am not from this spot I don’t want to be counted in your numbers, deemed a certain class, labeled with a certain intelligence, or lack thereof, because you never left your trove of trees planted in 1963.
Connective Cube 