post #27: Assembling Symbols Into My Own Poetry**
one thing that has made this transition back to school easier than it has been in the past (in addition to more proactively building in time and space for rest and naps) has been that I've finally figured out how to read. reading has been one of the biggest challenges for me historically in school. i can read and i can get pleasure out of it, but i have so often found that i could not read at a pace anything near what school requested. i tried last fall to remedy this by dedicating more and more time to reading, but i knew that this was unsustainable from the beginning, and when push came to shove and the smallest bit of extraneous tension was added to my system, i was crushed under the weight of a million miles of water. reading as i have been most of my life until now how been deeply painful in school settings because it is a site of immense shame because i've been aware that i read slow and that i cannot finish the material in time even if given so much excess of it, so i give in and stop reading (because I've never been able to skim) and start learning instead everything i can do to fake it. and, unfortunately, I've been able to make do with just that. speaking in vague terms when needed (or whenever, really) and learning how to parrot what others are saying or infer what else a text may be about. but that i've learned how to fake comprehension does not mean that it has ever been enjoyable. for me, this type of faking it is always a deeply uncomfortable act. i know that i know nothing, i know that if i am poked almost at all, my whole enterprise will come crumbling down, and so it becomes that every class becomes an exercise in walking on egg shells, an exercise in trying to prove myself (ironically i end up speaking more about readings when i am faking it out of a paranoid compulsion that my not speaking will give away that i know nothing). living like this, every class demands 100% attention, there is no room for error and there can be no idleness. from here, it always ends up becoming a cycle of shame and dread and all the rest of the things, and this is the type of climate from which it becomes that i have regular nightmares about being exposed as a phony which upon waking, i struggle to distinguish whether they were dreams or memories (and at times even in knowing them dreams, cannot rip myself of their grasp enough to not believe them true; and so maybe i end up staying home from school one day after such a nightmare).
and so it is by accident that i stumbled into a setup that fixes the key defects that lie at the base of this whole ~psychotropic~ manic cycle business with me and school. I've tried many configurations in the past-- many reading hacks and many other such things (text converters, speech to text programs, printing readings out and holding them in person, etc. etc.), but i have never found something that lets me read at a pace higher than 10 pages / hour. but oh how i have tried. because it remains that even though I've become very good at learning how to make do, i never enjoy it, i never want it to be where i end up in life; i always am starting the semester looking for a new cure a new way to actually make things right this time. and so it was by accident this semester, when i unknowingly had 2 albums playing through my headphones simultaneously and found the resulting effect incredibly enrapturing. through a couple of iterations (in combination with some stuff talked about in a disability studies class but that's not as neat of a narrative), i jerry-rigged a reproduceable environment that lets me read. in short, i use text to speech on times speed to listen to a text (highlighting relevant info as i follow along) in conjunction with some kind of album playing on low volume on loop in the background. there's still a long way to go before i become able to read for pleasure again and i think there are still kinks to be worked out (such as what type of music or what volume settings work well etc.), but in that just earlier today, i was able to read 40 pages now in closer to 40 minutes, i am riddled with euphoria. a future vis-a-vis academia once again seems believable (and not just because i've been naturally good at scamming the systems of education my whole life but forgoing conventions like studying or whatever). i feel less compelled to design my weeks around the intervals i will need to brace for impact vs the times when i will be able to come up to breathe. and yeah, idk, it feels really good, but also, it's such a radical change in what is possible for me that i sort of don't know what to do anymore. there's now so many possibilities and all the survival tactics i've spent years honing suddenly seem so pointless.
so many parts of school (especially higher ed) have always seemed literally incomprehensible to me. because i have literally warped my entire scholarly existence around this one damning deficiency, things like extracurriculars, having a social life, existing publicly on campus, going to events, etc., have always seemed out of reach or impossible to me. it's been like, how are people able to do this stuff???? are you guys not also spending the entire three days of your weekend pitting and penduluming between self-soothing and spending every available hour trying to finish the readings for your first class of the week?
teachers always put on their syllabus disability or access statements, stuff like, oh, please let me know if u have special needs and we can figure something out, but given that my struggle has been, the entire concept of reading, it's always been like, how do you even accommodate that? one (exactly 1) time last fall, i built up the courage to ask a teacher if they could flag important sections for me (a staff member from my program suggested this to me), and the teacher agreed, but also, it was so hard for me to ask, that i broke down crying as soon as i left the room and i couldn't bring myself to ask it of any of my other teachers at the time even though i had intended to request it of everyone. but even that only felt like a bandaid. and mostly i just didn't want these people i'm trying to make myself look good to-- i didn't want them to know just how fucked up and stunted i was on the inside. because even though I've always dreaded going to class to discuss readings, I've also always enjoyed it, because it's been something i'm good at. but what this has meant is that i then have to juggle this image of competency in the classroom with the fact that, aske me to do anything like a research paper, and it's game over, essentially before it even started. all bark no bite? heh, yeah, you could say that's me. :smug_face:
but i actually believe i can do it now. i actually believe i can do it. i'm not sure how to instrumentalize these coping skills I've been perfecting forever, but i'm sure i'll find a will or a way. but yeah, a lot of unknowns. it's like in bananagrams, where you have this intricately woven criss-crossing of words, where every letter that could be turned into a 2 letter word has been done so and it's all perfectly fit and snug, but the game's not over, you see, and suddenly you pick up a q or a z or something like this, or maybe you pick up a few more that don't fit, and so now it is that you have more things to work with, but in order to make it word, you will have to respool everything that has led up to this point, you will have to appropriate the innards of 'rotting' in tandem with those of 'aubergine' and a few others, and now you have 'quart' and 'zing' and 'beige' and... it can be done. i know it,. i can feel it,. it will be messy,. i know it.., i can feel it., and i have the strength and patience and time to see it through.,. i know it., i can feel itm,. because i have to.
anyways, i fell down the stairs when coming to write this* and my hand is feeling kind of sore now, so i'll end it here and try to go lay down again. that's all i got for now.
*real story, but also reflective of that furry music brainrot i've been consuming; i.e., see ep of same name