Learning Disabilities

Lately, I’ve been watching “Love on the Spectrum” (Netflix). First, I see a little bit of me in each and every person they showcase, to be perfectly honest. I don’t fangirl over one particular thing except my future husband and that’s been me my whole life. Except men don’t like having a fangirl, it seems. It’s where I go wrong every time.

They can’t stand having a fucking cheerleader, cheering them on endlessly. They don’t like being praised and told how awesome they are, they don’t like being reassured endlessly, they don’t like being loved openly and honestly. They also don’t like how quiet I can be, because I become a void that they see themselves in and they project onto me all their own mental illnesses and disorders.

And that’s what I do wrong, apparently. I fangirl over men who don’t deserve a fangirl (in their eyes) and so they reject me, misbehaving to the best of their ability because they are not perfect. As if I think they are perfect. There is no such thing as perfection and I know that. I accept what I am given and try to work with it, but they push me back and back and away again at every turn because they want to earn my love, not knowing love is my decision. It’s a commitment I make at the onset.

They battle me, hurting me again and again with their careless words, their empty promises, and their lying hearts. They cheat on me because I’m “too good to be true.” They label me the monster in the absence of my speech because they fill the silences with the hatred of others that came before me or those they keep around errantly while we date. They don’t know I’m treating the relationship like it’s a forever relationship because I don’t bring up marriage, I guess. I don’t make them do any work for my love.

I’ve fixed that. I didn’t think it needed to be fixed, not until God showed me the error of my ways. He showed me that I have zero attachments in reality and so the amount of love I have to give to a person is unreal. Huge. Larger than life. And none of them feel they deserve it. They don’t deserve it. I choose to give it. I even dilute it with friends and family just a touch and it’s too much. Now I choose to be an ice queen again.

I’ve got learning disabilities, which by definition means I am imperfect. And yet, they think I am perfection somehow, that’s what God said to me. I leave a void, a wake as my ship passes in the night, not verbalizing too much as they take over the conversation. They dominate the relationship because I’m not picky, but I get tired of their narcissistic bullshit at some point and want them to leave me the fuck alone forever. It’s all about them and they leave no room for me.

They want me to be an extension of them. They always did and do. I consistently do the right thing for the greatest good to the best of my ability, working on my goals to be a better person every day in every way I can. Apparently this means I am perfect, even though I see so many things in myself to correct. I don’t bother trying to change them because I myself have so much to work toward to be a better person every day. I compare myself to the me of five years ago, ten years ago, two decades ago. I take baby steps every single fucking day towards the Utopia in my heart.

I am wrong to do this. That is what every relationship has told me so far. I am wrong to just stay in my lane, working to relate how people are meaningful to me, working to learn new efficiencies so I might have more time for someone else to take up because we are social creatures meant to socialize, working hard to maintain peace and harmony in hopes of an easy loving relationship. And that’s wrong, I guess. To want an easy relationship where we just fucking get along.

I’m wrong to ask for harmony. I know it now. Men want strife and struggle. They want to be demeaned and belittled. They want to be enslaved by their woman and they want you to put blinders on them. They want to be berated for their eyes taking in the sights all around them. They want to be hurt, again and again. They do not want to take responsibility for themselves and their actions and try to be a better person themselves.

If you don’t have proof that a man is already trying to be a better self, then don’t date them, ladies. They want you to treat them like wild animals so they can excuse themselves from accepting responsibility for their own behavior.

I have all the learning disabilities I’ve ever heard of, I just found out, and yet I had an incredibly successful career (until the point of being too sick to work, anyway) and I have become an emotions expert as well as a motivations expert. All for what? So I could contribute meaningfully to this world, to make a difference and lasting impact in a good way. I just wanted to inspire someone else to work hard and play hard, just like I do.

I think I inspire them to be lazy retards, making me do for them what they should do for themselves.

Let me tell you what I deal with all the time:

• Mixing up syllables in words (aminal versus animal)
• Constant confusion of left/right
• I had difficulty learning to tie my shoes
• I have trouble memorizing simple things like an address, phone number, and originally the alphabet. I still run through the alphabet every time I put something in alphabetical order. Thank you to the Michael Keaton Batman for learning me the 13th letter is M, it helped immensely.
• I have slow, non-automatic handwriting. If I write too fast, I put in extra lines or scribbles (depending on cursive or not) that make it impossible to decipher, and it eventually gets unreadable.
• I had very slow, choppy, and inaccurate reading. I still do, sometimes, mis-reading signs on a glance. “Do not exist before 3:30 PM” and “Alien transmission” are two signs I misread. You might have already seen in my writing that I leave out transitional words because I find them useless.
• I cannot tell time on an analog clock worth crap without constantly reminding myself the position of the hands. It took me over five years to become used to reading an analog clock and I’ve already forgotten how because my clock isn’t up right now.
• I had great difficulty with math. It took weeks of nonstop flashcards to memorize the multiplication tables. In fact, I still don’t have them all memorized but I bet most people do. I have to reference them and look at them visually at least four times a year to keep them in my brain.
• I always dreaded going to school, though I posit that’s because I was bullied constantly and backstabbed by people I thought were my friends but they weren’t… they were just sharks waiting for blood in the water. I still have nightmares about school and I haven’t been in almost 20 years. I refuse to go to my high school reunions because it was traumatic, in a word. I won’t even go to college because of how traumatic school was, but I study independently.
• I have great difficulty reading printed music… I know what the letters are and the positions on a clarinet, but I never connected the symbols and special things with how to actually play them, such as staccato or legato, it never translated into a thing I could time internally. In fact, I’m terrible at time.
• I have to re-read things constantly to comprehend them appropriately because (I think) people use too many words to say things.
• I often get lost, even in a familiar city, though I no longer panic about it because I realize if I just know which direction I want to go, I can take roads until I eventually recognize something. I love GPS, thank you whomever dreamt that up for us all.
• I confuse the letters B and D occasionally, especially when ultra tired. In fact, if I type while ultra-tired, everything becomes a garbled mess — my fingers are on autopilot and I hit them in the wrong order constantly.
• I had and sometimes have great difficulty sitting still.
• I need paper or calculators to do math even to this day and forget long division, which I know I should know how to do without a doubt. I don’t remember how.
• I hate playing most board games because there’s always math involved.
• I mispronounce words (i.e. beddy tear instead of teddy bear, though that’s not one I have ever butchered personally I just can’t think of a real live example right now) but I also put words in the wrong order in a sentence ALL THE TIME. I think people take me less seriously because of it. For example “I just want to be well again” vs. “I want to just be well again” — the second one is more likely to be what I say. There are more things, I’m sure, because I correct my writing all the time on second and third read-throughs editing to make sense. I add tons of transitional words, which I still feel are stupid, and I reduce repetition quite often.
• I had a hard time learning nursery rhymes or things that rhymed for a while, sing-songing to myself endlessly to keep it in my brain pan.
• I struggle naming familiar objects, interjecting the word “stuff” or “thing” quite often instead of being able to name them. (Or thingymabob, that’s my favorite one, really. Thingamajig. And so on.)
• I tell stories out of the logical order all the time. I end up backing up to start over three or four times just so I can give all the context, which makes it difficult to follow.
• I’m terrible at remembering long lists of directions or planned steps to take, so I end up writing them down endlessly and checking them off as I come to it.
• I like to set it and forget it, generally speaking. As soon as I say something, I’m no longer thinking about it and if you weren’t in the moment, paying attention, it’s likely gone forever. For this reason, I prefer written communications.
• I re-read what people write to me and internalize every word to the best of my ability, creating a sense of a person in my head. If I do a really good job, then I have a replica of them to rely on forever without actually bothering the person in question because it gets annoying when I’m clingy and I understand that very well.
• I used to struggle reading familiar words in my youth, including cat and dog. I am unable to picture things in my head, which I learned is called aphantasia. This is a reduced capacity to access mental senses, such as imagining sound, movement, smell, taste, and touch. It’s a difficulty to visualize in general. It’s being internally blind, so to speak, so I find it incredibly easy to sympathize and/or empathize with the blind community.
• When reading aloud, I often skip words or skip ahead in sentences mistakenly. I ended up reading aloud for years to correct that problem, though sometimes it creeps back in.
• I have trouble quickly recognizing sight words/common words and end up reading them slowly as a result of that. I’m not a good speed reader at all. If I don’t take my time to digest every word individually, I might as well not even bother reading because I won’t generally remember a damn thing that I read that way and so it’s moot to even try.
• Because speed reading is impossible, if I’m forced to, I will be unable to explain what happened in a story or answer questions about the details of the story. I take my time digesting it and making inferences based on the text given. I dissect every story like a poem, looking for the deeper meaning that maybe even the author didn’t mean to divulge.
• I can spell the same word correctly and incorrectly in the span of minutes. If I repeat a word too many times (say 10 or so), I become convinced the word isn’t real anymore and I made it up and then I end up looking it up in the dictionary and try to tell myself the meaning of the word just as many times so I might remember it’s a real word again.
• When I was young, I did get upset reading because it was frustrating… eventually, though, books became my only friends. They don’t mind if you take extra time to read them, they rarely judge you, and they often have a lesson to learn.
• I frequently repeat the same mistakes, and it’s not just letters. For instance, platformer video games take a specific timing to conquer. I can make the same mistake ten million times, thinking I got the timing right, but my reaction speed isn’t as quick as I hope for (which is why I now drive like a granny on Sunday no matter when and where I am because I personally know I need more reaction time to slow down safely without re-injuring my neck from a 2002 car accident that completely fucked it up and is now why I’m disabled.)
• I struggle remembering abbreviations, especially if I don’t use them much. This is to my detriment in common day interactions full of LOL, RN, TTYL, ILY, et cetera. I have to remind myself what things like HRC stand for (Human Rights Campaign) and so on. Acronyms are the bane of my existence and I went into the tech field, which is full of them…
• I have trouble with word diversity without a thesaurus in one hand, so I’d call the dictionary and thesaurus my bible.
• I don’t think jokes are funny. Sometimes, once in a while, I laugh, but mostly I listen to comedians because they tend to be critical thinkers of one sort or another and I learn a lot from them. Once in a while, I smile or laugh, but typically speaking I’m not keen to do either one too often.
• I take forever to complete reading assignments and the more I read when it’s not laid out in an ADHD friendly manner, the harder it is to finish… especially when the text is uninteresting, just like this list of issues.

IN SHORT, I’m dyslexic, aphantasic, ADHD, autistic, synaesthetic, dyscalculic, smooth-brained, obsessive compulsive, multiple personality disorder (MPD), schizophrenic (but not paranoid), depressed, anxious, I have extreme repetitive PTSD, I have mood disorders, delusions of grandeur in a non-threatening way, I have hallucinations, I have confused thinking, and I was anorexic for a long time due to my weight.

Despite all of this AND coming from a dirt poor family, I was able to get a job that made a six figure income. I didn’t even go to college. I went to a business school. A very nice business school called TSBI — Tri-State Business Institute in Erie, Pennsylvania.

And the disorder that took me down? Anorexia. I nearly died of starvation/malnutrition. I wouldn’t even have it if any decent man would have proposed to me by now and helped me figure out why it is that I gain wait whenever I eat sugar. No matter how much it is, it’s bad for me. My doctor nearly killed me, encouraging my unhealthy eating habits and refusing to give me the care I needed as my PCP. And now? Nobody will help me. I’m just a basket case with no case at all for the court room.

I want to die. I forgot… I have one more issue: Borderline Personality Disorder. Life is so fucking difficult, I’d rather be dead most of the time. Or, more accurately, never born to begin with.

I hate humanity. I hate myself. I hate this world. The only thing worth living for is my support cats.

I hope you’re all proud of what you did to me.

I finally get it. I got what you’re all saying: I’m fat and it makes me disgusting. I’m unlovable because I am not a waif. And if it’s not that, it’s that I’m “too perfect” to compare yourselves to. You don’t “deserve” love. Fuck you for denying me love because you want to be miserable, you assholes. I hope there are spacelings coming to destroy us all. I’ll volunteer to be first because I can’t live with you anymore.

Somebody, please put me out of my misery. The human condition is so miserable that I cannot bear it. I can’t even kill myself. I tried and I went insane. I tried to kill myself and somebody out there with telepathy saved me and my stupid, dumb ass from starvation.

They fed me back to health and every time I want to quit, they stop me. I’ve beaten myself many times to try to make them go away. I want to die. I don’t want this other guy in my head. He was kind of nice for a while, but he is a narcissistic asshole who only talks about himself and endless empty promises he makes, telling me he’s going to hold so many people accountable. Telling me he’s God and all kinds of shit I don’t even care about.

You’re God? So what. Why did you let reality get this bad for people like me? Why? Why do you tell me if I go to a hypnotherapist, they will find that my parents tried to murder me multiple times… succeeding briefly each time… and yet I’m still here. Why do you try to make me go to court over all the wrongs dealt to me, promising me there are billions of dollars to make? Just fucking do it, dude. You have control over my body and what I say and do… so do it. Just do it. Stop talking about it forever and a day and execute a fucking plan already.

I told you what I’d do with billions of dollars. I’d clean up the ocean and I’d remove the nuclear waste from everywhere possible. I’d jettison that waste into the sun. It should explode long before it reaches anything of import and honestly, our ozone layer should reflect it completely. I’d buy up land all around Earth and save it for the animals. In fact, I want to buy the oceans and call them off-limits for fishing for about a decade so they can regenerate. Let the animals course-correct. We are destroying this fucking planet bit by bit just so we can throw away things that used to be alive as if they were nothing. I’d filter the air of carbon monoxide and I’d make EV motorcycles and RVs and I’d open a diner that’s allergen-free, at least of the top 16 allergens, which means it’s boring, kinda, but I bet I can come up with a menu all the same. I’d publish cookbooks and I’d pay an art studio to create the penultimate love story of all time: The Mountain Dragon Man. I’ll do that one anyway because I’ll learn how to do it by myself once my parents are out of my picture.

It’s either greatness or SSI. I said do whatever already, so just do it. Do both! I can always get off SSI. Either way, I think I need food stamps for the near future because eating is hard already and I have no income, yo. So when we gonna sign up, narcissistic bastard?