Unwritable

Unwritable HARRISON MAHLER George Washington University, 2020 Nonfiction 2 The neurologist’s office does a good impression of hospitality. Warm color palette, enticing toy chest in the waiting area, and a generous spattering of decorations in each patient room. My shins hit only the cushiony edge of the checkup bed as I clamber up onto it. The other doctors had uneven drawers, cold metal protrusions that scrape at a kid’s legs like a lion not quite trapped in its cage. I know the feeling. I’m that lion too. My rapid foot taps add a backing soundtrack to the quiet office and my mom tells me to stop it. I move to my nails, biting through a middle finger’s worth before my mom threatens a mouthful of soap once we’re home. I start rhythmically clenching and crashing my teeth together to the beat of a song I’ll one day know, but the doctor shows up before my mom can hold my jaw still. The neurologist is the kind of man who will always look fifty-something no matter what age he actually is with perpetually balding hair and a thick Israeli accent I’ll eventually hear behind no less than four different languages. “Well, little man,” he says, flipping through a folder of diagnostics and test results too thick for any normal four-year-old. “We’re going to put you on some new medication. You know how to swallow pills, right?” I nod. I like taking pills because they make me feel like a grown-up. I love the ritual of it, the medically mandated clockwork regularity, the way you can cheat in a solid along with a liquid, the unknowable magic behind the capsules dissolving into the body. The one he gives me is a small beige-yellow thing containing 18 milligrams of what I assume must be salvation. No more being told to be quiet because I will be quiet. No more being told to sit still because I will sit still. No more being told to focus because I will focus. On the car ride home, I daydream of being the smartest kid at school, of the birth of a new me, a better me, a me under my own control, a me that will see all my dreams come true effortlessly. And it works. An hour after I down the capsule on a waterfall every morning, the switch happens. My entire body tenses up, the muscles in my face and extremities vibrate, my heart rate rises, and the whole world slows down because it turns out the cure for hyperactive disorder is a stimulant. Go figure that one out. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Foundationalist Volume V, Issue II, 2020 3 But then there are the side effects. Some days my appetite gets so suppressed that the mere smell of food makes me nauseous. Some days I get headaches so intense that I can feel my heartbeat in my brain. Some days my body runs too hot, slicking me and everything else I touch with sweat. Some days I’m asleep for ten hours and wake up feeling like I just pulled an allnighter anyway. And of course, some days I forget to take it at all. There’s something cliché about that realization. Usually it’s about an hour after breakfast, when I notice all my nervous ticks are ticking at once and that I’ve only gotten hungrier since I ate. By that point, it’s a lost cause. If I take it that late, I’ll be lucky to squeeze a single hour of real sleep out of the night. So I try to live anyway. The world’s covered in a fog thick enough to swim through and yet there’s so many things happening that I can’t stop my mind jumping helplessly between them. I tear at myself, always mentally and sometimes physically, as if I can beat myself into controlled submission. And the hunger, oh the hunger, the hunger of a side of me that has been locked away for months, of a side that has dopamine receptors so broken and fried that it claws pathetically at any and every pleasureful stimulus in a useless attempt to feel anything at all in a world that is too fast and too silent and too numb and too much and too little all at once. The trick to coping is to make your mind scream nonstop until the day is over. Reality may be covered with static, but at least some of the buzzing background noise is yours, and that’s enough to latch onto sometimes. No wonder I got called a retard so much. Ableism is the one side effect every doctor conveniently fails to mention. I was able to hide amongst the neurotypical for a while. Every kid is a little jumpy, aren’t they? Maybe not quite as jumpy, twitchy, or tick-y as me, but I don’t think you’d have noticed unless you looked with a magnifying glass. For a time, I got to laugh at the special-ed kids on the other side of the schoolyard with everyone else. They were the ones who weren’t lucky enough to be able to hide it, who got cordoned off lest an “episode” occur with one of the beautiful normal children that could cost the school who knows how much in legal fees and reputation. The isolation of the different is a small price to pay for a sense of normalcy, right? !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Foundationalist Volume V, Issue II, 2020 4 But then the masquerade broke. See, ADHD isn’t my only disability, it was just my first. I think of it as a sort of “Neurodivergence 101: Intro to Your Fucked-Up-Beyond-Repair Brain.” Things wouldn’t get bad until my hands betrayed me. In kindergarten, I learned how to write. I wasn’t very good at spelling, putting spaces between words, keeping lines straight and stable, or remembering when exactly to use a capital or lowercase letter instead of whatever my hand found easiest. It was kindergarten though, so no one was that worried. All my other work was fine. More than fine actually, more than fine enough for me to “earn” a spot in the “Alpha Program,” the one for the “smart” kids to have their own space separate from everyone else. The salvation pill was working, my mind was getting faster and sharper every day, and I couldn’t imagine anything was enough to slow me down. Which is why it was all the more surprising that my scrawl didn’t get any better. It might have even gotten worse in first grade. By the middle of second, the failing marks in handwriting were starting to become a problem that the adults in my life were noticing. I was sent off on the weekends to more psychologists for more tests until they came back with a diagnosis of something called dysgraphia. “It means you’re going to have to try a little harder than normal when you’re writing, okay?” one of the nicer doctors said after I spent three hours playing with blocks and failing to draw the shapes I made afterwards. That meant it was catchup time for me. I started getting pulled out of class two or three times a week, confined to a closet-like room in the basement to spend an hour trying fixes, testing my motor coordination, and exercising my hand muscles. Soon, the other kids started to notice. “What do they pull you out of class for?” one of them asked me during lunch while I tried out the pencil grips I learned in the basement on a chicken tender. I hung out at the smart kids table, the one for all the young little boys and girls who would someday realize that intelligence is an awful thing to build an identity upon. The teachers told us we were so very sharp, curious, and observant, but in the hand of a third grader that could turn into a weapon. “Oh, just some extra help for some stuff.” My answer was plain and vague because I didn’t fully understand what I was getting pulled out for either. After all, I was only 18 milligrams different from the rest of them, right? !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Foundationalist Volume V, Issue II, 2020 5 “Oh, okay. Does that mean you’re retarded?” The question wasn’t meant to be hurtful. Their voice was more concerned than anything, afraid that the appointments meant I’d soon grow a wheelchair, lose control of my arms, and be pushed over to the side of the playground where all the other retards lived. “No, of course not!” I answered, even though I was surely afraid of exactly the same thing. I’d have plenty more conversations like this and you’d be surprised how many were with adults. Yes, I already know that my print seems to have evolved from chicken scratch rather than anything human. Yes, you’ve already made the joke about how I’ll never be able to hold chopsticks right. Yes, I understand that someday the real world will come knocking and I won’t have anything to hide behind anymore. Maybe that has something to do with why a year and a half of physical-developmental therapy did nothing. Or maybe dysgraphia is just a real son of a bitch. It manifests differently in different people, but for me things always come back to the physical side of it. Handwriting hurts, in the most literal sense. The medical term is “writing fatigue,” but I don’t think that does the feeling justice. That doesn’t cover the way that my muscles ache and tremor after writing only three sentences, the way I half-drop-half-throw a pen when I’m done like it’s turned to molten rock in my fingers, the way I instinctively shake my arm afterwards like the dysgraphia can be forced out if I try hard enough, the way “h”s and “n”s and “r”s and “m”s melt together under my pen until they’re interchangeable, the way “f”s and “y”s and “G”s are like syringes being forced all the way through my palm, or the way that I stab at the paper with a pencil until one or both break like I can finally carve the right runes if I just push down hard enough. By fourth grade, the school gave up on fixing me and my atrophied hands. A year and a half of stenciling exercises, pages of copying, all kinds of exotically lined paper, gigantic pens with squishy grips, all for nothing. So they started trying to work around it instead. For big tests, they would put me in that same basement closet with some college student who wasn’t getting paid enough to scribe for me. This worked in the sense that it let me do the assignments at all, but each new scribe brought a unique and thrilling flavor of ableism to the table. One forced me to listen to them read the test passages out loud, torturously slowly, even though reading had never been an issue for me. One !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Foundationalist Volume V, Issue II, 2020 6 bubbled in the responses on my answer sheet for me even after I told them I could do it myself. The worst was when they’d ask me to spell out what felt like every other word of my essay answers to make sure I wasn’t “cheating on spelling” even though spelling was part of my dysgraphia too. One time, I was practicing spelling with a new developmental therapist and he yelled at me because he thought I was doing so badly that it had to be on purpose. “Sivilisaton” is carved into my memory alongside “least favorite movies” and “high school crushes.” School quickly became a series of coping mechanisms. They put a scribe in class, but I begged them to leave once my friends stopped associating with a retard like me. They gave me voice-to-text software to use at home, but the technology wasn’t exactly there in the twilight of the 2000s. They gave me this typing-pad thing that seemed promising, but it was just a poor digital imitation of a typewriter with a long calculator-like screen that couldn’t display more than three lines of text at a time and that only scrolled if you sacrificed a goat or two first. All of these failed, tried to get around the wall that is the pencil and paper by putting up different walls that were more visible to everyone else. I lost a lot of friends to those walls back then. You can’t ask an elementary schooler to deal with the stigma of sitting next to the kid who spends all class muttering to a scribe or to himself or tapping clumsily on a keyboard that broadcasts just how different he is from everyone else, just how retarded he is. I wouldn’t really say I was bullied. Then again, it’s only recently that I put all the memories together, so make up your own mind. Everything was about to change for me anyway. In fifth grade, someone decided it might be a good idea to try giving me a laptop. My grades were starting to slip across the board, the content now too complicated for me to slide by without taking any real (or readable) notes. It was a small and shitty thing, a $200 or so netbook with a battery life of two hours on a good day that lagged if you tried to type too fast or do anything fancy with Word. Yet somehow, and I still don’t know how, I freed myself with it. The laptop didn’t feel like a new wall, not to me. The keyboard was – no, is an extension, a true-to-life metaphor for the self, for my self. Cold blue lightning sparks from every keystroke like a thunderstorm, carving language onto reality the way a pen and ink never could. Under my atrophied, dysfunctional hands, the keyboard feels like it could let me write forever. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Foundationalist Volume V, Issue II, 2020 7 But there was a whole new kind of ableism to contend with: Jealousy. “Why do you get to have a laptop?” asked in all shades of curiosity, accusation, anger, confusion, and want. For a while I made up answers or dodged questions, but eventually I figured out answering honestly was a useful filter. I watched their face muscles as I said “It’s called dysgraphia” for those hints of displeasure, annoyance, or paper-thin pity that I’d had so many opportunities to practice spotting. I’m still using it actually, and it’s as good as ever at turning away assholes, ableists, and others who still somewhere in their heart believe in a version of phrenology. As middle school came and went, the jealousy got worse. Classmates started asking teachers if they could use their laptop too, and sometimes the teacher would make me explain why they couldn’t. I’ve been accused by peers and adults alike of doing anything in class from watching porn (never true) to playing video games (only sometimes true). Sometimes teachers would rip the laptop away from me, force me to write on paper with hands now more atrophied than ever thanks to disuse, and watch me with eyes daring me to slip up the “act” and write legibly by accident. Even when they caved in, I never got any apologies. It’s funny how, as time has gone on, teachers and professors have become the chief source of any issues. In high school I still stood out, but my classmates were on the whole "mature enough to understand what it meant to be different" phase. Sometimes I caught a hint of envy in their eyes on test days, but I wasn’t the one who got singled out when someone called me a retard anymore. My “superiors” though, they’re a different story. With them, I’ve had to fight for the right to my tools and my metaphors more often than not. I’m lucky that I was able to get my difference made official, wrapped up in some nice looking papers that obligate even the most old-school of curmudgeons to let me fill their classrooms with the tip-tap of my typing. But the worst still comes out sometimes. Stop me if you’ve heard any of these ones before: “Computers distract you and all those around you.” “Studies show that students encode information better when they write it down.” “Screens inhibit creativity.” “All writers should carry a notebook with them.” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Foundationalist Volume V, Issue II, 2020 8 “I don’t want to be staring at the back of a laptop when I look at you.” “Take out a piece of paper and…” You get the picture. Whether the spiel was six years ago or last week, it’s always the same. The word “cliché” comes to mind, and I have plenty of those. There’s the part where I have to decide on the first day if the “no laptops” section of the syllabus is worth getting into a public spat over. The part where I have to write my email on a sign-in sheet and convince them that it’s not a lie or a gag; it’s just me. The part with the joke about doctor handwriting, which they always seem to think I’ve never heard before. The part where they convince me that this will always be the thing holding me back. The part where I really am just another fucked up retard with a pair of learning disorders who’ll never really be a writer. There’s an intuitiveness to the thought that almost wins sometimes. Obviously, a writer has gotta know how to, y’know, write, right? Funny how that’s worked out so far. Very funny. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Foundationalist Volume V, Issue II, 2020