Makeup Post

This is a makeup post for my missed class on Wednesday. I was having  a hard time writing and was finally able to write by sitting down and putting into words my experience with language. I'm not sure it will make sense as I'm not sure it makes sense to me at all, but maybe something good will come of this. 

My grasp on languages sometimes feels like a sinking ship, lost in the night. It is somewhere out there, but it bobs and weaves like a buoey at sea, tossed by waves that are dark and deep and mysterious. My grasp on languages is akin to the Loch Ness Monster, wild and mysterious but still untamed, and, at its heart, possibly not even real. I suppose then I could be nothing more than a collection of corks, arranged against a background to cast the illusion of a great and wonderful creature. 

As a child, I learned language, in fact I spoke and read earlier than anyone in my class. I was proud of this; it was an achievement, and I wasn't fast or the loudest, I walked with a limp and had choppy black hair that brushed my shoulders. I didn't speak much at all, except to the teachers, and even then, their urgings of me to speak up and show how smart I was only led to teasing, so I retreated back into the inky black silence. I learned that my language; how I communicated, was disconnected. I felt like I could connect to a good book, to a cartoon, to my parents, to the spider that climbed up the leg of my desk. I felt like I could connect to the beanbag chairs in the room which let me sit deep in them and to the therapsit I visited on Mondays, her office smelling perpetually like toast and rosemary. 

But language is not the same thing as communication. I was not a child who knew well how to communicate. I was literate in only one half of the equation. I remember vividly when the teacher, her voice stern, told me that being on the spectrum did not mean I had an excuse. I was not on the spectrum. I didn't even know what it was, back then. When my mother, anger in her voice, stormed into the office and pulled me out, I asked her if it was bad to be on there. She said of course not, but that wasn't my problem. I just needed a little more time. 

I wish that like a sinking ship I took on water, it covering all the imperfections in my learning. The learning that, when I was older, switched to making more sense (except for math), and allowed me to form friendships I still cherish. Of course, these friendships were a concious effort. They were always concious. They didn't just "come" like they did for the popular kids or my brother. They came like oar strokes on a frothing sea, deliberate and labored and always looking backwards for a life raft or a ship to come save me.