Continued, part 2:

When my mother was pregnant with me (and for years after), she suffered from an eating disorder, bulimia nervosa (she didn’t know the name for it, never diagnosed, of course, given the under-developed state of the area and most of the country as a whole). I remember her purposefully throwing up by inserting her hand into her throat.

While pregnant with me, she gained very little weight, so little, that on delivery day (she told me about it), the hospital staff mistook her for a visitor. She didn’t look pregnant. What followed was a breech delivery of a small baby. Throughout primary and junior high school, I remained significantly smaller and developed later than all but one of my female peers.

med. net. ca/ impact of maternal nutrition on fetal development: “Both nutrition and environment affect the ability and performance of the central nervous system. Maturation of the central nervous system is not linear. A decisive period of development represents a once-only window of opportunity that can neither be repeated nor reversed. The entire developmental period of the brain has subcritical periods, each of which may be disrupted and thereby affect the maturation and organization of the brain. Nutritional deprivation seems associated with varying degrees of intellectual disturbance such as cognitive impairments and attention deficit disorders“-

-and indeed I suffered early on and still, to this very day, I suffer from significant degrees of intellectual disturbances, such as cognitive impairments and attention deficit disorders. One reason why I’ve enjoyed so much being an active, daily participant in these forums on tiny buddha, for so many years (since May 2015, with a 6-month pause of Feb- Aug 2023), is that because of the format here, I have all the time in the world to read and re-read, copy and paste, organize and re-organize the information on the computer screen, to look up definitions of words that I keep forgetting, and in so doing, I am able to learn/ to form connections in my brain that otherwise- in other formats (such as in having a conversation with a person in real-life)- I am not able to make.

Here, in the context of these forums, I get to be.. smart, to feel the delight of being able to use my brain. But when sitting with people, hearing them talk- to me or to other people- so much is lost to me. I simply stop listening because I get lost. People say words that although I heard many times, the meaning of the words are lost to me. People connect two things that to me, are not connected.

Words people say stay in isolation… words they say do not get connected in my brain, to other words they say, nor do the connect to memories of things I heard or read before.

All through school, the way I’d study for a test (pre-computer) was to write and re-write for many, many hours. I’d then take the test, do okay (not great), and soon after the test, I’d forget the material. I remember in college, a certain professor, from the moment she started her lectures, to the moment she ended them, not a single word she said registered. The way I passed her class was to.. write and re-write and organize material from a book, then pass the test and.. forget the material.

At different jobs that required attention, such as clerical work, I failed.

I can spend hours and years in a room and not remember the color of the walls, or that there is a huge light fixture on the wall.. and once I pay attention, it’s like I see the room for the first time.. and then, I forget yet again.

Figurative language is lost on me, can’t connect words people say to figurative meaning, and often, in regard to many words, I forget the literal meaning and have to look those words up.. again and again.

If someone tries to show me how to do a task, I get very anxious, it’s so difficult for me to pay attention. I so prefer mindless, simple tasks. All this means that from the very beginning of my adulthood, and still, I am not qualified to do many, many jobs, and none that includes managing people and projects.

Part 3 of my story will be next.

anita