You Aren't What You Read: Part II

Frugality. Order. Temperance. Justice.

I scrawled the words on the bottom of the page, my hands shaking from nerves as I took another one of Prof. S.’s grueling reading quizzes. I repeated the virtues over in my mind, four of Benjamin Franklin’s thirteen, wondering if I had any of them.

Frugality? Kinda. Order? Definitely not. Temperance? Forget it. Justice? Maybe…

In the first weeks of the class, I had seriously questioned whether or not I could withstand the rigors of its academic requirements. One concern was that I had difficulty reading material of any length or depth due to my lack of concentration and memory.

But I knew there was something else, something that was grievously wrong with me. It became clear when Prof. S. showed a minute and a half long film on Native American culture, and I couldn't follow it. He showed it again, and a discussion ensued. I realized that other people had watched the film. Other people understood the film. Other people were discussing the film. I was so disconnected that I couldn't absorb a minute and a half's worth of material. My anxiety was running rampant. It was then that the point was driven home: I was in trouble.

I should have called my psychiatrist right away, but instead I suffered on my own, taking my deficits personally. I knew that my lack of memory was a correlated to overall stupidity, that my inability to focus made me a marginal human being, and that my disconnectedness would relegate me to be a failure in every arena: school, work, friends, and home. I was permanently cut off from the world and what it had to offer.

When I finally made it to my doctor’s office, it was time to come clean. She showed me into the office, offered me a seat adjacent to the dog, Ralph, and sat comfortably with her laptop.

“So, how are you?” said Dr. T.

I began describing my symptoms, lack of concentration, memory, focus, disassociation, depression, and gave examples. Dr. T. looked at me, nodding her head. Then she administered a memory test. I was pleased that I could remember the presidents backwards to Ford. The numerical tests were not a success.

“Depression,” Dr. T. said, “You have depression induced dementia. Not to worry. It’s not permanent.”

Dementia! Did she just say dementia! The frightening part was that the term seemed to fit. I felt like she had accurately described the severity of my feelings, my condition, and reassured me that it was temporary, that she could help me. We spent the rest of the session discussing medication changes.

“If you can’t read in a week, then drop the class,” she advised. I was happy to have an authority figure giving me some concrete direction. If I had to quit, it would be Dr.’s orders.

I left Dr. T.’s office with a drastic medication change, but with hope that my mind would begin to clear in a short period of time.

It was only a matter of days before my mood began to change, and once again I was reminded of the fickle nature of the bipolar illness. My reading improved. I could sit still and focus. I could follow conversations. I could screen out unwanted noise. I couldn’t believe the change, and I had to remind myself once again that these deficits are part of the illness and don’t have to be tolerated.

Just because my mood was turning around didn’t mean I should stay in the class. What if I continued to fail the reading quizzes? What if I couldn’t concentrate on the in-class exams? What if I couldn’t even remember how to write a paper?

I answered this question by changing my status in the class from a letter grade to P/NP, which I felt would give me the breathing room I needed. I also decided to apply myself and work as hard as everyone else. (Apparently, I was not the only human being that struggled with the reading quizzes at first, either.)

I intend to stay in the class and pass, but if I don’t, it’s really a moot point. One way or the other, I am at peace with the outcome, knowing that I’m trying, knowing that I’m managing my illness to the best of my ability.

I may not have Benjamin Franklin’s virtues of Frugality, Order, Temperance, or Justice, but I do have the most important one back in my life: Tranquility.

You Aren't What You Read: Part I

“Prof. S., can I have a word with you privately?” I asked with what I hoped was quiet dignity.

It was during the break of English 210, my American Literature class.

I trembled in anticipation of this conversation, one that would soon set me apart from all the other students. Isn’t that what I wanted? To have a legitimate excuse for my poor performance on the reading quiz?

Retiring to a space behind his desk, I shared in the lowest of tones, “I want you to know that I have…a disability. My performance in the class is going to be somewhat…patchy.”

Prof S. listened professionally, nodding at appropriate intervals as I shared that I would probably perform better on the take home assignments than I would on the reading because I had, again in whispers, memory deficits.

It was a blatant case of TMI, but I didn’t think my ego could handle a professor thinking I was merely stupid. I was merely operating under a curse of stupidity.

Prof. S. responded perfectly, advising me to go through Disabled Student Services to see if I could get more time to take in class tests, etc. He also suggested using SQ3R, a reading method that, as I interpreted it, required that you basically live with the text strapped to your body at all times.

This experience really wasn’t what I had had in mind.

See, this summer, I thought I would do something mind/life expanding and take a community college class. I thought it would be good practice for me to see if I was a candidate for graduate school, a way to ease into things. Put the big toe in the pool at the shallow end. Read some cool stuff. Meet some people. So, I enrolled in English 210, the study of early American literature.

I thought I’d be blissfully reading The Scarlet Letter in the cushy folds of my duvet. Instead, I was slogging through pages and pages of boring early American exploration narratives taken from a five pound tome called The Bedford Anthology of American Literature with tissue-paper thin pages. In addition, I had to read a bunch of Native American creation myths that blended together into an incoherent blob in my mind. And how was I to remember names like Wammeset and Wampinoag? It was flatly unreasonable.

But this class was deadly serious business; Prof. S. insisted on describing all this as LIHTRACHUH in his sonorous voice and administering brutally detailed reading quizzes.

So what I thought would be a kick in the pants was turning out to be was a royal kick in the ass.

When I enrolled, I was in denial. The truth was that since the days when I was a literature student at UCSD, my memory and retention of text, particularly unfamiliar and obscure text, had substantially eroded. It was not just that my mental faculties were on hiatus; to a certain extent they were just not there. As a result of many psychiatric episodes and the use of mind-blunting medications, I had undergone a version of mental amputation.

After the stressful conversation with my instructor, when I realized that the class was going to be a mammoth commitment of my time, energy, and would ultimately challenge one of my core deficits, my memory, I did what any intelligent disabled person would do: I decided to drop the class. After all, it was just a silly experiment anyway. It wasn’t fun, and therefore, of no value to me.

But then I did a mental double-take. What would it really mean to drop the class? It would mean that I couldn’t read, that I wouldn’t be able to read anything of literary importance ever again, that my cognitive faculties had shrunken to the size of a pea, that there was no hope of recovery. It would mean that I could not learn. Would never learn again. Would never be able to survive a graduate school program. Never.

Then there was the fact that I had developed a fondness for Prof. S. He was the King of Feedback. He had the masterful ability to take the most inane comment brought up by a student and rework it so that it sounded erudite. His brilliance massaged everything into cogent points.

He also was the King of Affirmation. When he first emphatically responded to one of my comments by saying, “good good,” I thought he meant my comment was good, when I learned later, “good good” merely meant, “uh huh.”

He was cool, and he was deadly earnest about the subject matter and ran an extremely tight ship.

Then there were the whippersnappers. I realized that some of them were not yet born when I graduated from high school, but that was part of the charm.

Was I really ready to quit? I felt like it was damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Drop the class: feel like a failure. Don’t drop the class: be a failure.

What was I to do?

to be cont...