I’m old enough to have experienced telephones with physical buttons. To know the way sometimes when I couldn't recite a phone number aloud I could still type it out using the memory of my body.
I think of this when I have a migraine and find myself unable to remember how to get home. I can't think about it or I'll psych myself out. I know where I am and where I want to go, it's just that in between is a void beyond the concepts of time and space. I have to trust my body to get me home, like those jokes about how the best cruise control is an old horse.
It's the domestic version of the horror that is using Daniel Kahneman's slow thinking to kick a soccer ball or have sex. It's not good. The body knows how to do things on its own. When we try to control it using slow thinking it leads to a particular type of chaos. Especially when part of my brain has gone offline, so there is no mental map, no ability to navigate the slow thinking way.
If I just let my body lead me through the automatic motions, it's all fine. Otherwise, I have to ask a stranger to look up my address on their phone. That’s fine, too. They don't know why I want to go to that particular address. They don't know how strange and alarming this is.
Of course, it's tricky when I'm coming from an unfamiliar place or the way back is complicated, since then I have to keep stopping and asking people, which can make it quite the adventure. I can't necessarily make sense of a map, so I have to figure out other navigational strategies. I know how to go from this bar to my friend's office, from the office to her apartment, and from her apartment back to mine. I follow my feet in absurd routes that eventually get me where I'm going.
I cannot express how much the existence of GPS and Uber reassure me.
I learned to say "I'm sorry, I can't talk right now. How about tomorrow morning?" from the days when my brain has stopped translating the sounds made by people's mouths into coherent language. It works just as well when I don't have the mental energy to listen, even when I can understand the words they're saying.
These experiences are helpful when I'm spending time with people with cognitive differences. Patience has never been a virtue of mine, but I can certainly relate to our shared struggles.
My brain doesn't all blip out at once. So I can't do what I'd planned to do today, I'll do something else. There are always a million things to do. I used to be really popular in offices for my willingness to take care of the filing. At the printing company I'd go run the bindery equipment if I couldn’t make sense of color correcting files. Tedious, menial chores are great for migraine days and there are always tedious, menial chores to be done.
This is all good practice for remembering that things don't need to get done my way. To know that sometimes there are reasons for doing things in absurd ways. To trust that there are sometimes good reasons for procrastination.
It opens me up to wonder, this chance to see the world differently. The world I think I know is occasionally transformed into a place that's both familiar and completely mystical.
It's been helpful since I arrived in Portugal. I've been fortunate that my internal compass has been working, although that alone isn't enough to prevent me from taking wrong turns in the maze of medieval cities. Sometimes it’s nice to ask for directions, even if I could use my phone, as an excuse to strike up a conversation and see where it takes me.
It's too bad that the words spoken to me in Portuguese that currently refuse to turn into language won't turn into words in a few hours or days when the aura symptoms fade. Eventually they'll start making sense to me, though.
Lovely writing and personal exploration. Thanks.