The Joy of Knowing Your Limits

I had a cathartic experience at a toddler’s birthday party some years ago. A bunch of baby toys were out on a rug in the middle of the room, and I watched children, ranging in age from about 18 months to 3 years old, have a go at the shape sorter. Looking happy and relaxed, they would turn blocks over, rotate them this way and that, and shove them through the matching holes in the box, until they got bored and toddled off to something else.

When nobody was looking, I had a go myself. I could get the cube through its hole, and the rectangle. But the parallelogram had me stumped. I had absolutely no idea how to change its orientation to match the aperture on the box. Turning it around in my hand made my mind feel like a Möbius strip - I had a feeling of losing my bearings in space and time, a vertiginous sense of confusion about the information that was coming in through my eyes. What had, moments previously, been a clear image of the objects around me was suddenly a mass of bewildering input - unintelligible as a string of binary code. I was momentarily washed over with fear, and nausea, and total blankness.

I have similar feelings when tying knots, parallel parking, or trying to remember a sequence of more than 4 numbers in the correct order. I struggle to count from one to ten unless I’m saying the numbers out loud. I have never been able to read music, despite 8 years of piano lessons, 2 years of cello lessons, and countless painful hours on the recorder in primary school - though learning languages with different alphabets was never a problem at all. I trip over things, mis-button my shirts, struggle to zip up coats, and have, as one well-meaning relative described it, ‘a hell of a problem with the physical world.’

Throughout my formative years, it was put to me by baffled adults who only wanted the best for me that I was careless, thoughtless, disrespectful, absent-minded, not trying hard enough. I was bright, but lazy. I was coasting, only doing the things that came easily to me. I was afraid of hard work. I was making excuses, expecting to be spoonfed. I didn’t have difficulties, so much as deficiencies of character.

Decades later, as a responsible tax-paying adult, with a good degree, an MA with distinction and a reasonable career, I found myself in a room full of toddlers, holding a chewed-on wooden parallelogram, having an epiphany.

My difficulties had never been a matter of not trying hard enough: a shape sorter toy is just not something most people need to try particularly hard at, beyond the age of 3.

Something didn’t work in my mind, the way it worked for the majority of people.

I’ve never had a way to talk about these difficulties that I can be sure other people will understand. And it feels hard, even now, to say, ‘I have dyscalculia’, or ‘I am dyspraxic’ because I know how hard it is for others to believe that basic things - automatic things that genuinely don’t require any thinking at all - can be difficult-to-impossible for me, when I’m highly competent in other areas. I’ve given up trying to describe to people the way time and space collapse in on themselves when I try to tie my shoelaces. It sounds mad and hypochondriacal and attention-seeking. It sounds unbelievable, because most people don’t have a mental model to understand it, in the same way I can’t understand a double knot, or a parallelogram in three dimensions.

I am happy to call these difficulties impairments. I don’t feel there is any shame in that. There are things I can’t do, and it makes some aspects of life hard. Not just for me, but for people around me. And just because I can’t help it doesn’t mean other people aren’t impacted and inconvenienced.

But - much as I am ambivalent about the language of ‘superpowers’ in the context of about neurodiversity - I do think the experience of having hard cognitive limitations has given me an immensely helpful perspective on some of the psychological difficulties that can be incapacitating for people who are involved in intellectual or creative work - and who also often have outlier minds and spiky skill profiles.

Problems like pernicious perfectionism, demand avoidance, work block, and situational mutism. Being unable to start or finish something, being overwhelmed by the distance between where you are and where you know you could be. Not knowing whether you can trust the power and swiftness of your mind, because sometimes it is just not there and you don’t know why.

Having specific learning difficulties means that I know on a visceral level, when I’m at the limit of what I can do.

I know what can’t feels like. (The best way I can describe it is like a glitch in the matrix).

And at my age, I’m done kidding myself that I can improve, with enough practice, in my areas of impairment. I put my energy instead into finding workarounds that don’t require me to use skills I just don’t have.

I can accept (often with sadness, but less often, these days, with shame) that some opportunities and experiences are unavailable to me - not because anyone is withholding accommodations, but because there is not really the possibility of accommodation. I just don’t have the cognitive and sensory equipment to make certain activities possible or enjoyable. And enjoyment matters, too.

I also got my disillusionment in early! I didn’t suddenly hit a wall at 30 and have to re-evaluate everything I thought I knew about myself. I had my whole life to form my sense of self around the bone-deep understanding that I am very smart in some areas and, frankly, uncommonly un-smart in others, and that this is a perfectly possible and not unusual way to be.

I know that while my ‘potential’ is a lovely idea, it’s just that - an idea. It’s not real or quantifiable, or something I must fulfil in order to win at life.

Experiencing failure, when all I wanted was to achieve and accomplish, helped me discover that mediocrity is not only survivable, but actually totally fine - a bit of an anticlimax even - and only shameful if I insist on making it that way.

Being unable to hide how bad I am at some things helped me realise that life goes on even when people around me think I’m stupid, incompetent or lazy. It doesn’t feel great, but it turns out not to make much actual difference to my day-to-day life.

I’ve also learned that, under some conditions, and in the company of some ‘safe’ people, I am at times able to do things I can’t normally do. It’s like magic. But it’s not reliable or predictable, and the ability doesn’t stay put - it vanishes again and I can’t find my way back to it. It doesn’t translate to a durable accommodation or accessibility ‘fix’. And this cognitive variability is particularly hard for more evenly-skilled people to understand (and still very hard for me, too). If I could do something once, why can’t I do it again? Why can’t I do it consistently? I wish I knew.

*

Evenly-skilled people have to learn the hard way about how it feels when your mind doesn’t do what you want it to.

Because this does happen, as well, to all-rounders who can turn their hand to most things. When pressure and stress reach unsustainable levels, and the nervous system is overloaded, the emergency brake comes on, and some cognitive processes stop in their tracks. This is burnout.

It comes as a real shock, when you have no framework for making sense of it. If you’ve gone through life being someone who copes, achieves, attains without too much trouble - who finds the simple things easy and the difficult things interesting - it can profoundly shake your sense of identity to come up against a hard limit.

You might ask yourself the things I asked myself throughout my school years. Am I making excuses? Am I being lazy? Have I overestimated my capabilities? Am I just a bit…shit? Am I being stubborn? Selfish? Careless? Do I need to force myself to push through? Punish myself? Set myself rewards? How can I fix this?

This is where it is helpful to get to a radical acceptance of the fact that we’re not always in charge of what we can and can’t do. That pressure and fear only fuel performance while the adrenaline lasts, and when that’s gone we burn out. And that we are not helping matters at all by piling on with panicky recriminations and self-loathing. This just adds further stress to an already burdened nervous system, making it harder to regain access to our thinking mind.

Letting go of some of the expectations we hold of ourselves involves a big paradigm shift. It involves confronting some hard existential truths - the limits on our time, energy, capacity and abilities - and with that comes fear and grief and anger. But when we can go through the looking glass, as it were, of the brittle narcissism of the creative and intellectual world, we come out the other side in a place where there can be richness and aliveness and meaning even when things aren’t finished, or perfect, or easy. Even when we’ve let people down and we don’t know how things are going to work out.

It becomes possible to improve our quality of life without the pressure of relentless ‘self-improvement’, to feel more comfortable with and curious about our discomfort instead of pushing ourselves aggressively outside our ‘comfort zone’ in the pursuit of an ever-elusive standard of excellence.

There is more room to enjoy our endowments of intellect and creativity, and to use them in the service of our own interests and principles. And we can relax into letting some things slide when they’re not important, seeing others overtake us without feeling annihilated.

*

As I left the children’s birthday party, I wondered what my experience of shape sorters had been when I was a child. Presumably nobody held my feet to the fire and refused to let me progress to the next stage of toddler learning until I’d mastered the parallelogram. I was able to develop around my deficits and focus on my strengths, and things turned out all right in the end.

I can’t ride a bike very well, or operate a cash register. I still can’t read music, though I did eventually learn to play Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu (slowly) by ear.

But I like my life, and the people in it, including myself. And I don’t know if I’d have been able to say that if I hadn’t spent a lot of time coming to terms with my limits, taking a balanced and pragmatic view of my strengths, and setting up my life in a way that takes the whole picture into account.