[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
Here's today's topic, from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
james.
There are a couple of touchpoints that would have created a much different world than the one I have now. The obvious one would be to warp back in time to when I first met the person whose name is not spoken but by dire necessity and convince my younger self that all of the warning signs are real and to go find a different and better community than the one that's on offer there. That'll cause a lot of changes in the timeline, which might mean a lot of things that are good now don't happen because I never had the opportunity for them. Maybe they would still happen some, but in a better way, to enhance the happiness that's already there. Or maybe things go worse rather than better for me by avoiding the big tragedy. It's hard to say what might have happened, even if at the moment, I know there would have been a lot of changes for the better in some of my life, even if I can't fully predict where the other changes would have landed. There's a good chance that the house that I'm currently in wouldn't be the one that I would end up in, but it's hard to game out whether that would have been better or worse, even though I'd like to believe things would have been universally better for not having gone through all of the financial and emotional damage that happened in those intervening years. That's an obvious spot to change and examine how it affected the timestream.
The spot I think I'd actually like to run back to, though, is much earlier on in life, where I had teachers in my elementary school who were concerned that I had a learning disability, based on how the teacher never actually saw me do my work and was instead doing reading or other such activities while the class had work time. The teacher didn't know that what was being covered in class was something I was pretty well aware of already and while the class was listening to the explanation, I was doing the worksheet and had it finished by the time the explanation was done. So I went to go see someone to get tested for cognitive ability, and that came back through just fine, very much so, which was good for everyone. I really want to pop back in time to that moment where things were in flux and people were worried about me and dump about thirty*mumble* years of research into neuroatypicality on the person doing the examination, giving them a pocket dimension's worth of time to study and understand it, and then hopefully letting that information help them poke deeper at the reasons why I was in their office, possibly so that something else could come out of it than "they're fine, just advanced for their age" and there might have been some suggestion to go see a person with knowledge about attention management and the signs of attention issues. Because the research of the time was still very focused on the idea that only young boys who were loudly disruptive in class might be neuroatypical, and I wasn't that.
So the change I would make in my life is essentially for people to treat me as a brilliant student who does well in academic settings and who also needs some specific supports in handling their neuroatypicality in situations outside of academia. So I could learn how to manage time appropriately, to not get stuck in a fixed mindset and avoid investing so much of my identity into a small set of things that I was "naturally" good at. And to be able to recognize, perhaps, how all my teachers and people around me were perfectly fine with letting me be "the smart kid", so that I would have to figure out how to express and practice those other aspects of me, and to find useful ways of handling failure or frustration that weren't getting emotionally worked up about it or not wanting to start because of the possibility of failure and the subsequent strong emotional states that would go with it. And that way I could go into things in my school and post-school life with the understanding of how to manage myself and how to explain to others about how I approached the world and its problems. Which hopefully would mean avoiding the terrible times with the one whose name isn't spoken, because better confidence in everything and better sense of self-worth, but also means that I would hopefully be better equipped to handle my workplace and a boss who didn't understand what managing a person with some neuroatypicality would look like, so that while I might still have a bad boss, I don't have to deal with the nightmare that was nearly getting fired for reasons I didn't understand at the time and couldn't figure out how to fix. (While in the middle of the bad relationship with the person who is not named.) I doubt that would be able to fix the situations where I have co-workers who are interested in causing trouble with me or who are trying to get me in trouble, but it probably would make it so that I could put the blame in the place where it deserved to be, with the other people who were behaving terribly, rather than assuming that there's something wrong with me and that I'm the reason why things go badly (since, basically, the consistent thing that's been in my life about bad things happening to me is, well, me, and since I had such a bad start in both work and relationships, I'm pretty well primed to have a brainweasel highway when something else goes wrong in my life.)
It's still possible the whole thing would have gone completely wrong in all the same ways, even if I had been more aware of what my brain was like earlier on in life, but I feel like having that knowledge and practice and being able to explain things to others in ways that made sense would have helped a lot in blunting the edges and the sharpness of the bad experiences or making them into something manageable instead of something terrible. Hindsight sees clearly what foresight cannot. Plus, we didn't know nearly as much then as we know now, to the benefit of the next generation, even if things don't get backported to our own.
Here's today's topic, from
james.If you could go back to any one point in your life and make one change, what would it be and how do you think your life would be different now?
There are a couple of touchpoints that would have created a much different world than the one I have now. The obvious one would be to warp back in time to when I first met the person whose name is not spoken but by dire necessity and convince my younger self that all of the warning signs are real and to go find a different and better community than the one that's on offer there. That'll cause a lot of changes in the timeline, which might mean a lot of things that are good now don't happen because I never had the opportunity for them. Maybe they would still happen some, but in a better way, to enhance the happiness that's already there. Or maybe things go worse rather than better for me by avoiding the big tragedy. It's hard to say what might have happened, even if at the moment, I know there would have been a lot of changes for the better in some of my life, even if I can't fully predict where the other changes would have landed. There's a good chance that the house that I'm currently in wouldn't be the one that I would end up in, but it's hard to game out whether that would have been better or worse, even though I'd like to believe things would have been universally better for not having gone through all of the financial and emotional damage that happened in those intervening years. That's an obvious spot to change and examine how it affected the timestream.
The spot I think I'd actually like to run back to, though, is much earlier on in life, where I had teachers in my elementary school who were concerned that I had a learning disability, based on how the teacher never actually saw me do my work and was instead doing reading or other such activities while the class had work time. The teacher didn't know that what was being covered in class was something I was pretty well aware of already and while the class was listening to the explanation, I was doing the worksheet and had it finished by the time the explanation was done. So I went to go see someone to get tested for cognitive ability, and that came back through just fine, very much so, which was good for everyone. I really want to pop back in time to that moment where things were in flux and people were worried about me and dump about thirty*mumble* years of research into neuroatypicality on the person doing the examination, giving them a pocket dimension's worth of time to study and understand it, and then hopefully letting that information help them poke deeper at the reasons why I was in their office, possibly so that something else could come out of it than "they're fine, just advanced for their age" and there might have been some suggestion to go see a person with knowledge about attention management and the signs of attention issues. Because the research of the time was still very focused on the idea that only young boys who were loudly disruptive in class might be neuroatypical, and I wasn't that.
So the change I would make in my life is essentially for people to treat me as a brilliant student who does well in academic settings and who also needs some specific supports in handling their neuroatypicality in situations outside of academia. So I could learn how to manage time appropriately, to not get stuck in a fixed mindset and avoid investing so much of my identity into a small set of things that I was "naturally" good at. And to be able to recognize, perhaps, how all my teachers and people around me were perfectly fine with letting me be "the smart kid", so that I would have to figure out how to express and practice those other aspects of me, and to find useful ways of handling failure or frustration that weren't getting emotionally worked up about it or not wanting to start because of the possibility of failure and the subsequent strong emotional states that would go with it. And that way I could go into things in my school and post-school life with the understanding of how to manage myself and how to explain to others about how I approached the world and its problems. Which hopefully would mean avoiding the terrible times with the one whose name isn't spoken, because better confidence in everything and better sense of self-worth, but also means that I would hopefully be better equipped to handle my workplace and a boss who didn't understand what managing a person with some neuroatypicality would look like, so that while I might still have a bad boss, I don't have to deal with the nightmare that was nearly getting fired for reasons I didn't understand at the time and couldn't figure out how to fix. (While in the middle of the bad relationship with the person who is not named.) I doubt that would be able to fix the situations where I have co-workers who are interested in causing trouble with me or who are trying to get me in trouble, but it probably would make it so that I could put the blame in the place where it deserved to be, with the other people who were behaving terribly, rather than assuming that there's something wrong with me and that I'm the reason why things go badly (since, basically, the consistent thing that's been in my life about bad things happening to me is, well, me, and since I had such a bad start in both work and relationships, I'm pretty well primed to have a brainweasel highway when something else goes wrong in my life.)
It's still possible the whole thing would have gone completely wrong in all the same ways, even if I had been more aware of what my brain was like earlier on in life, but I feel like having that knowledge and practice and being able to explain things to others in ways that made sense would have helped a lot in blunting the edges and the sharpness of the bad experiences or making them into something manageable instead of something terrible. Hindsight sees clearly what foresight cannot. Plus, we didn't know nearly as much then as we know now, to the benefit of the next generation, even if things don't get backported to our own.
