Very very frustrated.
I have problems that I don’t understand with spatial awareness. For example, I seem to have no sense of direction whatsoever. I can have driven somewhere 50 times under the direction of a passenger but the second I have to try and find it again or find my way back from this place, I’m lost. I have no idea whatsoever of where I am. Nothing looks even remotely familiar. My skin literally goes cold as the realization that I don’t know where I am and a temporary complete loss of recognition of anything hits. For example: sometimes I temporarily don’t see buildings or streets or cars or whatever in relation to each other, it’s just one big jumbled mess of stuff. It’s really bad when I’m supposed to be turning onto a road in a busy part of town and suddenly all perception of depth, relationship between everything around me, and that sense of what I should do right now completely disappears for a few seconds.
There are other problems along those lines too. I historically tend to whack the right side of my vehicle on things-especially the tires-despite being a very good driver. I can’t keep consistent time with any sort of rhythmic application (be it instrument or whatever) despite being a musician for the last thirteen years. I get lost in the spaces between the notes. They suddenly turn into this giant eternity of space during which I could do anything but can’t seem to figure out exactly when I’m supposed to play the next note/beat. My handwriting is borderline illegible and no matter how hard I concentrate i can’t make it any neater. I don’t know why. I used to get in trouble constantly when i was in elementary school because of my handwriting. It was practically a weekly parent-teacher conference on that subject, I tell ya.
Today I found a new manifestation that has me really screwed up, and I think this actually started last week. I stopped drawing many many years ago because it frustrated me so bad, was an unbelievable amount of work, and there were simply some things I just couldn’t seem to learn despite extensive instruction and year upon year of beating my head against the proverbial wall. Things like value, shading, and I could never get things to be in proportion to each other. I tried-again-a few years ago the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain course back when I was considering applying to Parsons College of Art’s Architecture Dept. in NYC (no, really). I figured I’d better get my pen and paper skills up to speed since I was going to have to submit a portfolio. Well what I discovered after 6 exercises in the workbook was that drawing had if anything gotten MORE frustrating. So, I put it aside and before long I was off to med school anyway so no big loss. This evening I picked up the workbook again (I had been trying to will myself to do it for days) and went back to exercise #6: copying drawings that are upside down.
What I found is that I kept constantly getting that same skin-goes-cold panic of not knowing where I was and not recognizing anything that I get when driving (or lets be honest here, even traversing the grocery store). I hadn’t actually gone anywhere. i was sitting in bed trying to draw something. The other thing that kept happening was that my brain seemed to keep rejecting details. Like it would see them and then go “ohhh no. We are not getting involved in that. You should just make a generalized line that is similar in shape.” I would counter with “But thats not what it looks like! It’s got a lot of pieces to it.” Brain says, “Look, I refuse to do it and thats that. I don’t care if you want the information, I’m not giving it to you.”
I put up with the lost-panic and details slipping out of my grasp for about an hour before I finally got frustrated and threw everything against the wall. I don’t get it. i’ve never gotten it. Could this be head trauma related? I do have a hefty scar and dent on the left frontal cranial/supra-cranial area from hitting a dashboard at 70 mph when I was 18 mos. old. However, I was never told that I suffered any ill effects from the crash. Is this a dyslexia thing? What’s the deal?
Fortunately there’s Photoshop, which allows me to do all sorts of crazy stuff. But what worries me-both as an artist and a doctor-is that I have tremendous difficulty interpreting what I actually see without resorting to symbol substitution. In Chinese medicine thats actually an advantage, as metaphor and symbol are the stock in trade and i do great with it. Other activities though, it’s just terrible, especially things like sports video games or strategy games where I can learn and learn and practice and diagnose and be coached and train, train, train and just not improve. Why? Because i can’t see what’s actually happening. At some point I have to make a guess or an assumption and that of course is not a particularly effective way to go about things.
I really hope this doesn’t turn into a problem once I start treating here in the clinic and have higher numbers of patients than I have thus far just amongst friends and family. Again, I think the metaphor buffer should help, but it does worry me.
As for art, well, I have to accept that I will never really be able to use traditional mediums and that’s that. If I were in a more chipper mood, I would say that I should be like the little guy from So You Think You Can Dance and turn weakness into strength, but I’m not at that point just yet. Right now I’m just disheartened.
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