Dancing Upside Down

Quicksand & Polar Opposites; Grace & Frustration

I have been feeling Graced and I have been feeling Frustrated at the same time a lot recently. In other words I feel and am experiencing two polar opposites at once. It seems to be one of the biggest themes running through this whole brain injury thing.

Boy, I am struggling writing about this. It is so hard to explain. Part of what is happening as I am writing this is that my mind is darting all over trying to pull together the various thoughts so I can put them out in front of me and onto this screen. That too of course is part of functioning with a brain injury.

One of the polar opposites is feeling positive and hopeful about how much progress and improvement I am making and also feeling frustrated because the more I try to do, the more I find my current limits.

I wish I could find more descriptive words to describe how confusing this all is and how much I feel I am being pulled in multiple directions at once. I will try.

It is like for every step forward there is a slip to the side, spin around twice, fall down, crawl a little and slide backwards, then get back up and take a step forward again. I know I am improving but the physical, mental, emotional, and all the other gyrations are confusing and exhausting.

I have good days, mediocre days, and bad days. I never know which day is going to be what. I feel I am beginning to get a handle on that but then wham!; a day comes along out of the blue that knocks me off my feet for no apparent reason.

As I try to do more I run into more limits. The brain fatigue is so intense! And it is so FRUSTRATING! I am finding that my brain still works. It is getting stronger. But it gives out when I don't expect it.

I have been doing some volunteer Strategic Planning and Consulting for a non-profit. I have been doing this through the Department of Vocational Rehab to test my ability and stamina. Ability is clear in that I can still think well. I can still do excellent work. However, brain stamina is all over the map! I can have a great, productive meeting with someone but afterward be so mentally exhausted that I cannot process thoughts safely enough to drive home!!

I am writing this blog post at 3 AM because I can't sleep. I woke up from a dream in which I was struggling in quick sand. I think it is very good expression of how I am feeling about all of this right now.

Wrong Business Decision at Watertown?

Somewhere below I mentioned a "favorite" coffee place in a couple of posts.  I was doing that because I liked it.  It was new.  The owners seem nice (they still do).  I want to see it succeed.  So I mentioned it in here to help give it some free publicity.  

Sadly, it has changed.  Still the same name. (Watertown)  Still the same nice owners.  Still the same location.  But no longer the same business.  

They have gotten their liquor license and have made the decision to be a bar all day long and push the alcohol.  They have decided (and told me this today) that being a bar means they need to play LOUD music all day long; too loud to have any kind of decent conversation so I strongly do not recommend it for meetings.  They do still have great coffee and free wifi.  You just have to be able to think to a heavy loud beat.

There is a much higher margin on booze so for every drink they sell they technically make more on the booze than the coffee.  The problem is, IMHO, that there are more people who want to have a good "Cup of Joe" during the early part of the day than a good "Shot of Jack".  

They have missed a great opportunity!  They could market themselves as a great coffee place; great place for meetings, and coffee with friends during the day and as a bar starting sometime in the late afternoon.  3:00 PM would possibly be a good time.

By marketing themselves as this dual personality they would gain a few of important things:  

First, it is a fun niche and a treasure trove of marketing possibilities.  It is different.  It is unique.  

Second, they would be addressing two audiences and could use them to feed each other.  For instance during bar time they could have a special thing like:  when you buy a certain drink you get a 10% off card on baked goods bought with an expresso drink good from X hour to X hour during the day.  The X would be the slowest time of the day so would do double duty to encourage people to come in during that time.  The could make it fun and change what drinks have the bennies on them from week to week or more often.  The same could be done with the day crowd.  If you buy a bakery good and coffee you get a card that gives you a bennie at the bar during the bars slowest hours.

Thirdly, back to the two audience opportunity; it is also two age groups.  This bar is located very near 3 large hospitals and medical centers.  There are thousands of employees between all of the hospitals and related clinics, offices, and other support services.  There is nothing like what Watertown was. They had a good opportunity to do some niche marketing and missed it.  

It feels instead that they have decided to take a broad shot gun approach aimed at the owners own age group: Twenty-Somethings and pretty much only them.  I have to admit that I know very little about twenty-somethings' alcohol consumption at 9:00AM.  Maybe they have a business idea that will fly. 

I truly wish them the best with their business endeavor, but unless you are a Twenty-Something looking for a stiff drink and loud music at all hours of the day, I can no longer recommend the place.

High IQ is overrated! Or is it?

Think about it.  

There are no negative or even neutral words to describe an IQ that is more than two standard deviations from the mean.  People have a High IQ, they are Gifted, Exceptional, Above Average, etc. 

The CIVIQ Society, which accepts people with an IQ of over 145, explains: 

"That high intelligence is a gift with only positive implications is a common misconception: it brings up facilities (talents, strengths and interests) on one hand, but often also specific difficulties and needs on the other."¹

IQ falls in a bell shaped curve with long tails on either end.

Two standard deviations below the mean is considered to be low IQ or mentally handicapped. We accept that people with low IQ fall outside the norm and may need additional assistance to adapt and be successful in society. 

Sadly, the same compassion and understanding does not often exist for people more than two standard deviations above the mean.  The existence of only "positive" words to describe IQ on the higher side is an example of that.

A big difficulty for people with high IQs is that they are sorely in the minority.  Though there is a long tale to the bell curve it is a narrow one.  96% of all people fall within 30 points of the mean IQ of 100.  For someone with an IQ of 146 they are 1 out of a 1000 or in other words for each person with an IQ of 146 there are about 999 people that have a lower IQ. Therefore "gifted" people are very much a minority. The world is not set up for them!  By the term "world" I mean school, the workplace, and even many social situations.  

Plus there is the additional burden of that it is not alright to talk about having a high IQ.  If you mention it you are thought to be boasting.  It cannot be discussed on any sort of equal, unemotional, and realistic footing. In fact, it is considered more politically correct to discuss hemorrhoids than IQ!  So a "gifted" person often struggles in silence; not understanding why they don't fit in and why their experience doesn't match what everyone else is telling them.

"After a particularly tough day of feeling "different", a 9-year-old, who is thinking of going underground with her abilities, says "I don't want to be a purple leaf, when the rest of the tree is green." ¹

And a child describes herself as a cube, "in a world of flat squares." ²

Things are slowly improving in the "Gifted" arena.  There is much more awareness in schools.  Children are tested at an early age for giftedness and there are many gifted programs even in public schools.  There are also many resources on the web for parents, educators, and kids to access.  (See the footnotes below for some links.)

So, back to the title of this post "High IQ is overrated! Or is it?"  I don't know if overrated is the right word.  "Koyaanisqatsi" is a Hopi word. It means "life out of balance".  (It is also the name of an avant-garde 1982 film about the frenetic speed of modern life.)  It is how I feel about the overrating of having a high IQ.  The rating is out of balance.  It exaggerates the positive aspects of the IQ without respecting the difficulties.

Footnotes:

1. The Civiq Society
2. The quotes come from the "You know you're the parent of a gifted child when . . ." page of Hoagies' Gifted Education Page.  Hoagie's is probably the very best site for parents of gifted kids and for the kids themselves.  It is a labor of love done by one couple.
3. The cartoon is by Jeff Gregory of Jagged Smile and is used with permission.  I love his blog and his cartoons!

TBIQ

This post was actually part of the post: High IQ is Overrated! I started writing about High IQ out of my own frustration in trying to deal with this fricking brain injury. One of the big drawbacks of being "gifted" is that the brain injury was missed.

On my first appointment at CORP-TBI the doc told me that they frequently see people like me: someone who has a brain injury but it was missed for a long while because we "present well".  She went on to say that she thinks people with high IQs sometimes suffer the most because they feel the gaping hole of the injury more than someone with a more normal IQ:  The holes simply can go deeper in someone with a high IQ because there is more "space" to fall through.  Therefore, the holes may be more noticeable and more painful to the patient. 

However, even though the caregivers at CORP TBI understand on many levels, I still had the experience yesterday of testing in the high normal level on a few tests that I know I did not do as well on as I would have pre-injury.  I feel the frustration of that even if the cognitive therapist was impressed with the results.  

I do not know how to suddenly go from operating at a high level to a normal level. My normal was not normal so normal is foreign and feels less than.  I am someone who has always striven for perfection (which happens to be one of the traits of high IQ) so to do less than perfect or less than some high standard feels like failure or at least poor and lacking.  

The big thing for me is that I distrust myself.  I no longer have the brain stamina to operate at a highly functional level.  Though I can perform well in some areas I burn out easily. 

Burning out can have catastrophic results.  I rear-ended someone last week which is the first time I have ever caused an accident.  And I know it was because I had done too much that week so that my brain was fatigued.  Therefore I could not stay on task and pay attention to the traffic.  I am now terrified to drive in the city - not because the traffic scares me but because I distrust myself.  I had a brain lapse and I fear it can and will happen again.  If I had caused the accident by getting distracted by something legitimate; something that was truly distracting I might not be as upset.  But I simply looked away.  I think it was just that my brain was too tired to stay focused.

The other thing for me with now having a brain injury is that all my life I have sort of "winged it".  I have relied on my ability to quickly come up to speed on anything and everything.  I have jumped careers, jumped industries, (jumped freights too, but that's another story) and worked in many jobs that required a degree that I did not have (like RN or an engineering degree).  I never obtained a label; some kind of handle that people could grab onto and know what it means; something I could grab onto to hold me steady or bring me back to myself.  Now I am paying a price for that.  It would be far easier if I had a degree, job title, or identity that I could fall back on; some place to start.

In relation to my brain injury, having a high IQ is a mixed blessing.  It contributed to the situation of the correct diagnosis being missed for a long time.  It accentuates the sense of what has been lost.  However, it also enables me to develop successful compensatory behaviors with some modicum of ease and it allows me to "appear normal" or in the doctor's words "present well".

The Unbroken

There is a brokenness
Out of which comes the unbroken,
A shatteredness out
Of which blooms the unshatterable,
There is a sorrow
Beyond all grief which leads to joy
And a fragility
Out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space
Too vast for words
Through which we pass with each loss,
Out of whose darkness
We are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound
Whose serrated edges cut the heart
As we break open
To the place inside which is unbreakable
And whole,
While learning to sing.

                                        -Rashani

Computer Confusion!

I have not posted for quite a while due to my trusty old (read: very old) Dell laptop gasping its last breaths.  It has so many things broken on it that I am not sure the nonprofit refurbishing organization will even take it.  The funny thing is the computer part of it works fine, albeit slow.  But it will no longer charge the battery (even though the battery is fairly new), the sole USB port on the machine is completely non-functional, the CD R/W drive will not securely lock in anymore and throws error messages, and I could go on and on.

Now the good news is that a friend offered me a work trade in which I end up with a new MacBook.  He pretty much made most of the decisions for me and ordered it last Friday . . . and wouldn't you know it: Apple revamped their whole line on Monday so now the old models are on sale for less.  

WARNING:  The rest of this short post is a little more of a ramble than my other posts.  That is because I truly am in the middle of the indecision as I write.  And I am going to go ahead a publish the post because I have been silent for so long.  You have been warned!  Read at your own risk!

Apple is coming up to the plate and offering a refund of some amount because we purchased it within 14 days of the announcement of the new models.  But now I also have more options and thusly a lot more confusion.  I can get a higher powered aluminum model for not much more than we already paid.

But man oh man does that ever throw my brain into sheer panic.  It feels like there are so very many things to weigh in and then it all gets so confusing.  

Nice Ad however, I find the range of choices on the Macs about as overwhelming as the PCs.  

As I am writing this I realize that I also am getting somewhat paralyzed by fear.  I fear I will make the wrong choice; the wrong decision. Part of the fear is real in that it is a big decision.  I am someone who tends to buy for the long haul.  I have had my Dell for almost 9 years, my truck for 15, etc.  Even if I change laptops again in three years it is still an important decision because of how much I use the computer and also because it is a lot of money! 

The other part of fearing I will make the wrong decision has nothing to do with a laptop at all.  It stems from having made so many bad decisions in the years prior to knowing that I have a brain injury.  Now my trust of myself and of my decision making ability is in the basement, at best.

The thing about the computer is that I am having problems with sensitivity in my fingertips and this mouse pad on the new MacBook is bothering it as much as my old machine.  So right there is something telling me I may need to upgrade to the aluminum mousepad.  Either that or I need to figure out why my fingertips are so sore!

The questions are still looming and making a cacophony of mental noise.  The biggest one is, of course, Mac versus PC.  I have only had one Mac: the original MacDinosaur.  It had 128 kilobytes of memory. Nowadays we are talking in hundreds of gigabytes for hard drives and even terabytes in storage drive.  

As an aside regarding the original MacIntoshes; there is quite a move afoot to make them into great MacQuariums!!  Almost wish I still had mine!¹

Ever since I outgrew the MacDinosaur I have been PC; mainly because I worked at companies that were PC.  

There are camps that say the Macs are overpriced and the PCs have caught up to the Macs in bells, whistles, and software.  And then there are the diehard Mac users who swear they are the very best and would never go back to PC.  

I have to say that in using this MacBook for most of the day there are many things I like about it already.  Bang!  A small hole just got punched in the PC bucket!  

It is now hours later as I am finishing this writing and posting it.  Mac has won and so has an upgrade.  It means I am down to my last cent yet again but I think I will be very happy with my decision in the long run.  

Boy!  It feels good to be writing again.  Just wait until I get a Mac that doesn't make my fingertips ache!

Footnotes:

1. The Macquarium pictured was created by Cate & Kevin Byers. Kevin & Cate Byers put a little ingenuity into designing the lighting apparatus for their MacQuarium. Two nightlights, a 3-socket swiveling adapter, and an extension cord installed inside a custom enclosure provides a great glow inside the tank. There is a veritable world of macquariums out on the web. Google it and you will see!