Words Against Mental Illness Part 1 - My Word(s)!

Transcript

Nobody gave me sin for this That’s reason why I try both This is all that’s old, I can see a thousand times of this I like writing, I really do, or rather, I like having written I frequently find it challenging to motivate myself to sit down and type words into my computer This is not the case for, as an example, painting, which I rarely find it hard to get on with But I like to say things, and I like to say a hell of a lot Usually to people around me, whether they like it or not, but most of those words disappear into the atmosphere along with the breath that I use to utter them I think that I like to communicate, but not everyone is receptive to being communicated to in the way that I like to communicate at all times Or in many cases, at any time Not everyone I know in the real world shares the same interest as me Or has a compatible worldview, or the time, or the patience, or the fortitude to hear me bang on about whatever I see fit to bang on about at any point in time I doubt this is particularly alien to anyone, particularly those who share my neurotype and or like to write Since one of the reasons we write is precisely to alleviate this particular barrier to expunging what’s on our overly, some would say unhealthily, active minds To reach through space and time to an audience that is interested in what we have to say, so that we can receive this at a time when we are willing and able to receive it There are various ways to do this, for me this includes painting, podcasting and writing, but I’m sure you have your own outlets On the writing front, I have my prose based blogs, podcasts, articles and posts, but, and not a lot of people know this, I also write fiction I’ve written various short stories and a couple of aborted attempts to write a novel, the latest of which I seem to be in the process of aborting right now I’ll let you know if I manage to keep that particular troubled progeny alive I’ve also written poetry, although I struggle to accept that I’ve actually done so since I don’t really understand poetry and can’t see how it’s possible for me to produce any given this I’ve also written countless documents, white papers, presentations and all manner of corporate articulations and bureaucratic detritus in my various day jobs, all of which required that I was clear, articulate, free of typos and other written mishaps and erudite and a confident sounding Despite my disdain for corporate speak, I’m really quite good at it, go figure I take pride in the things that I write, all of them, in the same way that I do with the images that I create, the food that I make and the recorded material that I share It doesn’t always come out perfect, but I produce all of it with thought, care and passion, I love writing and need to write Words matter to me, even if I have a somewhat fraught relationship with them, let me tell you about that You might have already noticed that I have quite a lot to say Believe me, what I’ve said thus far is just the tip of that particular iceberg I like to think I’m pretty good at saying or writing things, some might say articulate I’m no Proust or Pynchon, but I get my point across in, if not an eloquent, then a clear and entertaining way This wasn’t always the case, my relationship with words, particularly the written kind, has a rather fractious history Let’s go back to the beginning, and I do mean the beginning To the day of my birth, the 6th of August, in the year of our Lord, 1975 You might think that this rather arbitrary date would have little bearing on my later relationship with words, but you would be wrong It had a profound impact, not because that date was in any other way significant to me, or my parents, or the rest of humanity It was during an unusually sweltering summer in England during the slow, depressing collapse of the post-war socialist consensus that led to Margaret Thatcher’s election a handful of years later It’s not the year that matters so much, although I’m sure a lot can be said of us mid-Gen X kids that were born in that fractious period It’s the time of the year that matters here You see, the UK, like I assume any other first world country, has an educational system with an annual cycle Children are sent to school at a certain age, along with a bunch of other children of roughly the same age And then progress through the next ten, and in some cases many more years, in annual cycles, stratified in the same way This makes lots of sense for lots of reasons, not least that pretty much all our cultural, social, political and economic cycles also congeal around similar annual cycles I’ll not pontificate on the reasons for this, most of which I’m sure aren’t as obvious as they might seem I’m sure we can all accept that this is the case and will probably continue to be the case until we colonise other planets Anyway, as I’m sure is the case for any other school system, since we need said orderly groups of similarly aged children There has to be a method to organise them into those orderly groups The way most school systems account for this inconvenience is to pick a day of the year as the threshold or cut-off date for inclusion in a year group Those born before that date go to school and those born after wait for another year This is all well and good for the kids born after that date or in the six or so following months And it’s probably fine for most born in the latter half of that cycle But for those born in the couple of months before the cut-off, life, through no fault of their own, becomes somewhat harder This is because, as much as it doesn’t seem like it at the time, things move pretty fast during childhood Kids mature physically and psychologically at quite a rate, and one year is a long time in terms of physical and psychological maturity This means that kids born on the wrong side of the threshold, the youngest in the year, are generally at a disadvantage from day one And across pretty much every measure, for the rest of their miserable education life These are the smallest, least mature, poorest developed kids in an environment that takes precisely zero prisoners in terms of establishment and enforcing social hierarchies All because of an accident of birth The Brits among you will have already figured out where I’m going with this For the rest of you, this should all become clear when I tell you that the annual cut-off date for inclusion in a particular year in England is the beginning of September Making me amongst the youngest in my school year, the runt of the pack, the bottom of the pile Now, I know that some kids develop at sometimes drastically different rates There are some English August babies that mature significantly faster and therefore fare quite reasonably if not well within this perverse arbitrary system But the inverse is also true There are those of us destined to develop slowly, and worse, slowly and somewhat oddly So imagine being an English August baby AND a slow developer Which brings me to the second, perhaps further, maybe fourth or fifth accident of birth relevant to this conversation Although this side of things would not become clear for several decades, I, like every other such endowed person, was born autistic and ADHD and probably dyslexic and some other stuff too Despite what some wilfully undereducated dipshits would like to believe, neurodivergence isn’t caused, it’s just a set of genetic traits Autistics don’t have an extra thing or a deficit of something, they’re just a different flavour of human I was born neurodivergent and I continue to be so, and one of the constants that comes with that particular flavour of neurodivergence is slow emotional and psychological development This doesn’t equate to long term deficits in learning or intelligence, although those things may also be a part of a neurodivergence constitution But it can lead to some long term issues and certainly will likely contribute to a less than optimal education life Now I don’t need to spend time illustrating this, a ridiculous number of movies, TV, music and literature exist to illuminate the particular social perversions of school life Suffice to say that there are kids who, for whatever reason, fare well and there are people like me who didn’t and don’t This reality was all baked in before I even started school and creates obvious problems before we even consider the perversions of the English and I assume most other school systems You would be correct in surmising that things didn’t go well for me From a young age I was singled out as a laggard, slow, odd, disordered, messy, awkward, illiterate My handwriting was, and still is, unreadable, even by me I have some school textbooks from my middle school years that adorbed with impatient corrections from exasperated teachers Most of this schoolwork displays clear signifiers of dyslexia, such as reverse letters and numbers, inability to stick to the lines, malapropisms and all long past the age where this stuff is common For most of those middle years, right into secondary school, up to the age of around 14, I was in what would be politely termed as remedial classes While the other kids were learning history and maths and how to write proper English, me and my compatriots were practising how to write words in a way that they could be read or reading from books created for kids several years old junior A lot of the time they just seemed not to bother and had us draw pictures of stuff I was good at that I don’t remember being hugely unhappy at that point I do remember reflecting on why my friends in the other classes got to learn about much more interesting things while I drew pictures of the guitar that I was going to have when I joined a heavy metal band The bullying had started though, and some of my less socially acceptable behaviours had started causing me even more trouble It wasn’t as if my parents and my teachers weren’t trying to figure out what was going on with me There seemed to be an acknowledgement that there was a vaguely intelligent kid in there trying to get out So when I said I couldn’t read the words on the blackboard, yes I am that old, they truly sent me to the optician who gave me glasses that it turned out I didn’t really need There was talk of hyperactivity, an early euphemism of what would now be called ADHD And my mum diligently purged the food colourings E102 and E110 out of my diet as it was thought that these either caused or exacerbated hyperactive traits This connection has largely been debunked although I know ADHD is who swear that those additives send them loopy My parents, particularly my mum, never gave up on me, even if they seemed at a loss for what to do But largely everyone seemed to accept that I was a problematic but earnest kid who had potential but was probably a lost cause And then secondary school and teenage happened I tend to fare pretty well in novel situations My autistic brain curls up in a quivering defensive ball while my ADHD brain struts around like a peacock on coke Sometimes this is a good thing, such was not the case as it embarked on my journey with the big kids ADHD Alex needed to shut up and blend in, he didn’t I was suddenly overconfident, loud and probably very annoying This drew attention to me in all the ways and to all the people that I would have been better to avoid A combination of prior so-called friends turning against this newly empowered Alex And some fresh foes that the new school had delivered to my door I lived literally just a stone’s throw away from a school that served many local towns and villages Was a recipe made in hell The subsequent public ridicule, physical violence and ritual humiliation were depressingly predictable As a six foot tall weird kid I became an easy invisible target to anyone looking to get a social leg up or a bit of kudos in the public cruelty theatre stakes I won’t claim that I did nothing to deserve what was unceremoniously held my way But I think few people have done enough to justify the punishment that I received There was nothing else for it, autistic Alex had to take charge and do what he does best in such situations He helped me blend once again into the background You may think I’m getting off track here, perhaps I am a little But what happened next went a long way to define the adult I was to become, and not all of it bad You see, I wasn’t aware of my inherent deficits at this point I’m not really sure I was aware of my explicit and obvious ones for that matter Expolations would largely not have counted for much at that point anyway I just put my head down and got on with the businesses surviving This resulted in me drifting into the patronage of a small group of like minded weirdos Similarly focused on avoiding the attention of, well, pretty much everyone But these guys were different from my other odd friends, in that they were smart Not that my long time partners in Geek weren’t smart, they just weren’t book smart like this new bunch Really, they were just your average, nonspecific brand of secondary school nerds Not quite Malcolm in the middles, mates, but part of that lineage And I understood them, and they seemed to accept me as one of them As one of the smart nerds, smart, me, the kid who could barely tie his own shoelaces Let alone write articulately and do useful stuff with numbers I don’t really know when the change happened, but as best I can fathom A good space and broadened perspective this change in school time social group afforded me Changed my outlook, and pretty profoundly I found myself paying attention in the hard classes such as maths and science I found that I could follow along and started to jump ahead of the other kids in my group Admittedly this wasn’t that hard since I was still in the problem kid group with the no hopers and the trouble makers But at some point a couple of teachers noted that I wasn’t the dunce that they’d been led to believe I was asing, and I mean 100% asing, maths and science tests I was moved from the bottom maths class to the second from the top I worked my way up to the top tier in science too I don’t remember feeling smart at this point And those around me saw to it as their business to keep me in my place And made sure I knew damn well that I wasn’t I think I saw myself as a dumb kid who knew stuff English classes were still a struggle though I was and still am to a degree terrible at comprehension exercises Essentially reading a body of text and answering questions about it in an interpretive fashion My handwriting was still unreadable When asked to read anything out loud, a daily requirement at that point I was terrible, another problem that persists to date In any language orientated classes I still looked like the no hoper everyone seemed to know that I was While all this was happening, in my free time I was getting slowly more immersed in the music, movies and the cultural underbelly of the weird and the wonderful I loved heavy metal horror and sci-fi, iron maiden, star trek and zombie flesh eaters I started to develop a sensibility around narrative and language And the possibilities are both in terms of exploring ideas and creating worlds In short I became aware of the purpose of writing and more generally the arts It was a world that I tried to bring into my school life but to little avail Unfortunately the tried and tested methods for imparting information to the young Consists of indoctrinating information for later regurgitation in a very specific form Creativity when encountered was usually a happy or irrelevant byproduct When I encountered the wonders of learning and writing and painting I saw tools to achieve an end That end was making cool stuff like that which I spent my spare time bathing in To be clear my teachers didn’t have a problem with the things that I wanted to create They just considered them irrelevant What was relevant was writing things correctly, spelling, grammar, syntax, dates, methods, facts I’m actually pretty decent at that last one but I rarely absorbed the facts that they expected and required me to I muddled through It was too late for me to ace maths and science, just too much time was lost My GCSE results for those dramatically exceeded what anyone had any right to expect from me though I did well at art since that was what I spent most of my time doing but scored worse than many expected Mainly because I didn’t do what I was told and suffered because of it In English I did predictably poor to middling, a GCSE grade D Writing words were just not for me I could get meanings across, the words I used when others could read them were not terrible They did what they were supposed to if not always turning up in the right order and spelling But everything that surrounded them was all wrong That being the case it didn’t matter how creative I was I didn’t have the skills to support it I didn’t give up though I kind of couldn’t I’d left school giving myself a merciful opportunity to reinvent myself By this point I decided that I wanted to be in the movies or maybe TV Down that path lay many things but looming large among these was the need to create and navigate words Perhaps not an industry with the greatest reliance on words but plenty of them are needed To be fair most of the paths that interested me were going to be heavy on the words So when given the opportunity to retake GCSE English with a full year of tuition to get me over the line I grabbed at it This time I took it seriously because it mattered I remember being set a relatively Monday story writing homework exercise and going to town on it I wrote some adventure about a couple of pensioners robbing a bank just for the kicks It was awesome I think The tutor thought the story was excellent and then gave it a shitty grade Why? Because all the words and the grammar and the punctuation were wrong It was so frustrating I just couldn’t understand why anyone cared so much about all the grammar stuff Surely it was the spirit, the creativity, the value of what you write that matters Nope That stuff is simply not a factor when it comes to GCSE English This was further exacerbated by my complete incapability of checking my own work Bet over a year later I got the results of my second attempt at GCSE English I could not believe it All that extra work My grade? Drumroll Another fucking D I was blown away that such an abject feat was possible But this pretty much crushed any ambition I might still have harbored to do stuff with words I didn’t give up exactly I just kind of assumed that any path before me would have to not wholly be reliant on writing Being a scriptwriter, for example, was off the table No biggie, it was what it was But over the years I still couldn’t shake the urge to write I had so many thoughts and ideas in my head there really only was one way to get these out Well, two, the other one was talking and I did a lot of that I didn’t end up in the movie or TV industries Via a strange confluence of coincidence and circumstances I ended up joining the corporate train during the dot com boom And on the biggest train of all, that of amazon.com Well, amazon.co.uk, but close enough I was one of their first 20 employees in the UK And briefly occupied the same physical space as Jeff Bezos But that’s a story for another day I learned many lessons during the subsequent years of corporate servitude and assimilation Not least that the main task for such a borga simulant Was to consume and expel information to other assimilants The ratio between spoken and text based information Skewed towards the former in my ADHD driven early days as a warehouse operative Then an IT support peon Lately as I transitioned through management that ratio migrated Then programming happened Here’s where things get a bit odd Because anyone vaguely familiar with the activity of programming At least in the traditional pre AI sense Will know that it’s almost entirely concerned with the creation, consumption and manipulation of text Let’s zoom out a bit I’m not officially dyslexic I’ve always struggled with reading though It took me until the age of 20 to make it through an entire novel I think this might have been Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strangeland Which I was probably reading because I made and had a song of the same name It took me a long time As has every other novel or other extended body of text I’ve attempted since I frequently start but don’t finish novels My greatest feat of reading is finishing Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy Approximately a squillion pages It’s epic in scope and length and epically infuriating In terms of the use of Deus Ex Machina in its final chapters The advent of Audible was my saviour and 90% of my written word consumption Is done via that and similar services As well as podcasts and the like When, fairly recently I was talking to an adult in her forties Recently diagnosed as dyslexic I exclaimed something along the lines of How does a person get to their forties without realising they’re dyslexic? She told me that it’s not uncommon And that she just muddled through with a constant sense that she was doing something wrong Or maybe a bit thick This stuck with me because it mirrored my experiences with late diagnosed autism and ADHD So as with those I went online and took some surveys Compared myself against some checklists and appeared to ace every one of them But in the wrong way According to the Google web I’m probably dyslexic To add to my growing list of neurological peculiarities Who knew? Certainly not me It’s certainly explained a lot But hold on I can write code AKA programming And was known to write large treaties of stream of consciousness corporate bullshit And have written short stories and partial novels and blogs I contributed to publications and written white papers Over the years my meandering and ever restless brain had taken me in all sorts of directions And I decided since I could learn how to code A thing that clever people did I should be able to learn how to write proper too In fact I’d already realised that I was half decent with words Thanks to the vast volumes of well articulated corporate piffle I was expected to produce It was hard though Reading my own work back was the hardest bit I could churn out the words But that’s rarely enough For anything longer than the terse email reply you need to check it over At least to make sure it actually said what you meant it to say In my case I usually discovered a muddled mess of misstatements and typos I knew how it was meant to look It just didn’t And in lots of weird ways I frequently type NO K-N-O-W when I mean NO N-O I switch S for 5 and 1 for I The word guarantee is unspellable for me No matter how many times I try to memorise the correct spelling Thank God for spell checkers The same is true for countless other words Don’t get me started on I before fucking E Since I find reading hard and my writing is at best haphazard The job of revising and copy editing is difficult to the point of torturous Even after excruciating multiple revisions I frequently still find typos and other problems in text that I’ve revised to the apparent nth degree Yet still I’m able to churn out vast bodies of text and code How is this possible? I’ll tackle these separately since I think the reasons are different Written text, prose, creative writing, documentation, email, that sort of thing Is a bit easier to explain Spelling and grammar checkers, coping mechanisms, productivity hacks More recent technological innovations such as transcriptions and text to speech Sheer brute force determination and stubborn persistence All these factors would bear considerable examination But that’s for another date Non-coders tend to think of code like normal written text Structured language with specific syntax and vocabulary that is read By humans at least, from top to bottom, from left to right This is, to an extent, true If you were to structure a programme or an application in the form of a novel You would likely see things that resemble sentences, paragraphs, pages and chapters But there the similarity ends Reading page 2 of your code novel Might require consuming the whole of chapters 6 and 7 first Various words on that same page can only be understood by referring to phrases at the top of the page But only then if they aren’t redefined in another part of the novel Also you might frequently need to access the entirety of several other novels In the same seemingly haphazard way to be able to consume your novel at all All the while the novel is creating extra stuff like more text and images That also need to be comprehended to understand the overall thing It’s like choose your own adventure on steroids and with byproducts Rather than a linear sequence of statements A computer programme is more like a network of related elements Instructions, information, items, consequences The order of things matters less than the relationship between things And the state of the overall system This works well for me because it closely maps to my cognitive type Some people are linear thinkers In their world things happen in a sequence of circumstances, actions and consequences To such a person my world would seem like a jumble The linear state of things matters much less And is less apparent to me than the strata of underlying relationships between things and events I see connections that are not at all obvious to others It means that when some are observing thing B as a consequence of thing A I’m asking why thing A and thing B exist in the first place And noting some obscure connection to thing F There’s nothing special or particularly unusual about this It’s just a cognitive style We’re all different But it does give me a leg up with regards to coding That helps mitigate my otherwise troublesome deficits with text Code also has lots of white space Has a clear logical and predictable structure And is free of abstractions At least in the literary sense If you don’t understand something just ask the internet or an AI or another coder No need for interpretation or arcane knowledge to decipher literary illusions It’s text Jim, just not as we know it No, code I’m good with It’s all the other kinds of texts I struggle with And not just the English stuff either I’ve found it cripplingly hard to learn foreign languages I can just about get by in French and I know a smattering of Dutch having lived in both countries I know people who pick up new languages like contracting a cold But for me the cognitive load of reading a foreign language And transmuting that into English and making sense of what was written is just too much I also struggle with any English that isn’t fairly standard modern English Textbooks I generally fare okay with since they tend to use dry language, clear structure and lots of pictures But Shakespeare is a no go zone for me Even performed since I also have slow auditory processing Joyce gives me a headache although I suspect that’s the case for most people I find Jane Austen’s use of language incredibly amusing But can consume maybe a paragraph in one sitting before I get a dull throb behind my eyes I’ve really tried with poetry But the cognitive load it puts on my poor impaired linguistic brain makes it largely unintelligible Even if I take it really slow Even after having read explainers and interpretations This is also not helped by the fact that I am, at least to a degree, aphantasic Which means I have little to no mind’s eye Rendering visually descriptive poetry or prose, pointless and boring to me I’m wired to struggle with words But in a weird patchy sort of way Yet I’ve always felt almost existentially compelled to express myself via words So I picked up a bunch of hacks and coping mechanisms to help One of these is to structure my authoring environment in roughly the same way that I structure my coding environment Using many of the same tools This helps manage the chaos and Since coding environments tend to be pathologically flexible Means that I can customise them to account for my manifold peculiarities So I use the ultra customisable text editor known as NeoVim to write And the ubiquitous version control system Git when redrafting Helping manage my constant need to fix stuff I also have various home grown apps that help me convert text to speech and back again So I’ve muddled through but to my mind a lot later than I should have done Yes it’s harder for me but my literary spirit should never have been crushed in the first place Not suggesting that I’m some lost literary genius But had the school system nurtured my creativity rather than crush my spirit via syntax Then maybe I would have discovered my punch shot for words a lot earlier And worked through my now obvious challenges a lot sooner But this isn’t all about words Or at least not words alone In modern society our ability to use words is intrinsically linked to our perceived intelligence and social status The less able you are with words the harder society is to navigate and the more left behind you get This wasn’t always the case A couple of hundred years ago when most people couldn’t read General society was tailored in much the opposite way An obvious way to see this is in the names of British pubs Such as the dog and bucket or the crown and anchor Because most of their patrons couldn’t read They gave themselves names that could be represented by images or other visual cues So meet me in the cock and ball meant exactly that Meet me at the establishment with a picture of the male chicken and the male bovine on the sign But these days and especially so after the advent of the internet And only slightly relieved by the emergence of visual pseudo languages facilitated by emojis and visual memes Text is everything As far as almost all of the best paid careers are concerned If you can’t write good you can’t come in Typos on CVs will lead them to be immediately binned If you can’t express yourself in the stated pseudo eloquence of business speak You simply can’t progress But it’s worse than that Ability to articulate yourself via the written word is considered directly synonymous with actual intelligence If you don’t use the correct incumbent form of language in the accepted way Fast tracks of society will actually look down on you It doesn’t matter how erudite, learned and wiser things you have to say are If you don’t express them in the right way They will be at best ignored and at worst subject you to derision and exclusion It’s partly for this reason I don’t have a degree Even though legions of much less smart, able and deserving people have My original attempts to go to uni in my late teens didn’t pass the articulation barrier And since I came from a poor background my options were socially limited I tried on no less than two occasions in my adult years to make it through a degree course And write what I considered to be a wrong Both part time, both came to an end after the first year My failure to follow through was for various reasons The chief among these was the exhaustion that came from the pressure to do so much reading and writing This was then exacerbated by my ADHD need to go and find something else novel to obsess about Why did I feel the need to get a degree despite having carved out a very successful career doing smart stuff? Because despite mine ambiguously proving to everyone that encountered me that I wasn’t thick I still felt thick Those formative years struggling to make sense of a school system that couldn’t make sense of me And the subsequent struggles to do all the stuff that most others seemed to find easy Left me with a web of psychological scarring that I’m now only starting to Not heal, but perhaps assimilate and accept So yes I did manage to do the things that society expected of me But I had to work twice as hard as most other humans to pass muster Combined with my various other societal and interpersonal challenges This led to frequent episodes of Burnout and a lifetime of shitty mental health And yet despite all this I still feel strangely like I don’t have the right to express myself via the written word Like it’s not something someone like me should be doing A fake, a fraud, only pretending It’s irrational but it creates a type of motivational drag that, combined with the other difficulties outlined here Makes the whole thing even harder Still, here I am, 5000 words plus into a diatribe about how hard I find it to express myself using words Dreading the job I now have of revising and preparing it for publishing and recording One of my coping methods is to do basically no editing as I go along Preferring to let the words flow uninterrupted in whatever form they may arrive This makes the drafting process fluid and less stressful But means that redrafting is a real chore Friction, friction, friction So what of all this self-pitying, naval gazing? I’ve had a hard time, but hasn’t everyone? What makes me special? Well that’s exactly my point, I don’t think I am How many others, like me, had their literary spirit trampled at a young age for deficits that were no fault of their own Despite possessing obvious and apparent intelligence How many budding Oscar Wilde’s and Richard Feynman’s are now lost to obscurity because their brilliant work had punctuation in the wrong place How many didn’t have the opportunities and luck that I had to prove to the world, if not myself, that I was worthy We live in a world which, albeit with some caveats Information flows freely and is available to those who seek it Where opportunities are far less restricted by geography or social status This transition came at a cost Since so much of that information and so many of those opportunities come with the price tag of lexical proficiency I’m not saying that this is inherently bad, since language is the very bedrock of intelligence Just so that we should all be a little more accepting and less judgemental of those with difficulties in this area To celebrate creativity and academic smarts Even when it comes in a form that’s less than perfect Things have definitely improved And the identification, acceptance and provision of accommodations is much more widespread than it was when I was a kid But certainly in my place of dwelling, the UK, there’s a long way to go in both education and the workplace to close the gap Like much of what I say on this podcast, my message is less rise up and right the wrongs and more you’re not alone I will continue to churn out words in my own way, at my own pace and probably whether anyone is reading and listening or not It will likely continue to be imperfect, at times clumsy, sometimes garbled But always with spirit, creativity and an all-consuming desire to be heard, to be read and to be accepted If you feel the same desire but have similar struggles, I, at least, feel you Keep trying because we all deserve to be heard And for the rest of you, be prepared to listen Ask against mental illness