I am very fortunate to be able to work as an academic advisor with the occasional students of my former employer. I enjoy this. Sometimes I am an academic advisor, sometimes a tutor, sometimes more of a mentor or a coach, and sometimes am just someone to hold them accountable to there school work.
Today I was working with one of these students. An intriguing adolescent boy who gets easily sucked into the rabbit holes of physics. Today one of those rabbit holes was literally black holes which are incredibly difficult to escape so it is not surprising that he was so distracted and sidetracked by this tangent he got sucked into. I enjoy this boys fascination and comprehension of physics. It is fun to talk about, but he easily gets sidetracked from the task at hand and I frequently have to carefully redirect him back to the task at hand.
Today as I was trying to maintain that delicate balance I was reminded of a time in my life and person who would allow me to go off on tangents but then would carefully redirect me back to the purpose for my visit. I thought how interesting it was that I was now doing this for this boy and it made me that much more aware of the significance of my role. I remembered how I had even blogged about this and I felt this experience with this boy helped me understand better my own analogy of the straightjacket that I once applied to my redirector. (You can read that here: https://amicrazy2.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-straight-jacket.html ).
As I am driving home from working with my student I reflect on how alone I have been in my plight since that straightjacket therapist broke me. That is when I remember I need to call my mom back. My mom who had said she would help me try and sort out my medical records and file the requests for them to be corrected. I try calling. She does not answer and I am left alone with my thoughts again. I feel a bit sad about how my mom had not followed through with that help and about how truly alone I am with these very heavy burdens. I am not surprised by my moms lack of follow through but was more surprised by her calling. These days it is unusual for her to want to call and talk about anything but she wanted to talk so I wondered why she was calling.
My mom rarely surprises me, but when we finally connect today I am surprised, very surprised, to learn that she had been going over my medical records and she wanted to talk about them. It has been so long she does not remember what I had asked her to help me with. She says they have been hard to go over, they have made her emotional. She sees some of herself and her traumas but she also feels bad about me and mine and how she did not know how to help when I needed it most. But one thing she mentions is especially interesting. She says something about how Dr. He had mentioned several times tangential speech in his notes on me. She was not sure what that meant so she looked it up and it was upsetting to her. She feels like this problem should have been an indication of the something-more-going-on-with-my-head that I had tried to explain so many times to so many different providers and that really was going on. She is upset that Dr. He did request further testing and brain imaging to be done or for me to be seen specifically by a neurologist at his facility.
After I get off the phone with my mom I look up the term. This is what comes up: "Tangential speech or tangentiality is a communication disorder in which the train of thought of the speaker wanders and shows a lack of focus, never returning to the initial topic of the conversation." this is according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangential_speech and if you read the second paragraph of that link it states: "Some adults with right hemisphere brain damage may exhibit behavior that includes tangential speech.[4]" My mom remembered that the damage found on the MRI done last December was in the right hemisphere. The MRI that was done by an entirely different institution over year after Dr. He had documented my tangential speech.
And I am emotional again. The straightjacket analogy making more sense now and my heart broken and confused once again by the burden of knowing that he knows his stuff and he knew what he was doing. Then the question of my previous physical therapist echos in my head, "what is the worst possible scenario?"
"That he is a grooming psychologist, and I have to bring it to light or to stop him," I reply (or something to that effect).
But the thing is I still don't know. It is not proof that Dr. He is a grooming psychologist, and I know that it could just be more evidence of just how messed up the whole institution is or even the industries of psychology. I have seen and heard the bias and discrimination plain and clear in the language of the empirical and scholarly research and by and from the providers. I have seen how far down the nose other psychologists will look at a person who develops feelings for a person like me. I have seen and felt just how inferior I am made out to be with my damaged brain and disorders of psychology and personality. I have seen just how rigid and unwilling the professionals are to believe that we are not inferior and that a person can be successful at adjusting, adapting and living as a well-adjusted person with the those disorders rather than the person being the disorder.
An anomaly or the member of an inferior class of people that would be shameful to be attracted to or to credit with a comparable level of intelligence? Which am I?
I am an anomaly. But just as anomalies so often are, maybe I am less of one than they think. Maybe if people would stop treating me and those like me as shameful subhumans than they might find the things that make me a successful and/or positive anomaly are not so unusual after all.
...But mostly what about the tangential coincidences of the day? Tangential speech, not to be confused with circumstantial speech.
