Anticipating a heatwave and inspired by my daughter’s purchase of one recently, I decide to buy a fan instead of finishing the assignment due next week.
It’s a simple enough job, I tell myself, and proceed to spend the best part of a morning looking at different styles and models whilst trying to create a ‘price-to-cool’ ratio based on strangers’ reviews and a consciousness that my dog will be startled by anything that makes much noise. I briefly wonder if some sort of ‘balanced scorecard’ approach is over the top.
My daughter receives hers first and finds it hard to assemble because a piece she needs to remove and replace is stuck fast which reminds me of the time I had a similar issue and became so aggravated that I went at the head of a screw so violently that it ended up as a smooth hole that the screwdriver rotated in perpetually whilst silently mocking me.
I congratulate myself on buying a model that needs no assembly but when it arrives it’s missing the instruction booklet and remote control.
‘Why do you need a remote control for a fan?’ my daughter asks, not unreasonably.
‘If you’re so far away from it you need a remote control you won’t be able to feel the benefit of it.’
She’s so annoying sometimes.
‘It was supposed to come with a remote control so I want it. The instructions are missing too.’
‘Why do you need instructions for a fan?’
When I call the customer service number I recognise my unnecessary level of aggravation.
While I don’t much like to admit it, I find it hard to ignore the little voice that had questioned whether I really needed to spend money on a fan and that maybe this was some sort of karma as a consequence of my unbridled consumerism combined with a thinly veiled attempt to avoid doing more important work.
The belief that things will probably go wrong if I imagine they might is not new.
When a piece of carpet needed replacing in the bathroom in my first house I used it as a template thinking it the best way to guard against my self-declared hopelessness at anything practical.
‘Good plan’ I told myself, seeming to have hit upon a strategy to avoid any disaster.
What I hadn’t considered was that using the old carpet upside down would result in my cutting out a perfect piece of carpet for next door’s bathroom unless I preferred to have the back of it uppermost.
I didn’t care about the wasted piece of carpet, it was my pride that went first into the skip. Worse still, I had to lug it out of the bathroom past the cabinet which I’d put the doors on upside down.
I’ve tried to believe that my stupidity is confined solely to the practical but it isn’t true.
Recently, due to a change in some training commitments I had to adjust my work schedule and move some of my clients.
I’ve got a colour-coded spreadsheet that works on a four-weekly cycle to avoid any timetable clashes and embarrassing situations like the one some years ago when I forgot to attend a session with a client suffering from low self-esteem.
‘Even my own therapist forgot about me,’ he said, barely half-joking.
Despite my diligent and colourful organisational skills it still took me over an hour to work out how I was going to make the necessary changes without creating inconvenience, something I’d be too ashamed to tell anyone apart from you.
When I was at school, I found it hard to apply myself and concentrate which was almost certainly related to my then undiagnosed ASD and ADHD. Consequently, I either wrote myself off or was written off, or both.
I could never understand why there were some things I appeared to find so much simpler than my peers and others that left me feeling like a simpleton.
I knew I wasn’t stupid, but I was frequently so damn stupid.
Reading non-fiction throws up a further reminder when something I feel engaged and fascinated by just won’t go into my brain and I circle back reading the same paragraph several times confusing myself through overthinking or getting stuck on a single word the etymology of which takes me down a rabbit hole I can’t find a way to escape.
At the start of a YouTube video I’ve found to help me set up my new camera the presenter says,
‘This is for those of you who couldn’t be bothered to read the manual.’
I think, ‘What about those of us who found the print too small, even with our glasses on, and kept being distracted by the French language version because we wanted to see how much vocabulary we remembered from our school days?’
When executive function problems meet attention deficit they create a fast track towards negative self-perception.
Sometimes, the gap between a sense of my potential and the performance I’ve been able to deliver has been painfully wide and, whilst it often left me feeling stupid, I’ve come to realise that the energy and endurance required to close the gap can feel like too high a price.
As a therapist, I’ve always been evangelical about the benefits of being in therapy myself.
While supervision is rightly compulsory in ethical practice, without being able to work through my stuff it’s hard to see how I wouldn’t unconsciously take it into the relationships I have with my clients in destructive ways.
Whilst I believed I had developed a much kinder and more nurturing attitude toward my sometimes bewildering uselessness it was only when I started working with a neurodivergent therapist that I realised how hard and unkind I could still be when I don’t get things right.
I thought about her when I received an all too common question this week.
‘How do I recover from the thought I’m not good enough?’
As I began to lay out the importance of identifying where the belief originated so it’s possible to challenge the noisy inner critic, I pondered the meaning of ‘recover’.
Many years ago, I was working with a recovering alcoholic suffering with crippling levels of anxiety.
His breakthrough came, he told me one day, when he realised that ‘recovery’ didn’t mean an absence of discomfort but rather the ability to find a new and more constructive way to deal with it.
So it isn’t that the transitory feeling of being stupid needs to disappear, it’s developing the ability to see the feeling as perfectly normal and nothing to get excited about so that you can pass through the feeling more quickly.
The delivery of the replacement fan arrives on a late spring day that’s so cold I briefly consider putting the heating on.
After the rigmarole of having it exchanged and several disgruntled conversations with customer service, I prepare to unpack it and check it’s complete.
As I’m doing so, I notice a clear plastic bag on the floor next to the washing machine and, on closer inspection, find it to be the instruction booklet and remote control from the original fan that had fallen out in my haste to set it up.
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