Mirror Images

Fascinating dinner conversation. I'll condense it into a monologue by T. This is a pretty accurate rough translation:

"I keep thinking things that I don't want to think. Like, if I touch my right cheek with my right hand, I feel like the left cheek is going to be sad because it didn't get touched. Then I think my left hand is going to be sad because it didn't get to touch anything, so now I have to do it again with my left hand. I don't want to think these things because it just makes me tired because I keep touching and touching and touching. I'm trying not to think like that, but I just keep doing it. Sometimes when I feel like there are strings on my left hand that are making me want to move it, I pretend there's a knife in my right hand and I cut the strings, but then I think, Oh, no, the knife wasn't sharp enough, I have to cut it again. And I cut it again and again and again...Ugh!"

Wow. I remember very specifically how I was similarly limited as a kid. Only with me it was with left and right feet - I had this obsession with always keeping an even number of steps on each foot, equal time spent leaning on each foot; always start the stairs with the right foot - that's the odd-number-steps foot - and end on the even-number foot at the top, even if that means you have to take a stutter step on the landing or skip a step at the end. And the extra pressure on that foot caused by leaping over a step could be offset by quickly swinging the other leg around and bending the knee of the left leg so that you wind up in a forward-lurching, but still upright, crouch at the top step. It was an acrobatic move that I tried, probably unsuccessfully, to make look as natural as could be. I knew exactly how many stairs there were in every set of stairs I commonly had to go up and down - our schools, our church, the store, the house, Snapping fingers - snapping on one hand meant I had to snap the other too.

It's like I was watching myself at the age of five - only this five-year-old felt perfectly comfortable bringing it up as a topic of conversation, expressing her frustrations, certain that we would not only listen, but offer suggestions or sympathy. That, I don't remember as a kid. I actually suspected I was slowly going crazy, but couldn't talk to anyone about it. Not that I had specific fears of how anyone would react - it just did not occur to me that anyone would care about my inner life. I knew, somehow, bone-deep, that speaking of such things was taboo, that I would be annoying people by bringing it up - not to mention cluing them in on what would surely be seen only as yet another sign, another confirmation, of my weirdness. So I never told anyone.

Of course, my vast experience in this area did not mean that I had a whole lot of advice for her. I was just making it up on the spot. What I said was that if she didn't want to feel that way, she could say to herself, when she felt compelled to do something, "I'm going to do JUST the opposite. I'm going to rub that right hand all the more into the right side of my cheek, just to show the world, and myself, that it doesn't affect anything at all." We all want the world to be just so, I said, orderly and neat. And it isn't. Sometimes our minds want us to feel that things are all neat and predictable, because things would be easier that way. But you can still be comfortable in all the discomfort of the world. Loose and jangly and off is a nice way for things to be, once you get used to the idea that they're supposed to be that way. If you learn that things aren't always perfect, but are still very, very nice, maybe your mind will calm down and stop wanting it ALL to be even."

I don't think she was fully listening to all of that, because she just said "Yeah" at the end and changed the subject. But I hope at least she felt that she had been listened to.