I have a homework assignment due on Tuesday, so naturally I'm here wasting an hour on my blog. One of the greatest things happening in my life (aside from maintaining the looks of a 25 year old while actually well into my 30's) is enrollment in school and pursuing acceptance into a graduate program at a top-tier university.
On Saturday, I had the good fortune of sitting in on a graduate class at the University of Washington. The title of the class was "Social Work Practice With Chemically Dependent Adults." While I have a passing knowledge of social work, I have an intimate one of chemical dependence and a vague familiarity with adulthood. I know a few adults and I have seen many of them on television. Occasionally, when I go someplace like a bank, I am treated as an adult until the teller accesses my account and sees my purchase history on my debit card. ("This guy went to the same grocery store three times yesterday?") I'm always afraid that they'll recognize the frequent $2.99 purchases at Safeway as my regular pints of Ben & Jerry's and I'll be laughed out of the bank and banished to the check cashing/payday loan industry. But I digress...
I often found that my chemical dependence stood between me and adulthood, but introduced me to many social workers, so this class seemed right up my alley! I have been a student at the local community college for almost a year and have achieved better grades every quarter than I ever earned in high school or during my undergraduate studies. Nevertheless, as I plodded into the Saturday morning class, an old familiar song started playing in my mind. "You're not good enough. This is a joke. You're a joke. You'll never get into this school. These are serious students and you're not one of them." This is the way I talked myself out of every good opportunity I had back in the drinking years.
It's cruel. It hurts. And I do it to myself. To my memory, nobody has ever said these things to me, but I have consistently said them to myself for as long as I can remember. Truthfully, I struggled with school from kindergarten through high school. Assignments went uncompleted. When I did complete them I sometimes chose not to turn them in. I cheated. I cut corners and skipped class. I was not a good student. I barely graduated high school. In fact, and I hope this won't disqualify me for holding public office one day, but I wouldn't have graduated if I hadn't cheated on a major paper during my senior year. *gulp* I can't believe I'm admitting this on the forever internet where everyone can read it (this blog has about 3 readers.)
I've reached a confidence in my life that, combined with a faith that my higher power and the universe will protect me from harm, allows me to explore in-depth and admit to God, myself and others, things that I used to try to keep hidden from all of the above. That means that I have begun examining the things that I formerly thought could hurt me. Over the past year, I have developed a strong faith in a higher power which I choose to call "god". This faith informs my trust that I cannot be hurt by finding out the truth about me.
For several years I took important documents like past due bills, court summons or treatment assessments and stuffed them into the top drawer of my desk. The idea was that I would come back to them "someday" and deal with them. Well, in a way I did.
Eventually, I forgot all about the nature of that drawers contents and decided to clean it out. 18 months into sobriety, I began literally cleaning house and came upon the drawer. I felt so completely protected from what I found that I read every page before burning it in the wood stove. All of the bills were either settled or so old that they will soon be off my credit report. The treatment assessments and police incident reports were nothing more than clarifying records of faded memories that I've discussed ad nauseum with sponsors and counselors. It was like snooping through some other drunk idiots desk. I felt detached. I felt well and healed.
Since that day, I've slowly begun thinking about another fact of Kevin Toth that is profoundly relevant to my academic pursuits. That is the fact of my learning disability.
Last night, after attending the graduate class, while working in the restaurant, I had the distinct pleasure of waiting on my middle school art teacher. Her name is Lara Jones and she's an absolutely wonderful person. I love art. I'm fucking terrible at it too. My paintings look like something my four-year-old nephew would probably mock. If he had a refrigerator of his own he would probably hang up my paintings and think "man, that Uncle Kevin makes some pretty sad paintings. I hope he's good at sports or something. Actually, he sucks at sports. Good thing he's so darn cute." Still, I love to paint my terrifically terrible paintings. At certain points in life I've made lots of them. All of this occurred to me as I wrote down my email address for my former teacher. I wrote it down in my familiar, sloppy, labored handwriting with a mixture of upper and lowercase lettering so that it read "KEVINtoth@gMAIL.com".
I am a dysgraphic. Nobody seems to know what that means, so I'll explain it to you (no need to thank me). In layman's terms I have what you would call "fucking ugly" handwriting. Not only does my handwriting look like it was written by a trained seal with thumbs, it is astonishingly painful for me to write. I get immense cramps in my fingers. My wrist tightens. The sentences stray from the lines and the lower and upper cases mix inappropriately. My penmanship would look more fitting if it were written in crayon and had a few letters backwards like a child's.
In this moment last night, something clicked. This is why my paintings and drawings are so endearingly pathetic. People tend to look at my artwork and react with an "Ah, look! Kevin did some doodles!" as if I'm a puppy who just took an adorable shit on a shag carpet.
I spent decades denying that anything was wrong. I hated the term learning disabled. I never truly felt "dumb", but I thought I might actually be dumb. I feared I would find out the truth that I was. So I took the results of the two learning/neuro-psychological examinations I underwent (at age 12 and 16) and stuffed the manila folder into another drawer of the desk and pretended it didn't exist. Until tonight.
I took 30 minutes to thumb through the reports and saw that these professionals who assessed me twenty years did an amazing job. They got it exactly right. They tested with astounding accuracy my strengths and weaknesses. It is uncanny to read such a vivid, fair and downright correct portrayal of my 12 and 16 year old intellect and academic ability. I just wish they had paid more attention to my looks. They really failed to capture my charm.
But my responses to their testing seem the most illuminating. I was "satisfied" with my B-/C+ grades and felt those were "good". I didn't trust the praise the testers gave me when I scored highly on something. I thought they were lying to me about my high IQ and superior ability to express myself verbally. I now understand that my strength to communicate verbally is a compensation for my early childhood struggle with handwriting. Just like my devilish looks are a compensation for my devilish soul and complete lack of morals. (Just kidding, I have morals. I just choose to ignore them.) What the professionals couldn't quite predict when they tested me in the early 90's, is how much help a computer is to me. As I am frequently told (and thank you very much) is how clear my voice is in this blog. Typing is, in fact, quite easy for me. It seems to be an equalizer for my dysgraphia. I love to write- just not with a pen and paper.
I am really glad that my parents held onto this paperwork and handed it over to me when I got sober. I'm also glad I waited a while to read it. Today I view self-knowledge as liberating and helpful. I'm glad to know more about myself and it feels good to understand my struggles and to see what makes me exceptional. It's nice to know who I actually am. I am not dumb. I am not lazy. I am just as good as every other student in that fucking grad school class. And when I don't get accepted on my first application (and I won't), it won't be because I'm not smart enough. It will because I'm not ready to be accepted yet. But if I apply again, and when I'm accepted, I have as much chance at success as all the other WASP-y, rich kid do-gooders that apply for a master of social work program. In the meantime, I'll be at home finger painting and writing blogs when I should be doing homework. Okay, maybe I am a little bit lazy. But I'm also charming as hell.
I love you. Thanks for reading my blog.
