I don’t think fractals was such a great metaphor for what I was trying to say anyway, because they are identical at different levels, and what I was talking about isn’t identical, just nested, like Russian dolls (which, come to think of it, are pretty identical), or ‘worlds within worlds’, the way that our conceptions of sub-atomic particles orbiting a nucleus depict them as being like planets around stars. And if that was the metaphor, what was the subject I was trying to describe? I’m even hazier about that but… my thoughts and actions, I think. Does that make any kind of sense? No, I don’t think so either, not logically, but in the analytical part of my brain, I can sort of see it.

It’s forty years now since I started studying systems thinking, in a module from the Open University, which I’d signed up to as a one-off (or so I thought at the time) – I think I was described as an ‘Associate Student’ (something like that), and I was just doing this second-level course, partly out of curiosity and partly as a precursor to doing a third-level course on ‘Systems Modelling’, which I thought would help me with a new role I’d taken on in my job – it didn’t, not directly, but it led me, after two years, to sign up for a degree with the OU which ultimately led me to a PhD and my thwarted attempts at an academic career.

Okay, so now I’m talking about my life, which doesn’t directly get me back to the whole ‘fractal thinking’ thing. Except, in a different way, maybe it does. I look back on my life, and I see it in chunks that overlap and interact with each other – the people, the places, the activities, and the different threads of cause-and-effect that run through them. In my teens and early twenties, I had no ‘plan’ for an academic career, beyond undergraduate level – and that, as I’ve mentioned before, I saw more as a way of getting away from the constrictions of my parents and my home town – and (rather ironically as it turned out) finding a husband and/or career which would set me up for an ‘adult life’ (or whatever conception of that I had at that time). Consequently, as I’ve also mentioned before, I messed up my first degree, and was lucky to get a reasonably good job (but less lucky with my choice of husband – the first one, I mean, not the second).

I still don’t think I’ve answered the question – actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure that I’ve even asked one yet. TBC

And today, I went to Sainsbury’s. Ten days – no, eleven – I must have stocked up really well – not just on Christmas stuff, but milk too, because that, as usual, was the indicator that sent me out this morning.

We all live in our own worlds, that’s what I was thinking earlier, before I went to Sainsbury’s. ‘We have just one world/But we live in different ones’, to quote Mark Knopfler (Brothers in Arms). Each of us has our own personal world inside our head, which evolves over time, partly from genetics, partly from the environment we live in, partly from our experiences of interaction with all the other worlds surrounding us, the physical, social, economic and cultural worlds (all of which can be considered as constituting the ‘environment’ to our personal world). Each of us has a world of incredible complexity inside our heads, whether we consciously realise it or not, even before we factor in the ways in which our internal world interacts with all those other internal worlds of all those other beings with whom we interact.

I was going to say ‘people’, but I said ‘beings’ because – well, even my little cat has her own world in her head, which leads her to predictable actions but is largely impenetrable to me – such as the way she was in the living room when I got home from the shop, but while I unpacked the shopping and made coffee, she came upstairs and was sitting on the landing outside the study door, waiting for me to come up and switch on the computer. She can predict my behaviour almost better than I can predict hers – sometimes we surprise each other, but given that our relationship is based on observation rather than verbal communication, it’s surprisingly mutual and very close – even more so since last year and my periods of lock-down.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this this morning (although in a way it is the basis of my PhD thesis). How do we understand all those other worlds that we crash into and bounce away from like billiard balls? The default position, I would suggest, is that we start from an assumption that our own world is ‘true’, and that other people’s experiences of and relationships with the world are broadly similar to ours – at least those with whom we are in close contact. In fact, we have to start from that assumption, that our own perceptions are based in some kind of shared reality, otherwise how can any kind of communication be possible?

In the process of trying to re-evaluate my life in order to better understand who I am and how I got here, this strikes a chord. There were things I was going to say. But earlier I remembered a poem that I thought I would dig out and now I can’t find it. This is the second time this has happened to me in the last few months and it is worrying. I have so many poems and they can be anywhere – well, I think there are a certain number of places where I would have saved them, but I’ve looked in all those and still no luck. Emily Dickinson wrote hers on paper, and shoved them in a drawer where her sister found them after she’d gone, but who’s going to bother trawling through my computer for mine?

I’ve gone through my assorted ‘poetry’ or ‘poems’ folders, but no sign of it – I can’t remember a title for it, which doesn’t help. I remember that I wrote it in my flat on Beach Road, which narrows the date down to between May 2015 and October 2016. And there’s no 2016 sub-folder in my Blog folder on Google Drive, so does that mean I didn’t write any blog posts in 2016? Of course, I would have been using my old laptop then, so it could be on there. But it was unfinished at the time, and then I’m sure I’ve gone back to it in the last couple of years and tweaked the last bit, so that implies it would be somewhere I’ve accessed more recently.

Well that’s blown out of my mind what I wanted to say. Process and outcome. My PhD is a classic example of a hugely significant process with an outcome that no one was interested in – not only if we assume that the ‘outcome’ was the thesis, but if we take ‘an academic career’ as the outcome I was striving for – well, that never happened either. I used to say that the process of doing a PhD is like having your brain extracted, tied in knots, and put back again so you can never see things in the same way ever again. Maybe that was just my experience.

If I think back to the time before, from the point when one of my OU tutors asked whether I’d ever considered a career in research, my aim was always to ‘do’ a PhD, rather than to ‘have’ a PhD – which reminds me of another poem, which hopefully I can locate…

I had a dream.
And then what?
I made it real.
And then what?
Dreams in daylight
turn to dust.
And then what?
How long does it take
to make a new dream?
And then what?

Linda Rushby 22 June 2012

The sun is shining at present. I didn’t mow the grass when I said I would – maybe I will today, if it stays sunny, though it must still be wet underfoot.

I’ve not been remembering my dreams recently. When I wake up, I know that I’ve been dreaming and now I’m awake, but the content of the dream is completely gone from my awareness. It’s like watching something on the telly, and you know you haven’t been asleep, but you haven’t got a clue what just happened, or what was said, and you have to rewind the last few minutes to find out. Of course, that also happens when I’m listening to the radio, or reading, or even in the middle of a conversation (though in that case there’s no rewind button), and as I now know, that’s all part and parcel of dyspraxia. But I’m sure I used to remember my dreams.

Incidentally, although for me the lack of short term memory had always seemed to be the key aspect of dyspraxia, from which all else follows, it’s only recently that I’ve started to think it might be the other way round. Starting from the premise that it’s due to faulty message processing in the brain, and that that makes it hard to focus on more than one thing at a time, this leads to the phenomenon of ‘absent-mindedness’, whereby I have no recollection of where I put my glasses, because when I put them down no part of my brain was processing the information : ‘I am putting my glasses on the bookshelf/back of the toilet/behind the fruit basket/they just fell on the floor’ and so doesn’t leave an imprint on my memory.  

Sounds like a good theory – it definitely reflects my personal experience, anyway. I expect somebody somewhere has thought of that before, but as I mentioned yesterday (I think), my PhD supervisor pointed out years ago that I struggle to accept things unless I can understand them from first principles. What I don’t think he understood at the time was that it wasn’t due to bloody-mindedness so much as that my brain couldn’t hold and process that information if I didn’t have the right pegs to hang it onto. Which sounds quite paradoxical, because although I can have enough flashes of insight to have achieved a PhD, there are times when my brain freezes and I’m incapable of absorbing what I’m being told.  

Still reading that book. It’s moved on from left brain thinking to ways of developing the right brain: yoga, tai chi, meditation etc. The irony is that my PhD thesis was all about managing a world where causes are reductive and impacts are holistic. Trying to find left brain categories for right brain phenomena when language itself is suspect because it immediately binds thought into its own limitations. I used to get so excited about all that stuff, until I realised that this is in itself the problem, that the two can never be reconciled, and that’s why the world is in such a mess, and probably why my head is in such a mess too. I didn’t use the language of left-and-right-brains twenty five years ago, but the ideas are directly comparable.

How can I express myself more clearly? Reading back that last paragraph, I thought: it’s about control. We try to understand causes and control them, but the problems with this are legion: how do we identify the fundamental causes? How do we find ways of controlling them? How do we implement the controls and sanctions? How long does it take before we come up against the unintended consequences of those controls and sanctions? And what has happened in the meantime to the overall impacts we were trying to control in the first place? I could go on, but I’ve probably confused you more than enough already (if there is a ‘you’ still reading this).

And how, if at all, does this relate to my dyspraxia? The author of that book would probably say that my right brain is currently working out something that my left brain is preventing me from recognising.

Yesterday was Skype-therapy day, I read out to the therapist the list of ‘wisdom’ bullet points that I posted earlier in the week, and I thought I was being quite tongue-in-cheek about it, but part way down the list I started to get tearful. Because all those contradictions and over-simplifications are what makes up who I am, and can’t be wished away by well-intended platitudes, or by trying to make me laugh at myself when all I want to do is cry. Maybe, in the context of what I was saying, they’re a set of left-brain ‘solutions’ to the holistic right-brain question of who I am and how I get by in this world without shattering into a million fragments.

I’m not saying dyspraxia explains all of that. Of course, it’s a left-brain category and hence by its nature draws arbitrary lines in the sand – this side and that side, inside and outside. But the more I look into it, the more I unravel the strands of how I became this self-contradictory person, the more I can see how well it fits.

Yesterday I joined a Facebook group for dyspraxic adults. I have a sense of ‘coming out’ and being – not exactly proud (I don’t do ‘pride’) but maybe ‘honest’.