A bus driver lay on her horn at me the other morning as I crossed in front of her path a little close for both of our comfort. I’m sure her heart missed a beat or two just as mine raced into gear as I peddled just a little bit faster. My mind spun with questions about whether I had misjudged the distance, or if the driver had just accelerated or sped faster than should be expected on that road. If I were Sandy, I would have been confident it was the latter and outraged that I’d almost been squished. But not me, and certainly not me now. Now I can only assume fault and attempt to figure out what perception of mine was compromised.
I’ve never had a completely traditionally functioning set of sensory skills. By all standard measurements my hearing is excellent, and my sight is conventionally correctable. My physical reflexive reactions respond when the doctor pokes and taps them. I’ve never had my sense of smell or taste assesses, but I’ve always been able to taste and smell something, so why would I? The only tests of coordination (proprioperception, equilibrioception, vestibular sense) were physical sports at which I failed miserably. I quiver at the thought of how much less coordinated I would be if I hadn’t taken 8 years of ballet.
As for the myriad other senses that we don’t learn about in school (touch, itch, pressure, thermoception (temperature), tension sense, nociception (pain), stretch receptors (dialation control), thirst, hunger, time, and magnetoception), it doesn’t surprise me that several of mine are responding haphazardly these days.
When people ask me why I don’t drive when I have a driver’s license, I usually joke about how I have a license by a fluke clerical error resulted in never having to take a physical driver’s exam. But the real reason I’ve not used it for over 20 of the 30 years I’ve had a license is that my visual and proprioperception senses falter as speed increases. I remember reading a long time ago in a cognitive psych class that the normal human can keep track of X number of things in their field of vision, but race car drivers can keep track of some significant amount more. I don’t recall the numbers or the study, so I won’t fake them, but the take away was that racing at speed required the ability to visually and mentally attend to more items. Since reading that I’ve always suspected that my ability was something like X/3, and as speed increases that number drops precipitously. I grow anxious that my ability to attend to items in my field of vision when bicycling at a very slow rate of speed is failing.
Of course, given a chronic disease that debilitates at an unknown rate and requires multiple medications including anti-convulsants combined with an existing propensity for mental illness for which you are taking other medicines as well as experiencing other unexplained autoimmune reactions sometimes makes you question your own questioning. You cannot say with assurance that yes, this is quantifiably worse because everything is perceptual. You fear that you sound like a hypochondriac every time you report a new symptom. Your intention is not to complain or to fleece the medical system for more care or medications, but simply to create a record that could be useful ten years from now when the disease has progressed to an identifiable state. It’s as if the entire industry and world around you is designed to gas-light you.
The metaphor of one’s mind fraying appeals both visually and tactilely, but I think it misleads. It makes it seem as if others and perhaps even yourself could see it happening. I think it’s more like the wear and tear at the fabric of a pair of pale jeans. It happens gradually just a bit more each day of wear and tear. From a distance it is indiscernible. And it’s not just any old jeans. It’s the only pair of some poor kid who does not want to show to his classmates that he only has one pair. And whose mother and father want to deny as much as possible that they are growing thin because it costs them something both financially and emotionally to acknowledge they need to be replaced or repaired. And like any one of something in a strapped family, the question of what would you wear while you repaired it anyway, much like even if you could afford to fix the engine of the car, what would you drive when you took it in and spent the last of your money getting it fixed. So everyone pretends that there is no problem while the kid feels the draft coming in a bit more with each day of wear. But what can he do but wait until there’s an active tear before he forces the issue.