Skipped school again yesterday and stayed home. I went walking past the postage signs, through the wetlands and the woods. Somehow it’s been almost two years since I’ve been back there. The place doesn’t seem to have changed. I walked, and I listened to stuff I’m meant to read for homework.

I found an app that will read (stolen) epub or pdf copies of the assigned readings out loud for me. Even though the computer’s voice is choppy and strange, it’s somehow not unsettling. I chose the lower tenor voice with the british accent and set the playback speed to a little faster than a regular speaking pace. My brain can – miraculously – attend to and process and understand what I’m hearing for long & mostly continuous stretches of time.

Between the meds and this useful bit of tech that I’ve just found, I might actually be able to keep up with the readings for my classes. This is game changing.

I have managed to BS my way through about three and a half semesters of philosophy without being able to keep up with the readings. I’ve had to get quite good at BSing, because I can’t make my brain concentrate on the task at hand when I sit down and try to read.

To the best of my knowledge, I am mostly getting away with this. The only prof who has called me out on my bullshit understands exactly what I’m doing because he spent most of the six years it took him to get his undergraduate degree skipping class and playing table tennis with his friends and I guess that it takes one to know one.

I’ve done my best. I can read enough to sort of know what’s going on some of the time, and most of what I’ve actually learned has come from lectures and seminars.

This is funny because I can sit down and read any halfway decent fantasy fiction book in a couple of days, any time, if I want to. I don’t know why. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just is what it is, and I’m learning to take it in stride.

This is also funny because it’s opposite of the way I got through a math degree. I zoned out every thirty seconds for four semesters of calculus and linear algebra and differential equations. My hands took notes, but I couldn’t pay attention well enough to listen. I had to be, like – knitting, sitting with my feet up on the seat of another desk or with my legs folded into a pretzel, drinking black coffee, probably drumming my fingers on the desk without realizing I was doing it, etc.. in order to be able to be present in that room at all.

It was all of the time spent working through the notes outside of class that helped me make sense of mathematics. But I suppose philosophy is easier in the form of the spoken word.

I’m not sure if I have a disability, or if the whole entire system is just less than user friendly for people whose brains are wired like mine. But since the system it’s going to change any time soon, I’m the one who needs to get creative about finding ways to learn within a system that isn’t designed for me.

Which sucks, because it takes me such a long time to find the things that help. But it’s good to find them wherever I can.