My Young Mind
Do you remember childhood being simple? What about it being dramatic? Sad? Angry? Happy? Fantastic?
All these words mean different things at times. We all have good & bad memories. And at times our short term memory is better than our long term memory & visa versa. I’ve learned overtime how my memory & mind in general works. When I remember those times, for the most part they are happy. Sometimes they were frustrating.
In a previous post, “Can you find the words”, I had mentioned how essentially my words could become a jumbled mess. And as a child that was frustrating. So I would scream and cry because it was the only way I could say, without saying, I was frustrated.
Often my mind was swirling with finding and connecting the right words to say. I had briefly done speech therapy to help me form the right words but that didn’t end up helping me connect my brain to my mouth. To this day that connection sometimes turns off. I don’t stutter or stammer but my brain becomes incapable of pushing the words out in the right order or at all. Either I say nothing or I would say something like “the cat ran over there” and it would come out as “ran the there ran over”.
At times I found listening to music helped that connection “calm down” in a way. And I found singing to not only be helpful but enjoyable for me. Singing helped me slow down and focus on my words but also gave me an escape from the thoughts in my head (and it still does now).
If you talk to anyone in my family now they would tell you how much I enjoyed putting on “concerts” in my backyard thinking no one was watching or seeing me. I escaped into being the artist and didn’t think of the dificulties I faced with my speech. It got me to dance around using my body more and using my speech more with singing. I’m sure my siblings got annoyed with me at times but I didn’t notice. I sang everything from Britney Spears, Nirvana, Destiny’s Child, to Celia Cruz.
I also noticed that math came easy to me to an extent. Numbers and number sequences were easy for me to maintain. Give me a phone number one time and I could probably recite it with ease back to you. Math equations run through my mind with ease. This is still true to this day but once I get into college level algebra - forget it. I sometimes forget the x’s or y’s or solve for x in most cases.
I think math came easier to me because I didn’t have to worry about putting words together and forming sentences and worrying about it making sense. I just had to solve it and be done.
As I move through this subject I hope to give more insight to how my mind works not only over the years but even today and days to come.
