Me and my brain: an on-and-off love story

My son once said of me, 'My mum is very smart, but she doesn't know what day of the week it is'.

I'll start by saying I've had no diagnosis, other than awesomeness, and I've never sought one. I just have it on good authority that I'm sometimes ... a little different. I don't know if that's true - but if it is, I want others like me to know they're not alone.

This is the story of me and my brain. Sometimes we're head-over-heels in love. Sometimes we fight. Those times are hard. But after all these years, we're still together.

***

My relationship with my brain got off to a rocky start. When we were alone together, it was fine. But in the company of others, it was like my brain didn't even wanna know me.

I was a dreamer, still am. I was that kid who sat in class, sometimes utterly engaged in a way that could be unusual: other times, a little lost. I could devour a topic like a cannibal; or my attention could slip, and next minute I was behind my peers, silent and anxious. Trying to hide that I wasn't keeping up, and when I could no longer hide it, making self-effacing jokes about it.

Maths is for SQUARES. Get it?

Maths is a case in point. I didn't understand it in the classroom - my brain simply decamped, relocating to everything from Egyptology to Apartheid - and yet I'd go home, sit on my bed, and graph quadratic equations to make parabolas. I found them beautiful, a coded secret you could unfurl.

I dissected things to know intimately how they work - words and music, especially, and feelings and ideas - and then I tinkered with them, to make them work better.

I could never reconcile that desire to focus, to master a topic, to pursue it to the ends of the earth, with not always knowing the day of the week.

I concluded I was a bit thick.

***

I'm competent. I feel like I have to rush to reassure you, to get in first. It's just that my brain works back to front.

This is how it's supposed to be, I believe.

Low-level tasks are meant to be easier. Remembering where you left the keys you had five minutes ago. Charging your phone. Reading the clock right, turning the oven off. Knowing what day of the week it is. A brain is supposed to handle these things readily, freeing up real estate for more complex tasks.

Big ideas are a comfort and a pleasure to me, like sinking into a luxurious bath.

It's the little things that vex me, tax my energy and stoke my anxiety, occupying mental real estate like belligerent squatters.

Finishing thoughts is sometimes

I feel like I'm living Opposite Day, and trying not to let you know.

***

Sometimes my brain is a dick to me. It's humiliating.

It doesn't happen all the time; but there are things I do wrong, again and again, and I can never account for them. I frustrate people. I misread calendars. When I have ten minutes before a meeting, I fill that time with a task - then I get lost in the task, and I run late for the meeting.

People judge. I want to say, please understand: I'm not stupid, just wired differently. But I never do. I'm not brave enough. I simply wait out the self-consciousness, looking at my feet.

There is very little that makes me feel better about these mortifying moments.

Today, one tiny thing did. It was a friend who said the things that I post make her feel like she could have a similar career to mine, even though she doesn't know where her keys are. This post is my gift to her.

***

I have to organise my mind like a better mother would organise the pantry.

Ideas must be purposely arranged, labelled, put in places I know I can retrieve them quickly. Otherwise, I sometimes can't recall things on the spot - even when I understand them deeply.

I can do the same day-to-stay stuff as most folks. I just have to work much, much harder.

Everything - literally everything - goes on my to-do list. Only lunchtime and wharepaku can be left to my in-the-moment judgement.

My to-do list is elaborately coded. Orange shows the days of week things are due, and pink shows what has to be done right away. A post-it note goes over the top, showing the order in which the pink 'do today' tasks must be done. I consult my codes several times an hour, a security blanket I can't let go of.

The codes are onerous to me, something a primary school teacher would instruct with stickers, but they help me live a pretty good life. With them, I got through a PhD - years of struggle that, in an event I still can't really believe, placed a cap on my head and a scroll in my hand. Without the codes, I'd be forever looking for my keys, even though they're in my ****ing hand.

***

Sometimes my brain makes me feel lonely.

And sometimes it makes me feel exhilarated. This is the 'love' part of my love story. Maybe it's the weirdest part too.

The best I can explain this love is the feeling I got when I watched the final scenes of JoJo Rabbit. Bear with me here.

I cried when I watched, and I wasn't sure why.

At the end, the city falls to the Allies. All is lost: only old men and children are left to fight. Ragged combatants fumble antiquated weapons, fling petrol bombs across grey rubble. A soprano sings.

In the disintegration, Klenzendorf and Finkel, the German soldiers who we know to be gay but in fear of Nazism, surge forward: one, with a crimson cloak and plume in his helmet, the other, bizarrely, clutching a gramophone. They are, in the disintegration, unrepressed for the first time, because they are going to die, but together - in dress-up clothes, child-like as the little boy who watches them.

You watch a scene like this, and everything about it seems incoherent, batshit. The sensory overload makes you uncomfortable in your seat.

Only, it's not incoherent, not batshit at all. It is jarring and impassioned and poignant, an intricacy of things that are complex and beautiful, unashamedly the product of a mind that is different. There are threads and themes there: you simply have to focus intently, look differently, to see them.

Even if you can't work out at first what you are experiencing, you know, without a doubt, in all the brazen colour, the disarray and the discomfort, that you are fully and utterly and unapologetically alive. Whatever the day of the week.

Meet my on again, off again brain.

***

This felt hard and vulnerable. It took me a couple of hours, a couple of glasses of wine, to type out.

I bared my soul to you, I guess, because my brain and my soul are much the same thing. I feel OK, but I'm tired.

Thank God it's Friday!

Oh, wait.