2 + 2 = 5 (No Rat / Face Cage Necessary)

About five years ago, I found out about a learning disability called Dyscalculia, which in some ways resembles Dyslexia, except that instead of being a developmental reading disorder, it makes it incredibly difficult for a person who has it to comprehend arithmetic, math facts, and anything to do with numbers in general, along with some fun “bonus” issues (we’ll get to them later.) After reading about it for less than five minutes, I not only realized that I clearly had it, but felt a massive amount of relief finally knowing that this thing I’d been suffering from since I was a child was an actual thing, and not just me being an idiot.  It had always struck me as odd that I could somehow be able to score perfectly on a SAT or GRE verbal exam, but score abysmally low when it came to the other half of what is generally accepted to be the basic measure of human intelligence.

To give you a good idea of what living with Dyscalculia is like, let me start by asking you a question. What is the bigger number: 4 or 7? Did you have to take a moment to look at both numbers and decide? And in the moment did you have to carefully think about whether or not what you were looking at was a 4, a 7, 74, or 47? Now let’s up the ante. What is 4 plus 7? Did you have to use your fingers to get the result or was it faster to do the work in your head, or did you use a shortcut you invented where you counted the four points of the numeral 4 and counted up from 7? Was it much harder for you to do because one of the numbers wasn’t an even number? Did you have to check yourself several times just to make sure the answer is correct, because this wouldn’t be the first time you incorrectly did simple introductory math. If you said yes to all of the above, and you are not in kindergarten, congratulations, you probably have Dyscalculia! You too can live the dream of being ridiculed by an eight year old for counting on your fingers.

You see, the basic problem is that when you ask me to picture the number four, all I see inside my head is a number 4. What I don’t see is the concept of four. I can recognize numbers, and I’ve learned to recognize that 47 is a larger number than 4, but that’s only because I know that there are two numbers in 47, and two is bigger than one. And all of that after making sure that I’m not looking at all the possible combinations of the numbers 4, 7, and 4. Point is, even the most rudimentary math takes me a lot more time to accomplish than, well, literally everyone who doesn’t have Dyscalculia. And it gets worse. Addition and subtraction is one thing, but multiplication? That’s practically algebra for me. Division? If I didn’t have a calculator I promise you that I would never be able to figure it out. It might as well be magic.

As you can imagine, having this learning disability made school hell for me. Once it became clear that my math skills were practically non-existent, and my verbal and reading skills were superb (to paint a picture, I read the Hobbit for the first time when I was six), the conclusion reached by all but one of my teachers from fifth grade on was that I was A: An idiot, or B: Lazy. Which is frustrating when you have to put so much time into figuring out basic math. I was trying, trying five times as hard to finish my math homework after breezing through the liberal arts subjects, but there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get it all done. The only reason that one teacher (bless his non-judgmental heart) saw past this was because he regularly had me in summer school, where he saw first hand that if I had enough time, I could always reach the right answer. I think he must have suspected something was up because he would also give me partial credit for answers where I had transposed the numbers.

Tests were the worst. I would sit there, looking at the page, trying to make sense of it all, knowing that I was being timed, knowing I was going to fail because it would take me ten minutes to get through a single question and get a right answer on a test with thirty questions. Oh, and make certain to show your work! Having to fake that compounded the problem. And I had to fake it, because showing my work would essentially be me writing down the numerical equivalent of the All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy bit from The Shining.

And remember me mentioning being timed? Imagine wasting even more time while being tested due to one of the fun side effects of Dyscalculia: Difficulty gauging the passage of time. As an adult I am constantly checking my phone or a nearby clock to make certain I’m not running late, and I often show up for work or social events fifteen to thirty minutes early because I hate showing up late (a coping mechanism I had to learn to survive in academia.) And that goes hand in hand with any kind of estimation of size and distance as well. How big is it? I don’t know. How far? No idea. Close and far are about as sophisticated as it’s ever going to get with me.

Once I was finally out of the public school system, my academic life immediately went from being a shaky C level student to a 4.0, Dean’s List member. It was surreal. I found myself finally having all the time in the world to fully commit to working on homework that had absolutely nothing to do with arithmetic, and realized that without that extra burden of having to comprehend math, I was a mental powerhouse when it came to reading, writing, and analyzing information.

I thought my troubles were over. I was wrong.

Because you see, there’s life after college. And if you’re someone with a liberal arts degree when the economy takes a nose-dive, you’re quickly going to realize that there are certain jobs that are next to impossible to perform without access to basic arithmetic. I once, briefly, worked as a cashier at a calendar kiosk, and that went about as well as you can imagine it did. One of the managers actually thought I was stealing from the till, probably because I was handing people more money back than they had given me. It didn’t help that one of them informed me that I was being timed every time I opened the cashier.  After less than two weeks one of the managers passive aggressively rescheduled my shift in order to make me late for work (did I mention I hate being late?) and I quit on the spot. Which I imagine was exactly what they wanted.

Dyscalculia also features the major side “benefit” of sufferers having low latent inhibition. If you don’t have time to look that up, it’s basically the tendency to be easily over stimulated by sounds, color, etc. In my particular case, I cannot tolerate loud noise, particularly when it’s artificially being created by speakers or sub woofers.  Imagine not being able to attend a live concert without feeling like a shrill drill instructor is howling directly into your eardrums. I’ve had to flee numerous social occasions because a band has started playing. One incident ended with me screaming at the top of my lungs and abandoning a restaurant I had been waiting two hours to get into (and I’d already ordered.) I cannot tell you how many fire alarms I have literally smashed into pieces to get them to stop shrieking at me. Yes, I could have removed the batteries, but you see that would have taken too much time. It’s that bad.

And, of course, humans being what they are (delicious), few people will believe you when you try to explain the problem to them. I’ve told people I have a numerical learning disability (I naturally assume most people haven’t heard of Dyscalculia) and their response is usually: “No you don’t, you fucking dirty liar.” I can go as far as pointing them to the Wikipedia page describing the condition, and they’ll still pull the whole “Well, anyone can edit that, you know, so it must not be true.” I swear I could have the surgeon general tell these people that I’m not lying and they would probably conclude that I had hired an actor and dressed him up as Boris D. Lushniak.

The slightly kinder, stupidly well-intentioned response is, of course, “Well, I’m certain you’ll get better if you work at it.” Yes, technically, that statement is true. I have, in fact, spent a lifetime coming up with shortcuts and habits that make me seem as adept at math as a canny first grader. But, for all intents and purposes, my skills at arithmetic will always hover around there. Yes, with great effort I can solve complex equations. I’ve done it. The thing is, the knowledge of how to solve a complex equation doesn’t stick. I don’t forget the knowledge because I’m not using it, I forget the knowledge because I never really knew it in the first place. I can’t memorize numbers because I can’t even freaking see them inside my head. But I can memorize mnemonics, songs, the names of people (real and imaginary) and use those things to stand in for proofs, formulas, and numerical sequences. Unfortunately, that kind of complex memorized knowledge doesn’t stick around forever, the same way an actor will gradually be unable to remember the lines of a play he hasn’t been in for six months.

Somewhere, the noble native American chief Sohcahtoa cries a solitary tear.

So if you know someone who, like me, shows up 45 minutes early because someone told them that it was 15 to 5, and they were worried that they would be late for a 5:30 appointment, and thought that they had been informed that it was 5:15, please, go easy on them. It’s tough to be outsmarted by 8 year olds when you’re 36.