With Fingers Struck Dumb
© by Holly Lisle
All Rights Reserved
I have been, for the past three weeks, lost in a morass so painful that
(having worked for years with stroke victims) I would almost describe
my condition as a form of self-inflicted stroke. With the exception of
the three people I live with, I communicate almost exclusively through
my fingertips, through the medium of a keyboard. My work is typing, as
is much of my recreation, and until two weeks ago, I typed about as fast
as I thought, and with no real awareness of the actual process of typing
that moved the words from my brain to the page. I thought, the words appeared.
A simple form of magic, like speech, and one that I took for granted.
Then I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout, and in the blink of an
eye, my fingers fell mute, and lay helpless in front of me, and I had
to learn to speak again.
I don't consider myself especially subject to whims, and in fact when
I do most things, I've been thinking about them so long on and off that
I've almost forgotten when the idea first occurred to me. Sometimes the
original idea occurred so far in the past that when I do make the change,
I think at first that I jumped spontaneously. This is one of those times---no
real warning that I was going to make this switch, not for me or anyone
else.
But my sudden leap to Dvorak isn't really; I've had some pain in my wrists
for years after long bouts of typing, and I've already moved to the ergonomic
keyboard and the ergonomic desk and chair and I occasionally wear wrist
splints and do all the other things that people trying to fend off long-term
damage from repetitive-stress injuries do. I knew that the Dvorak layout
would help, and I filed that fact in the back of my mind, and at some
point, something triggered in me the knowledge that the time to make the
change had finally arrived. And I jumped all at once, knowing that if
I tried to shuttle between the two systems, I would only slow down my
progress and render the whole process more difficult.
I wasn't expecting this to be so hard. I already knew how to type; this
was simply a more intelligent way of typing. I'm intelligent, I've always
caught on to things quickly, I expected that this would come to me with
just a bit of time and application on my part.
But my analogy to stroke victims goes deeper than the mere loss of speech.
It connects directly into the heart of how we learn the things that we
know so well that we know them with our bodies and not just with our minds.
That was how I knew to type. My fingers knew their own way home, and went
there without any effort from me. And then everything that they knew became
scrambled, and now my neurons have to train themselves to new patterns
of firing. I have to rebuild a part of my brain, tracing new pathways
through old terrain, convincing nerve endings that what was once "s" is
now "o", and that no matter how many times the left ring finger returns
to the home row, it will always find "o" there, and never again "s".
This might seem a small subject for an essay. On the face of it, I'm
relearning to type---who cares? But the small subject has larger implications;
I'm struggling to regain my ability to communicate, after having lost
the way I knew. I have been subject to fits of anger and frustration and
feelings of inadequacy and even self-hatred on occasions when I tried
to make myself understood and couldn't. I've avoided chatting on-line
at any cost, because my crawling, fumbling pace and endless errors made
me feel stupid. I've cut back on the amount of mail I answer and the length
of my replies---e-mail became for a while a source of anxiety and a monumental
task, and is still difficult. I pulled deeper into a shell while trying
to find a way out of it. In other words, I replicated in exact detail
the stages and emotions that the post-stroke patient relearning speech
goes through.
And the effect this has had on me has been large. I've come face to
face with the knowledge that the communication I so value---the communication
I have built my life around---is so fragile and easily disrupted that
the simple act of moving the locations of keys on a keyboard (or slightly
scrambling the electrical impulses in my brain) can render me mute---temporarily
or permanently. I now know that my mind can be walled off intact behind
a barrier that neither desire nor will can break through; I can be the
same person inside, thinking the same thoughts and feeling the same feelings,
yet to everyone else suddenly cease to exist in any familiar form.
I did not expect, in the simple act of switching from a poorly-designed
keyboard to an intelligently-designed one, to have my own frailty as a
human being thrust at me, nor did I expect to have to look from the inside
out at one of the devastating illnesses that strikes tens of thousands
of people in the U.S. every year. But then I guess that was the value
of the experience. No one expects to wake one morning to find his fingers
struck dumb, his words fallen away.
Dvorak & Me -- Three Months Later>>
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