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Mind Your Language

Writer's picture: Paul ChronnellPaul Chronnell

I sat down to write about mental health. And, so we’re clear, I’m not referring to how one might describe my ever-growing list of physical decrepitudes, caused by the passage of time and an ‘interesting’ life led:

 

First thing in the morning (says I) I have trouble bending my fingers, my shoulder’s still knackered, the two mossie bites on my elbow are so itchy I could take sandpaper to them till I hit bone, but also, I appear to have cured myself of asthma – possibly with swimming, possibly with Pinot Grigio. Blimey my health is mental!

 

Not that.

 

But then I decided maybe I wouldn’t - it’s my blog, and if you don't like that, see me in court.

 

It’s easy to write about the negatives of mental health. At one time or another most of us go through something challenging in this area. Personally, I’ve walked the Old Black Dog round the block a couple of times, old black dog poo bags in hand, so I could scribble something about that - but for reasons I can’t explain, I don’t want to.


But I do still feel drawn to write something about the brain or the mind. I spend a lot of time in mine – moving dusty boxes around and wondering where it all came from and what it's all for. And as that message is coming from my brain, it feels like something to address.


A painting depicting a man with many thoughts in his head.
Sometimes I can think as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Which got me thinking about the ever-developing, and often complex, subject of neurodiversity. Brains working differently.

 

Everyone’s talking about it. Which can only be a good thing.

 

To be honest, I’m a big fan of talking in all its forms. Whether it’s about difficult and troubling stuff, lovely and interesting stuff, or just whether anyone knows where all the bloody biros go in this house! It’s all good. Conversation is one of my very favourite things.

 

I think a lack of communication may well be the root of all evils. More than Putin, Liz Truss or even Love Island. Anyone talking about anything that leads to greater understanding, a problem shared, or even the beginnings of changing someone’s mind for the better, I’m absolutely in favour of it.

 

(OK, maybe that last one is a proverbial flogging of a proverbial, deceased domesticated, one-toed, hoofed mammal belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. I mean, come on, can anyone remember the last time anyone actually changed their mind? Does it even happen anymore?!)

 

Now, I’m terribly supportive of all forms of behaviour and conditions and stuff that fall under the flag of neurodiversity, insofar as ‘supportive’ means that if I meet someone who is neurodivergent, I’m highly unlikely to run screaming out of the building and start rounding up the local villagers to fetch their pitchforks and begin building a pyre.


terrifying villagers screaming and holding pitchforks standing in front of a pyre
Not my idea of 'supportive'.

Mostly because I try to 'take as I find'. I mean, it’s the least I expect from people I meet and I have no problem reciprocating. I know, I know, I’m absolutely splendid, it can’t be denied.

 

But the reason I said it's complex, is that, as with anything ‘new’, in public discourse, as welcome as the discussions are, there’s often a lot of language I’m a little vague on.


As anyone who knows me will confirm, I am a man to whom the English language is a dear friend, a bubble bath of words I like nothing more than to sink into with a rubber duck and a good book until my skin’s gone wrinkly. But other languages, the ones they speak in countries too lazy to learn my mother tongue, well, those are a veritable Hampton Court maze of mystery to me. I’m not too bad with hello, please and thank you. And I do a great line in smiling embarrassedly and pointing. But languages are not my thing. It probably goes back to the trauma of my O’levels…

 

………….

 

I arrived at my O-Level German exam, (for those too young to remember O-Levels – they’re the examinations we had to take, back when exams were hard, NHS waiting lists were manageable, and we thought not using spray deodorant might save the planet. Good times.) I'd arrived at the language lab with a perfect understanding of the word glücklich. And little else. Before I left the house, I had a few dozen other words too, but the nervousness of being rubbish at German pretty much reduced three years of lessons down to this single word.

 

Ironically, glücklich means ‘happy’, which couldn’t have been further from the truth of my emotional state. But like a man who buys shoes to walk around in, then, when they’re too scruffy and embarrassing to be seen out in, repurposes them as ‘painting’ shoes, until they wear all the way through and he thinks maybe they could be filled with fertiliser and become a pair of novelty flower pots, I was absolutely determined to get my money’s worth from the word.

 

Oh, and I did.

 

In the oral exam I spoke of the happy awaking that happily happened every happy morning when my happy Mum happily knocked on my happy door before happy school. And the happy walk to happy school in the happy sunshine of this happy summer day… (you get the idea). On the one hand it was a brilliant and optimistic tale of a gloriously contented teenager. On the other it was an utter waste of time and graded as a ‘U’ by educators that didn’t realise my talents lay elsewhere.



(The above three photos were all created by asking an AI image creator to produce a photo using nothing but the prompt glücklich as a guide. Make of that what you will.)

 

………….


So, whenever I hear discussions around the topic of neurodiversity I feel the need to reach for a brand new dictionary, or run the risk this new information will make me glücklich – and little more. So, recently, I’ve been getting ahead of my ignorance and doing a little research – so I have the faintest idea what other people are talking about.

 

It still takes me by surprise whenever I hear the words: neurodivergence, neurodiversity, neurodivergent, neurodiverse. Only because, to me, the words sound like something Captain Kirk might have uttered about a being found sitting in a tree on an otherwise unpopulated chunk of rock in deepest, darkest space. But that’s language for you.

 

(Please note, in no way am I, by the above, suggesting neurodivergent individuals are aliens in trees on fictional planets explored by William Shatner. Or that I ever really watched Star Trek.)

 

‘Neuro’, by the way, comes from the Greek, meaning sinew or cord. While ‘diversity’ simply means variety. So, on one level, am I right in thinking the word Neurodiversity could also signify people who wear an assortment of different corduroy trousers?

 

No? Oh.

 

Have you noticed it’s only ever the filthy rich who wear those port or mustard coloured corduroy trousers you see on certain brandy-addled, older gents in the posher parts of town? I wonder why that is?


A man in yellow trousers
Literally could have chosen anything at all to wear today, and he chose these...

I tell you what though, it makes me wonder if there isn’t a gap in our language for a word describing people who wear a lot of peculiar leg coverings.


Sadly, I’m not in charge of new words. But, I hear you, I should be. Write letters. To people. I have faith in you. It’s in your hands.

 

Neurodiversity is a broad church, of course. One person’s brain behaviour might bear no resemblance to another’s. For example, the brain of Jacob Rees-Mogg as compared to the brain of a dung beetle... oh, wait, that's not a good example...


Anyway, after almost two minutes of deep and considered research I have discovered a unique signifier that many types neurodiversity share. And for a person like me, it can be problematic.

 

One moment while I write a research paper outlining my discovery…

 

Another moment, please, while I publish it in all the relevant peer-reviewed places…

 

A couple of moments while I run away from the peer-reviewed places, pursued by all manner of peer-reviewed attack dogs…

 

I know, I’ll see if I can register this blog site as an arena for sharing new and otherwise unthunk thinking, under the peer-review banner…

 

Fine. I can’t. Rude.

 

Right, well, I’m sharing it all the same…

 

The thing a lot of types of neurodiversity have in common, to me at least, is that they’re terribly difficult to spell!

 

Some of them are so difficult, they’ve been reduced to letters. What more evidence does one need? Incidentally, the meaning of these letters is known to no one. Literally no one…

 

ADHD – a word that is impossible to pronounce, and as I said above, formed from words no one can remember.

 

Dyslexia – a word that can only have been created by a sociopath obsessed with cruel irony.

 

Tourette syndrome – two words, one of which is created from an utterly implausible set of letters.

 

Orrtizum – not a widely recognised spelling of the word, but it should be. Phonetically, it’s much more sensible than the way it appears in the dictionary.

 

Dyscalculia and Synaesthesia – I looked them up and everything, so I know they exist, but at the same time, I’m pretty sure the spelling of these two words was invented by two monkeys, wearing brandy coloured corduroy motorbike helmets, banging their heads against typewriter keyboards. Tell me I’m wrong. 


Two monkeys wearing yellow helmets, sitting at typewriters
The Department of Difficult Spelling

Just for the record, I’m not saying people who are successful in spelling bees will tend to follow a more ‘typical’ brain-wiring, life-journey. Whatever that is.


Spelling, per se, isn’t a super highway to more mainstream thinking or behaviour. Although knowing when and where to use their, there and they’re; or understanding that to, two and too are not interchangeable; or having a basic knowledge of the difference between your and you’re (and yore, if you’re historically minded) might well help you to impress a future life-partner or their retired English teacher mother. And that can never be a bad thing, eh?

 

Now, as far as I’m aware, I’m not neurodivergent.

 

More typically the picnic hamper of my mental wiring contains a mix of anxiety, occasional and inexplicable lows, and overwhelm.

 

Oh overwhelm, what a generous bedfellow you are.

 

Overwhelm is a louche, lounge-lizard in my life. He appears in a tuxedo, bottle of champagne in hand, grinning, because he knows I’m defenceless to his charmless charms.


A lizard in a tuxedo holding a champagne bottle
Allow me to introduce - Overwhelm!

I realise overwhelm is not fundamentally part of the neurodiverse spectrum, but it most definitely is a core ingredient in my own brain salad. However, it’s also still very much part of the ‘pull yourself together / oh for godsake! / don’t you know how lucky you are?’ world.

A world I’m sure the neurodiverse know only too well.

 

Even though I’m a sufferer of regular overwhelm, I still sometimes think it should be a thing I can time-management myself out of. And occasionally I can. But when I can, it’s because I’m not truly in the sweaty-fingered grip of overwhelm – I’m suffering from what is medically referred to as ‘Utterly Disorganised Human Being Syndrome’.

 

UDHBS is different to overwhelm. Because overwhelm, firstly, isn’t about multi-tasking.

 

(For the record, multitasking is not a thing. It’s just a word. Like Penistone (a town in Yorkshire) or wankapin (a plant) or cattywampus (when everything’s gone bolloxed).

 

Anyone doing two things at the same time is really only doing two things half as well as they could do them - if they were me.

 

Nor, secondly, has overwhelm got anything to do with an overly encumbered to-do list. We’ve all got loads to do, that’s just life, isn’t it?

 

So overwhelm can look like a rather simple thing. Like me. But, sometimes, to me, it isn’t.

 

Because when there’s a thing I’m doing, and a thing waiting to be done, and then a leftfield-thing baseball bats me in the head as the heavens open and the trains go on strike – it takes inhuman strength for me not to sit under the lounge window and turn the floor light on and off like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. 


a woman in a t-shirt sitting on the floor
Glenn Close to losing her sanity... (see what I did there?)

However, Glenn Close has much better legs than me (it’s the only reason we’ve never been able to be friends) and, what with my back, sitting on the floor isn’t as simple as it once was, so I tend not to go down the Glenn route. To be fair, her character in that film was also in a place I’ve never found myself – not least because she’s a woman, but also because I’ve never had sex with Michael Douglas and then (spoiler alert) been rejected by him.

 

Caveat: I have a dear friend who knows Glenn Close and he assures me she’s absolutely lovely. And that she’s an actress and the characters she plays are actually from the minds of writers, not aspects of her own personality. (Who knew?) And so the likelihood, should she ever read this blog, of her coming round to my house and screaming ‘I’M NOT GONNA BE IGNORED, DAN!!!’ through my letterbox, is slim. Not least, because that's not my name.

 

I do however, sometimes feel like my head is a microwave oven that’s been filled with eggs and set on full power for a week: a complete mess. I’m sure you do, sometimes? 


A microwave over filled with broken eggs
My head sometimes. Sort of.

Life is messy, heads are messy – it’s why we have wine coolers, long walks, headphones and unhealthily large bags of salty snacks. Sometimes they help, sometimes not, but we muddle though the best we can.

 

It’s all part of the varied and wonderful canvas of people and weirdness. Good weirdness.

 

Some of the very best people I know are neurodivergent. And some of the biggest arseholes I’ve ever met, are not. And yet there is stigma on the former, and not on the latter. What’s that about?

 

If I’m honest, I’ve always been attracted to ‘other’. People who do things differently, cope with things in different ways, walk a different path. They’re the best. However, I am, most definitely not trying to say that being ‘different’ is always easy…

 

When my amazing eldest son (18 years old, 6ft 2”, basketball genius, funny, articulate, utterly excellent speech maker at our wedding) was born, it was discovered he was completely deaf in one ear. His Mum is a teacher of the deaf. Her students, when they found out she was going to have a baby, wanted to know if she hoped our son would be hearing or deaf. Oof.

 

In the end though, like a pint of snakebite, he’s half and half. Remarkable.


A snake wrapped round a pint of beer on a basketball court.
My eldest. Sort of.

 But, to me, my son is just my brilliant son. He is not lacking. Technically he's 'different', technically he's 'other'. And sometimes, sure, he’s a little batshit crazy. But mostly, he's just who he is. And I wouldn’t change him one bit.

 

Although, a few weeks ago in Barcelona, me, Sarah and both my boys were sitting in a lovely piazza having a drink. I had just discovered that if you held the drinks menu directly opposite you on the metal table top, and slowly raised it from horizontal to vertical, all the while talking in a fairly loud voice, the sound of your own words abruptly changed, like you were suddenly sitting in the middle of a surround sound system, the like of which I could only dream of.

 

You know, like you do.

 

I explained this to my eldest. He tried it. It didn’t work for him. I suggested it might be because of his one-sided deafness. He replied that he thought it was more likely because I was an idiot. No doubt one of us was right. But then my youngest said he could do it. But he may have been lying. Then Sarah said she couldn’t. And she’s barking. So what have I proved?

 

I guess, that in particular scenarios (and with a following wind), we’re all differently wired. And possibly the notion of children being seen and not heard is a behaviour sadly lacking around piazzas in Spain.

 

Living in one’s head isn’t always easy. Like living in one’s posh trousers, no doubt. But trousers can be changed, heads, not so much. And when being different causes hardship - in a society that currently seems to find ‘otherness’ akin to satanism – I’m all for understanding, both in an empathetic sense but also intellectually.


Because, once you take a step towards understanding, spelling aside, that’s got to be a good thing. Hasn’t it?

7 comentarios


Invitado
02 jul 2024

Love it. I think my brain might be a bit like your brain. 😂

Came across you as Sarah is on my website lipstickcabaret.co.uk

Not that I ever got her any work. Not that she ever needed it. She does super well huh?

Keep on writing….👏🏻

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Invitado
18 may 2024

Loved it! It took me on a delightful 'squirel chase' of thoughts. Tha ks Gen for the recommendation to read.

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Paul Chronnell
Paul Chronnell
18 may 2024
Contestando a

Thanks for reading! I’m also very grateful to my sister for spreading the word. 😊

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Invitado
18 may 2024

I totally enjoyed your writing. Loved that you used the word louche. It’s right up there with plethora in my list of words I find delicious to say.

I had lunch in the company of Gen and Serge and Em yesterday.

Here’s to “otherness”.

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Paul Chronnell
Paul Chronnell
18 may 2024
Contestando a

Thank you so much! I’m a big fan of ‘curious’ too - I think it goes back to reading Agatha Christie when I was a kid. Ah, sounds like a lovely lunch of otherness!

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Invitado
17 may 2024

Dear Paul, My name actually is Dan. Do I need to worry?

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Paul Chronnell
Paul Chronnell
17 may 2024
Contestando a

Mm, tricky. I would imagine not - but, to be on the safe side, I'd consider moving. Today. Right now!!

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