mf

so when in 2019 I went for a cognitive evaluation, the psychologist made this comment:

"You express a lot of doubt."

He said that after we were done, referring to the objective portion of the tests. Memory questions, IQ questions, response speed questions, etc. Apparently, when I was answering, say, general knowledge questions, I nearly always added "I think?" or "I'm not sure" or "I'm pretty sure, but..."

"Do other people not do that?" I asked him.

"No, they don't."

When I talk about that cognitive evaluation, I nearly always talk about how I still do not know how to process the IQ ("cognitive resources") results - so far only my youngest sister seems to understand why I find the results extremely funny - but to be honest I think it's that one comment that really... changed my life?

I think a lot of it is just realizing: oh, when other people are talking, they're sure of what they're saying, but they're not that sure. I don't have to be that sure. I can just say stuff. As though knowing where I am relative to average, regarding the confidence I feel about my own accuracy, has removed some of the pressure I put on myself.

But over time it has had a different impact, one more about evaluating situations in real time? I'm figuring out how to put this into words - bear with me. Ok. So it's like this: I've struggled, for as long as I can remember, with people who tell me I'm wrong about something. Not the ones who say they'd like to check, not the ones who say something like "oh cool, I thought it was [different fact]" - the ones who put up a conversation roadblock. It might be direct or indirect... sometimes it's just someone correcting my vocabulary, sometimes it's someone straightforwardly saying "not it's not!" but sometimes it's just someone pretending I'm not there while I'm trying to contribute to a project. Which I suppose isn't them saying my information is wrong, as such - more that I'm wrong in thinking that my information is relevant. Those interactions make me feel uneasy. Troubled. Unstable. But ever since I've been told that, proportionately, I express more doubt than average, it's like that has centred me, somehow? Like in that moment of having my credibility questioned or invalidated, instead of thinking something along the lines of "oh I guess they don't take me seriously" or "I must have done something that made them see me as someone who would talk out of her ass" I realize (1) maybe I did say something incorrect but sometimes people do that, it's fine, and it does not explain why this interlocutor sounds like they're dismissing the possibility of factual accuracy and cutting off dialogue (2) this person might be wrong, themselves... which also does not explain why they sound dismissive. Leaving my head clear enough to think: ohhhhhh. And the dismissiveness is a completely different issue, unrelated to whether or not I have any credibility as a human who knows facts.

Something about a sense of context, I guess.

There's something else, though, something more I've been thinking about. About truth; about having a sense of what is real; about knowing my own mind. I keep thinking about concepts like "Stockholm Syndrome"* and gaslighting. About what happens when one person tells another person that they're too dramatic, or that they're overreacting. Tells them sometimes that they're too sensitive, and other times that they're not sensitive enough. I keep thinking about being asked how much something hurts and having absolutely no idea what kind of response is expected because words mean different things to different people and I've never experienced every level of hurt so I don't know the scale... and then thinking about it never used to occur to me to answer the question with the words that sounded and felt right to me.

Ok this feels like an abrupt place to end! Oh no! My brain just abruptly went "that's it that's your quota of ability to turn thoughts into words for today." It does that sometimes.

*I hear Stockholm Syndrome is not a thing