Well, I am in training for this new job and it has a lot of new information systems that have to be learned and gobs of new information. Now, I sailed through my oxygen-depriving heart surgery with no ill effects--I thought. When you are sitting home watching Grey's Anatomy for the 7th time, your short term memory is not very taxed.
Here I am with my 50plus oxygen-deprived brain trying to remember the first step of a long process that the trainer taught us not 3 minutes before--meanwhile all the other 25 youngsters in their 20's and 30's are six steps ahead of me and I haven't a clue.
I felt slow, lost and stupid, much like when I was in the first grade and everyone was folding a piece of paper so there would be 8 squares and I can't do it---the exact feeling. It was surreal. I mean, I have struggled my whole life with the inside and outside label of being dumb and here it is again.
Needless to say it was a very rough week and I kept on having dreams of hiding and being lost in the dark and having to walk through stranger's houses at night in an effort to get back home.
Well, I took it all pretty bad and was all weepy about it but when I was done, I sat down and wrote myself a letter. In that letter I reminded myself of the two dreams about writing and the feeling I have that if I just move in that writing direction, it will all be okay--and I thanked God for those dreams.
That night, I had another dream--nothing I remember just a fragment and a feeling, really. I dreamed I was reading Mr. King's Twitter or Facebook posts (as I do in real life) and there was a post where he addressed me personally. Nothing long, just a brief sentence where he called me cb--just like that in lower case and said something. I don't know what it was exactly but I know it was encouraging because of the way I felt when I remembered the fragment--encouraged.
Like in my dream world, Mr. King is my GOOD FAIRY OF WRITING--my dream symbol-- keeping me on the writing road--and it's all good.
After that, the rest of my training turned out better because when it came to looking up random terms in the company search engine, I generally found things six times faster than every body else because I've been plugging in random terms in search engines way before Google was a Goo. And then when it came to writing heart-felt emails to these upper-crust consumers, I also sped to the front of the line because I have read and written about a million words in my 52 years and simply put: I can write like the wind blows.
When we got to the writing, I suddenly felt like Cinderella at the ball and my good fairy said, "No time clock on this one, cb--you have arrived--show them all how to dance."
Here I am with my 50plus oxygen-deprived brain trying to remember the first step of a long process that the trainer taught us not 3 minutes before--meanwhile all the other 25 youngsters in their 20's and 30's are six steps ahead of me and I haven't a clue.
I felt slow, lost and stupid, much like when I was in the first grade and everyone was folding a piece of paper so there would be 8 squares and I can't do it---the exact feeling. It was surreal. I mean, I have struggled my whole life with the inside and outside label of being dumb and here it is again.
Needless to say it was a very rough week and I kept on having dreams of hiding and being lost in the dark and having to walk through stranger's houses at night in an effort to get back home.
Well, I took it all pretty bad and was all weepy about it but when I was done, I sat down and wrote myself a letter. In that letter I reminded myself of the two dreams about writing and the feeling I have that if I just move in that writing direction, it will all be okay--and I thanked God for those dreams.
That night, I had another dream--nothing I remember just a fragment and a feeling, really. I dreamed I was reading Mr. King's Twitter or Facebook posts (as I do in real life) and there was a post where he addressed me personally. Nothing long, just a brief sentence where he called me cb--just like that in lower case and said something. I don't know what it was exactly but I know it was encouraging because of the way I felt when I remembered the fragment--encouraged.
Like in my dream world, Mr. King is my GOOD FAIRY OF WRITING--my dream symbol-- keeping me on the writing road--and it's all good.
After that, the rest of my training turned out better because when it came to looking up random terms in the company search engine, I generally found things six times faster than every body else because I've been plugging in random terms in search engines way before Google was a Goo. And then when it came to writing heart-felt emails to these upper-crust consumers, I also sped to the front of the line because I have read and written about a million words in my 52 years and simply put: I can write like the wind blows.
When we got to the writing, I suddenly felt like Cinderella at the ball and my good fairy said, "No time clock on this one, cb--you have arrived--show them all how to dance."
