Sunday 1st December
I woke up this morning around 7am. I was hoping to sleep later considering I was back in the familiar marshmallow that is my own bed. Thinking that perhaps 7am was just my body’s preference for starting the day I consigned myself to accepting the fact. Snuggled within my warm feather duvet I began mulling over the week at the writer’s retreat. There were various challenges that came up for me and one stand out was the difficulty I had when listening to the other participants read out their work.
We were a group of nine, a satisfying number, all kind and intelligent women with curious stories to tell. It’s just that I struggled to hear them.
The morning workshops took place in a room at the end of the building, a light filled rectangular space with a twelve seater oblong pine table to fill it. We’d do various short writing activities, as you’d expect, then share them with the group. And here’s where I struggled. At times I felt as if my inner ears were stretching and straining to catch the words. I’d catch parts but then a mumble would arrive, ‘speak up’, I’d say to myself, enunciate please. I felt challenged with the range of accents too. What’s going on? It’s not like I haven’t heard them before – American, Australian, Irish and RP. But I’m just really struggling here.
I’m wearing my Loops, I have to to counter high pitch squeals of laughter that pierce my eardrums like small sharp daggers, or the sound of a scratchy pencil traversing a thin sheet of paper next to me, akin to the sound of chalk screeching on a blackboard. I can feel it scratching in my ears. Regardless, the earplugs just take the edge off, not mute the room. I don’t understand why I can’t hear with clarity what the women are saying when they are reading their work. Everybody else does. They all laugh, mmmmm, sigh and arrrh, at the appropriate moments. Fuck, I’m lost. My concentration has gone, and my mind starts to drift off, becoming more absorbed with problem solving – just how did they get this enormous pine table into the room? Even with the legs removed, for the sheer length of it, it would have been a challenge. I’m pulled back into the fold. ‘How evocative, I really felt like I was there’ ‘Where?’ I ask myself ‘oh there, up on the brow of a hill…’ I’m trying to piece together the parts.
And it wasn’t like there were other noises going on in the background distracting me – I have sensory processing challenges so that could easily have been a denominator. No. We were in a generous place of silence where you could easily be deceived by the fact that at any one time there were a minimum of nine adults filling it. There were no building works going on, or the sound of kitchen appliances whirling away down the hallway where our delicious lunches were being prepared. No. We were surrounded by silence and the serenity of the dale. But yet I found it difficult to hear what others were saying.
Shifting position in my comforting marshmallow my thoughts left last week to find myself transported back to the 1980s and my English Lit class at secondary school. I have no recollection of what the teacher instructed us to do but I do remember looking blankly at the pages in, was it the Merchant of Venice or perhaps a WWI text or equally both, and feeling like I’d hit a brick wall. Stumped, not knowing what I was meant to do, where to start. Did I miss that information too, more preoccupied with gazing out of the picture windows? Or was there, being that the school had a high achieving reputation, an expectation that one would just know? I have no memory of being given any guidance or instructions, only struggling to make sense of what lay on the page before me. Give me the answers and it would all make sense.
Did I have learning difficulties? The enormity of the question created a heavy depression in my chest. I didn’t get on with English Literature at all, in fact, it’s just coming back to me now. I felt so estranged from the subject that I refused to sit the compulsory O’level exam. Why didn’t anyone see me struggling and help me? Did my teacher just not care, or perhaps just prefer the ease of more fluent students? It felt like the only recognition I got from them was at the end of term when my report card would be read ‘if only Lara paid more attention . . . ’
I wonder if I’m dyslexic, my mum is. And I wonder if I was read to as a child, because on reflection I don’t remember much taking place. Would I have had better story listening skills if I had of? Did I even read that much as a child? I just about remember reading Charlotte’s Web, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and a few others but I certainly don’t remember having any conversations about the stories with anyone.
Going on the writer’s retreat opened up more than I anticipated leaving a great deal to process, not only in the new skills and knowledge that I have come away with, but also a deeper exploration and reflection of how I learn, and what I need to maximise my learning experience. I’m not sure I have all the answers but I’m open to exploring the possibilities.
Tiger.On.The.Rock 