A love letter to holidays twixt ‘pocalypses
This week, as I settle into two days of PTO and the lull between organic (89.85%!) and biochem, astride a mid-life med school motorcycle, I’ve found myself coping with the time and space by reading two books in tandem.
They would neatly flank ends of a spectrum - one - Neurotribes (Steve Silberman)- about the autism and her misunderstood history and the other about Supercommunicators (Charles Duhigg). Which. Is about people who communicate well, deeply, and with charisma.
I find myself identifying deeply with both.
With the latter, I relate to being so relatable that folks I’ve scarcely met unzip their facades in service of unveiling the skeletons behind them AND I relate to feeling very astutely aware of how everyone else is experiencing life emotionally while feeling like a far distant species made of stone. Or Vulcan.
Most often people think I’m funny… when I’m just being serious. Or truthful. It’s hard to be funny on command for anyone, mostly because humor is context and context is everything. Am I being funny or am I just… funny?
The Neurotribes book smacks of Sacks, recounting neck-deep case studies of early folks and bad diagnostics, trends and lyrical threads, and more than one long stretch about how fascism has always been a terrible plague of loathsome ideas without moral tethers. A man named Asberger who is indeed my soul mate and may have inspired the backwards, inside out, and endearing elementary nest I came from.
The most lovely mentions are two fold:
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