Sorry, I’m Bad With Faces

And other moments from a blurry life

If I could paint just one thing really well, I would choose bare branches against an empty sky. I would like to paint endless images of bare branches against infinite empty skies. But I am not good at painting.

I can sketch a series of interconnected boxes, but the lines are never straight. I am incapable of drawing a perfect circle. I made a sculpture once, of a mother dragon holding a baby dragon, and it was pretty decent, as far as third grade work goes. I never kept up with sculpting. I probably would not be good at it now. I would make something decent, and then keep going. I would do too much, and then it would be bad.

I can’t do much math beyond basic arithmetic, multiplication, and division. I cannot hold numbers in my head for very long. I must repeat a phone number aloud several times, and quickly, until I can write it down, because I know it will go away. My mind is a sieve through which digits slip into nothingness.

The school put me in gifted math when I was little, and when it became very clear that I was not, in fact, “gifted” at math, my father wouldn’t let me go to the regular class. He got mad about it all the time. He yelled when I didn’t understand. Eventually, the teachers decided I should take regular math. I was relieved. I did poorly in…