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30-DAY WRITING CHALLENGE / 18 SEPTEMBER 2022
The One Skill I Once Wish I Had
And my secret for moving past the shame
Sometimes you just have to accept your limitations.
When it comes to numbers, I have met my match. I respect and envy people who have a good grasp for figures. They can rattle off long mental numerical lists and decipher what the numbers are telling them. Calculate percentages and cions at the speed of light while I am still pulling up my calculator app and trying to locate the percentage button.
An artist at heart, this skill has been a hindrance to my baffled neutrons. I can compose an illustration using the Golden Ratio, but ask me to balance my checkbook or quote the numerical properties of said Golden Ratio, and I would be lost. How I ever managed to pass math class will forever be one of the great unsolved mysteries of my time.
Add a brain injury, and my ability to handle numbers got worse. On a good day, I can get by, but on a bad day, I have to Google what 1+1 is. It takes a lot of mental power to get numbers to stick around long enough to make sense.
In the beginning, I hated this gaping hole in my abilities. I felt embarrassed to be secretly counting simple math on my fingers. Don’t give me a long division problem…
