TTT: Get Temporarily Impaired

Note: These takes are totally tacos!

I have a friend with a moderate cognitive impairment. She’s typical in most respects most of the time, but under stress the ability to manipulate numbers escapes from her completely. After a long and particularly stressful day at work when she was closing the shop alone at 11pm she couldn’t get the combination-lock on the door to function. She’d used it many times before. She had the number written down as a reference. The lock just WOULD NOT WORK. After twenty minutes she gave up in frustration. The next day when she went back to work it was working fine, and she was able to use the combination lock without problem. But when under stress she actually could not put in a 5-digit combination even with 20 minutes to work on it.

Book-keeping in general was a herculean task for her as well, even on good days. Fortunately she’s on some good meds now that help with both these issues.

When I was in my alcoholic phase, I once drank so much that I couldn’t multiply 3 x 5 and get to 15. It was a bizarre feeling. I knew that I knew the answer to this. I knew that I knew the process to figure it out even if I had forgotten the actual answer. I probably could’ve have gotten there with some work, but my nearby friends laughed and told me the answer so I never did find out. Anything more complicated than this would have been impossible regardless of time. The connections just weren’t being made.

When my younger brother was in the army, one night him and some friends got so drunk that he could not use a pay phone to dial a 10-digit number. He was holding the paper with the 10-digit number in one hand. He was trying to push the buttons on the phone in order, as they were written on the paper. The task was simply beyond his capacity. He couldn’t keep track of where he was in the number line. Not even using his thumb to track what numbers he’d already dialed helped.

It’s hard to truly understand just how difficult and scary life is for someone with significantly less mental ability without experiencing the state yourself. Imagining being unable to use numbers is a hard exercise on its own. To actually feel what it’s like, to find yourself broken with frustration in the face of shifting arcane symbols without coherent rules, and completely reliant on others, is a level of helpless fear that may be impossible to fully comprehend without living it.

I’m not advocating taking so much alcohol that you get to such a state… it probably gives you actual brain damage which may take months to recover from if you’re young, maybe impossible once you’re older. But I’ve heard there’s other drugs with less potential for damage that can cause similar effects. It may be enlightening to try to go fully retarded one evening, in a safe place with sober friends, and try to function as normally. Just to really get a feel for what those with -1 SD (or more?) have to live with every day of their lives.

This, too, is an injustice humanity must destroy as soon as we have the means.

Like all Taco Takes, this should not be taken seriously.