I have a friend who suffers greatly from an affliction which she has coined ‘spatial dimentia’.
This lesser-known disability probably affects the lives of thousands of misdiagnosed sufferers around the world.
Every. Single. Day.
They are living with this silent burden, nowhere to turn, no medication to remedy them, no support groups for comfort. Just anguish.
For those of you who don’t know what spatial dimentia is (which is most likely all of you because it’s a complete made-up affliction), it’s the inability to determine what sized container one would need in which to keep leftover food.
A spatial dimentian would, when confronted with the remains of a meal, break into an absolute panic, grabbing hold of an ice cream tub for two pork sausages and a courgette, when really a 100g margarine tub would’ve sufficed. The suffering is real and uncontainable.
But I digress. The point of my spatial dimentia reveal is that we all suffer from life’s ‘blind spots’ – the inability to perform mundane tasks, or a lack of seemingly common knowledge that we need to get us through life.
For my husband, it’s the absolute inability to comprehend a word if it is verbally spelt out to him. My husband. The linguistics major. The English teacher.
He cannot spell a word in his mind. It makes keeping secrets from our K.I.D.S almost impossible.
And because he attended an elite boys’ boarding school in the Midlands (not Michaelhouse, the other one), he can’t speak a word of Afrikaans, so there’s no resorting to that either.
I can’t really judge though. I also have my blind spots.
Often when I’m driving. But even more so when the topic of geography is raised.
Despite my dedicated five years of geographical education at high school, the only knowledge I seemed to matriculate with is that ‘only goats will graze in marginal areas’.
When it comes to knowing where the hell countries are located, I’m absolutely stumped. And it can even be countries
I’ve visited.
I lived in Vietnam for a year, but if you asked me to point it out to you on a map, I’d somehow land in Pakistan every time.
If a group of mates start discussing countries in Africa (did you know Western Sahara was a country? I thought it was a new drink), I have only one move – I mutter something along the lines of ‘it’s just awful what’s happening over there right now’, and bank on the fact that there has been, is, or will soon be a civil war taking place, before I promptly introduce a drinking game – one that isn’t based on geographical knowledge.
But I live with the (lack of) knowledge that everyone has their blind spots.
Some people are useless with grammar. Some people know nothing about history. Some people can’t fit small things in big containers.
Some American presidents suffer from all three.
The only real piece of advice I can give you when your blind spot is eventually exposed, is this…
Only goats will graze in marginal areas.
