I start to rediscover that I’m a kinesthetic learner, and
it’s odd. It’s so contrary to
everything I’ve ever been told about myself, and it feels so good.
When we started learning about multiple intelligences
theories, kids who were described as kinesthetic—as learning most naturally
through movement or action—were dancers, naturally talented athletes, the class
clowns, physical actors, the kids who could never sit still. Kids who were always in trouble for not
being able to stay in their seats, likely to pick up a diagnosis of ADHD
somewhere along the way.
High-energy, daring, uninhibited, and loud.
And I was very quiet, very still, very inhibited. I was always in trouble in PE for not
knowing what in the world I was doing or being totally unable to keep up with
the rest of the class. I was badly
coordinated and nowhere near fast enough for any team sport. I never placed in any event in Field
Day. I failed out of gymnastics.
Kinesthetic learners were generally thought not to do well
in school because of their need for activity and movement. I sat quietly in class and got all A’s.
I had a photographic memory.
Teachers were always scolding, “You can’t expect to only study the night
before and do well on this test!”
But I could. I got into the
gifted class and kept my hands rolled up in my sleeves.
But all the while, I just ached to be taught how to do
things. I clawed my skin off from
having not enough to do with my hands.
And I could feel the terrifying void that existed between the fact that
I knew about a lot of things, but I didn’t know how to do almost anything. The scrutiny of other people was
literally paralyzing. I resented
more than anything as a kid when we’d be told that we were going to learn how
to do a really cool thing, but then what we actually got was obviously a fake,
dumbed-down version, of making gingerbread houses or uncovering fossils. People told me a lot about how I was
never going to make it in the real world, but nobody seemed to want to teach me
anything real.
But writing is movement, too, and I was better at that than
most people. So is beading. So is loading electrophoresis gels, and my biology classmates marveled at my dexterity at that.
As a child, making tuna salad or cutting up fruit for
myself, people try to take knives away from me, sure that I’m going to cut
myself, but I never do. (They do.) I never fall on steep hills or icy sidewalks when adults are
sure I will. I never sprain an
ankle toe-walking.
I could feel that if I could know a thing in my body, in my
joints, in my bones, in how it behaved in my hands…anything I could make a
physical habit out of, was a thing I’d always be able to do, that I could never
really lose or forget, the way I’ve forgotten calculus almost entirely from
disuse, and chemistry, and how I’ve lost my photographic memory to other
cognitive demands. (That one makes
me mad.)
I start stealing opportunities to do that. Time without a well-meaning adult
hovering over my shoulder was time to steal fire.
We have typing class in 9th grade, and once I
start learning, my fingers twitch constantly, ghost-typing out any sequences
of overheard words against my thigh.
I had no idea what was wrong with me, why I couldn’t stop.
I was in high school, and may’ve been listening to a lecture
from my grandfather about the difference between people who work with their
minds and people who work with their hands, and thought silently, “If I don’t
work with my hands, I’ll go insane.”
My acting teacher tells me to get my hands out of my
sleeves. I turn out to be good at
acting.
At a new job, I initially panic when I learn that my nightly
duties will involve moving pianos by myself. But I quickly get a sense of the individual moods and
idiosyncracies of the Hamburg, the New York Steinway, the Fazioli—their resistance
and center of gravity. They almost
have individual wills, like baby elephants.
I get told at a meet-up that I have very loud hands, and it
makes me so happy.
I start teaching myself a little ASL to make up for the
apocryphal childhood gesture language I was trained out of, that I have no
conscious memory of, and it feels like breathing air instead of doing
complicated sorcery.
