Setting up an IRA or money market account is full of hard to undestand decisions, which is why most people have an expert “fund managers” at big financial companies to handle it all for them.

Insurance is another deep rabbit hole that most people have hard time understanding. Annuities are a difficult concept.

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And this is why investment and insurance companies use slogans of stability “like a rock” and past stability, to help the uneasy confused investor to give lots of money to them.

The job of their annual report is not just to inform the people that can understand it, but also to exude an aura of confidence for those that do not understand but are investing in the company anyway.

For all the talk about charts and graphs, the stock market is mostly about emotion and feelings. Stock market bubbles and crashes happen because of regular people buying and selling on emotion, rather than thinking clearly about what they are doing.

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Your experience with these doctors is completely normal, though most of the “normals” around you are not willing to admit they sometimes experience the same uncertainty and anxiety that you do.

But I can see that if you have always been told to always question your abilities, then it seems like a much bigger problem.

“birthday” just isn’t a word I’ve needed enough to recognize easily.

Also, I’m glad that you found out the major problem with your hands is tendonitis. I hope they heal well :D.

I’ve noticed that, and they will also tend to get offended if you say it’s not that. (I think some of them think it means we’re “trying to be unique and special” or something, not quite getting that we really do mean something different.)

With regard to listening during lectures, I find that the more I try to listen the more likely I am to fall asleep. But it’s certainly not that I’m not trying to listen, or that I am bored. (I noticed that I cannot sit through a normal church sermon without falling asleep, but I can usually easily sit through a more “boring” (by normal standards) Quaker meeting without falling asleep, something that as far as I can tell makes more people fall asleep. And I can fall asleep during sermon or lecture no matter how interested I am in it, even if it’s on my favorite topic I will still often fall asleep.)

So then he did his usual enter-and-leave-before-I-can-ask-much routine, and I thought “Hey, if he diagnosed tendonitis without telling me, maybe he diagnosed the hand injury without telling me too.”

The nurse, when I asked, kept telling me how busy he was and how they couldn’t help my finger so it didn’t matter what was wrong with it. I told her it was my finger and I deserved to know what was going on with my own finger, seeing as it’s attached and everything. She told me it moved just fine so it didn’t matter. I told her it hurt so it did matter, and besides it was my finger and nobody was telling me about it. She still took awhile to agree to ask.

She said he’d discussed it with me before. I said “Yeah, all he told me was that it wasn’t a break or arthritis, he didn’t tell me what it was.” She said “Maybe he doesn’t know.” I said “I don’t know is at least an answer, he didn’t even give me that.”

Eventually came back with my chart, where she tried to show me a bunch of long words that basically meant “your finger is bent 20 degrees and won’t straighten.” I said “Yes, I kind of noticed that. Does he know why?”

She told me I wouldn’t understand part of the chart (which I did understand), and then she showed me the part where he said it was sprained. “Thank you. That’s all I had needed to know.”

“But we can’t fix it.”

“Really, that’s okay, I just wanted to at least know what your word for whatever went on in there was.”

(Note that if someone hadn’t been there with me, this conversation couldn’t have happened, because it took someone getting her to shut up long enough for me to type, which she didn’t want to do. She wanted to tell me what she wanted me to know, rather than what I wanted to know, for some bizarre reason, and tried to make me feel guilty in several ways for asking questions.)

This kept tripping me up in school– everyone was willing to assume I was lazy or ‘absent-minded,’ and I couldn’t find the words to refute them. I think I tried to explain to someone when I was 10 or 11 that trying to force myself into a state where I ‘listened all the time’ was physically painful. The reaction I got was, though not in these exact words, along the lines of “Ha, ha, what a dramatist you are. Everyone gets bored having to listen to lectures, and that’s all you’re describing, getting bored, so just buck up and do what everyone else is doing.”

But there were times also when I found peace in release from the words being spoken around me having to make sense.

-Julian^Amorpha