Aaron Walters had it all; lived very comfortably in an expansive luxury penthouse atop one of those desirable downtown glitzy condo towers, possessed the right education credentials to get to know influential people who willingly opened those invisi...
"Understanding your daughter's efforts to harness emotions will allow you to maintain your sanity while you're busy helping her feel confident in her own."
Lisa Damour, Ph.D.
"Maintain sanity?" I laughed in disbelief.
"Yeah... Right..." muttering skeptically as I closed that window to revert to the other, more believable subject I'd been reading.
In his book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell posits that roughly ten thousand hours of practice are required to achieve mastery in a field.
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"Interesting, "I thought and wondered, "How did Gladwell arrive at this conclusion?"
"Hmmm..." in afterthought, and then grabbing my calculator while muttering, "Let's see... ten thousand hours equates to 416.67 days going 24/7... and Tina has been with me nearly four years now... so discounting six to eight hours a day for sleep... a bit more than twenty-five thousand hours... that many?"
I had no idea but Dilbert's take I could identify with. Then again, if I'd mastered anything, it was finding square one, because that's where I usually found myself back at.
I clicked to close the windows, shut off my computer and stared ahead through the real window behind my desk.
"Rain coming." noticing dark clouds gathering and hoping that precipitation would materialize; the ground needed rain.
No amount of online research was going to help me because advice and answers I was mistakenly seeking elsewhere didn't exist; with Serpentina I was charting my own course.
Days came when Tina was very self-conscious that she didn't possess legs and feet, and I'm convinced that her own partial humanity coupled with her constant online exposure to the human world were likely primary causal influences. This said, I'm equally convinced that if she could spend any time at all only with snakes, nothing would change in her thinking.
Tina's unique paradox is that physically she's a reptile most resembling a snake, yet intellectually and emotionally she's virtually human. She and I can verbally communicate with each other, but should she ever wish, she can never expect anything remotely similar from a snake. Her origins are from both yet she doesn't fully belong to either.
I'm merely trying to wrap my head around this bizarre disconnect to understand it, yet Tina is the one who must every day live, grapple and come to terms with this unprecedented extreme challenge. So yes, she's riding an emotional roller-coaster concerning her identity, and that means many days I'm at wits end.
One point is unquestionably certain; just because Tina looks like only half a person doesn't equate into having only half a brain. What she lacks in terms of mobility and some basic human physical abilities (in the context of a human world), she more than makes up for in intellect. I'm beginning to wonder if she's truly a genius by the correct definition of this badly misused and oft overused word.
