zyx

Having slept well, I was ready for the next day.  I should say physically ready.  I don’t know if I was ever mentally ready for each day, as I never knew what was coming!

After the morning greetings and pleasantries, we began again.  Now she wanted me to clay the letters of the alphabet in lower case letters…backwards.  Wait now.  I don’t want to add to my confusion.  I see things backwards now, how is this going to help me!  At least I had the alphabet on the table from the day before, so I didn’t have to go to the end of the song and try go forward.  Again, a lot of time making rope clay so I could make my letters.

z   x   y   w   v   u   t   s   r   q   p   o   n   m   l   k   j   i   h   g   f   e   d   c   b    a

I had an assignment that day when I went home.  I was to memorize the alphabet backwards!  Come on now, I was trying to get rid of this backwardness I was experiencing!  This only seemed to me to encourage it.  Nevertheless, this was the assignment, so I did it.  Now I will tell you how I see this backwards, and how I learned it backwards, which I never thought of doing before.

zxy, letters used in math, if x=? and y=?, what is z?

wv, can’t you see volks wagon here?

uts, the first three letters of my name, backwards

rq, r a letter in my name, q just fits in here

pon, almost spells the word pond

mlkj everyone know m and n go together, so m has to come after n, and mlkj is Martin Luther King Jr

ih, the two dotted letters are together in the alphabet, so if I am at j, i must be next, and I see hi here.

g, this just had to be memorized for me

fed, do you see this word?

cba, shouldn’t be hard if you know your abc’s

What I thought would take a long time, really didn’t take long at all.  I just looked at the picture I had taken of this clay alphabet, and saw these little things to help me remember it backwards.

Now, I was to say the alphabet out loud to her, as she pointed to the letters with her pencil.  Forward and backwards, and backwards and forward. Then random pointing. She wasn’t going fast.  Wished she had.  I had this memorized and could even sing it to her.  In fact, most of us probably sing it to ourselves when we do it in our mind.  How many of us have that tune in our mind when we are reciting the alphabet out loud to another person?

No, she wouldn’t go fast.  Letter by letter, we went through it.  She said that I did a pretty good job, but there was one letter that kept tripping me up.  I don’t know if I hesitated, stuttered, stumbled, or what, but that darn letter ‘F’ was giving me some issues.

I have no idea why! She asked me to name some words that started with the letter ‘F’. Failure, flunk, frustrated, finicky, flawed, feeble, and on and on the list went.  Do you see a pattern here? Cindy wanted to know if I knew that other words started with that letter, such as fabulous, flower, friends, or friendly. I figured there could be other words, but I knew plenty of the negative ones already.  They were engrained in my mind all these years.  They had been my associates, my mentors for all these years, and now she wanted me to let go of them and make a mental change with the letter ‘F’?

Next blog: The huge internal struggle