No thoughts just the scene in Heartstopper S2 where Nick and Charlie are finally alone and things get heated and they both stop and agree they’re not ready for anything more than kissing so they spend the entire night in each other’s arms talking about anything and everything until they’re both finally too tired to keep their eyes open and they fall asleep in a tangle of limbs and neither of them can keep their hands off the other and
I binged heartstopper s2 through work yesterday and i have Things To Say but i'll just start with this: i hc that Nick has dyscalculia
Listen when he opened his maths exam and instead of equations or diagrams he saw a bunch of squiggles which messed with his head is such an accurate portrayal of what it's like to do math with dyscalculia. Not as in they actually become squiggles but more as in it feels like you're looking at a foreign language and no matter how hard you try you cannot make sense of it.
Personally i can do simple sums but anything more than that and it just stops making sense. At a certain point you don't even know what you're calculating anymore and you get extremely frustrated with yourself. And when you talk to others about it usually they'll be like "oh yeah i get it i hate math too" but the thing is, i actually enjoy math and it's really satisfying when it works. But for me the issue is that more often than not i end up confused before i can even solve it. I don't hate math i just genuinely can't do it.
Dyscalculia is such an unknown learning disorder. A friend of mine did her thesis on learning and behavioral disorders for youth in prisons, and she made the remark that no matter how hard she looked she could barely find any research papers to use in her thesis on dyscalculia. All of it was dyslexia, adhd and the like. Each time people ask i have to explain what dyscalculia is, and each time they go "oh you don't know your multiplication tables? That's kind of silly" and it truly grinds my gears. This impacts my daily life immensely. A cashier will hand me my change and i just have to trust they're correct because i cannot count that fast. When i ask someone for the time and they just show me their analog watch in response i want to bite their hand off, bonus points if that watch has roman numbers. There's several tasks that take me way longer than it should at work because i get lost in calculating the price for something simple,
Anyway, Nick has dyscalculia 2023 and i will not take no for an answer.