I spent a fair amount of time when I was about 10 wondering if, to use the terrible vernacular of the time, I was “retarded.” I remember, after a particularly frustrating day at school asking my smartest friend on the way home if she thought “retarded” people knew that they were so.
She said, “They probably don't know for sure. But they probably wonder about it.” I walked the rest of the way home in silence.
I tried to test myself: Once, after a day of academic failure, I tried reciting “How Doth the Little Crocodile,” the way Alice in Alice in Wonderland did when she wanted to resolve a similar question about herself. I could do it. But recitation skills didn't help me at school, where I failed, cheated and barely passed year after year.
I'd begun school by repeating kindergarten. I didn't read until Grade 4, when mercifully reading seemed to come to me all at once. But my letters and numbers were wrong when I wrote them down.
I remember in a very early grade the teacher instructing the boys to put their finished written work in one pile and the girls in another, and myself standing at the table, scared of making a mistake: While I knew without question that I was a girl, the girls' pile was neat and tidy, and my smudged scrawls were worse than anything the piggy boys had produced. I refused to put the piece of paper down. I continued not to hand in assignments for years to come.
I'm learning disabled, as many people are. There was little testing back then. If you misspelled a word they made you write that word out 10 times – of course, I'd write it six different ways. No amount of extra lessons, practice or punishment could correct my handwriting, which meant that even though I often understood the material presented in, say, science class, I'd fail the test.
I read all the time, but I could still barely pass English, as marks were deducted for every spelling error. Even if teachers were patient enough to decipher what I'd written, A essays became D essays by the third paragraph. Worse, the fact that I read was taken as a sign of at least average intelligence, which meant that I was “underperforming” – willfully failing.
It's difficult to explain what it's like to be learning disabled. The closest I can get is to say that it felt as if I had a smart person's mind but a stupid person's brain – the mechanism I needed to express my thoughts didn't work. Alongside the spelling and the handwriting problems, anything that involved organization or patterns – math, for example – was nearly impossible for me. I never had a pen. (I still never have a pen.)
Not surprisingly, I left school after Grade 9. I worked as a nanny and in retail and in restaurants. At 21, I bought a Macintosh computer and it was like giving someone with terrible eyesight her first pair of glasses. In many ways the field was levelled.
Of course, a lot of what Apple did wasn't new. And I'd dealt with computers before. But before that I hadn't wanted to – couldn't, in fact – work on one. I needed a prosthetic limb for the parts of myself that failed me, and Steve Jobs – with his insistence that computers be intuitive and responsive, and his uncanny sense of what that meant – made Apple products exactly that.
Mr. Jobs was an artist of technology. One accusation levelled against dedicated Apple buyers is that they're seduced by elegant design. But humans have always made art of their tools, their weapons and their armour, and our computers are all those things.
Apple designs are frequently delightful, but it's more the way he approached his work that made Mr. Jobs an artist – the stakes and investment in the tech world are breathtakingly high, making sticking to one's vision a true high-wire act. He stuck.
It's counterintuitive, then, to say that his work was modest. But every day my own Mac says to me, “Don't worry about the details. None of this is worth considering. You get on with your work.”
I'm grateful.
