WearManyHats on DeviantArthttps://www.deviantart.com/wearmanyhats/art/Trepidation-Tesselation-198115957WearManyHats

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Trepidation Tesselation

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I have dyscalculia.

It's like dyslexia, but with numbers and math. I can only do very basic addition in my head at no larger than two-digit whole numbers and even then it's tricky. With a calculator's help I can do simple division, multiplication and subtraction. I failed out of a pre-algebra class three times in college and nearly didn't finish college at all because of my problems with numbers. The worst part of it was that through all this, I believed I was just stupid; nobody else seemed to have this much trouble, so clearly I was a moron or something.

I only discovered dyscalculia long after I'd clawed and beaten my way through an obscure "life-skills" math class to barely meet the required math for my degree. I felt at once relieved and betrayed-- relieved that I had an explanation at last, and betrayed that no one, not all my math instructors and tutors had suspected something might have been wrong. I'd been written off by more than one of them as hopeless.

I still have to struggle with numbers, even as a graphic artist. I sometimes can't "hear" numbers when spoken, and I transpose and invert digits when writing them down. And God help me if I have to backtrack what tax is out of a total amount.

Math, to be blunt, scares me. I have panic attacks and blank right out when faced with it.

So how do I deal with this?

I take my fear and translate it into something that doesn't scare me. Something I understand. Something beautiful. Something like this.

This is a fractal tesselation, an ever-repeating ever-diminishing pattern of spiral tiles. A design based on numbers and formulae. My baffling, terrifying enemy wrought into something I love.

(I did learn also that Adobe Illustrator locks the hell up if you carry the pattern into too many iterations.)
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changewinds's avatar
Wow, totally inspirational! I commend you on your persistence to struggle through an adverse subject like math and to turn into something so wondrously complex. The pattern is amazing and beautiful. It has the feel of mosaic tiles, something that would be wonderful to chance upon in a building full of static tiles.