I am currently writing a book. This is a collaboration with my son who's just turned eleven. It's the most recent in a long series of collaborations with him on a number of different projects - most of them, unplanned. For years, he has drawn fantastical beasts and regaled me with tales from an imaginary world. We have a sketchbook where he draws his scenes and beasts, and I work on them in pen adding detail and lifting them from the paper with texture, shading and contrast. I enjoy this process, but could never provide the initial ideas - I am creative, but not imaginative in the true sense. It is he who is the true creator. I am pleased that people enjoy the pictures, and I am particularly taken with their reaction to the level of detail. I find repetition calming, and the process of filling a page with tiny orderly lines and dots, the antithesis of the difficult, time consuming and agonisingly boring task that most assume it to be. My answer to the ubiquitous "How long did that take???!!" is "Not long enough". My eye sees only error and perfection, efficiency and inefficiency, pattern and interruption. We follow the same division of work when we are writing: He provides the story, the characters and the descriptions and ideas, and I impose order through structure and vocabulary, and style through wordsmanship. It is a true and equal Partnership, with both parties cooperating and each providing something the other cannot. Reciprocation happens naturally as part of the process of collaboration.
It occurred to me that similar "Partnerships" have been forged throughout my working life, in lieu of friendships, that are much more difficult and complicated to navigate... As someone with such a woeful record in friendship, I am, I realised, actually pretty good at forming partnerships. I am a Designer: A problem solver. To do my best work, I need a problem (the bigger, and more complex, the better). In the absence of such stimulation, I can be like a machine waiting, dormant, in standby mode, for input. This is poor fodder for friendships that require regular maintenance and reciprocation. My strengths in this regard are welcomed in a crisis, but not in the everyday.
I find very few people easy to get on with. Those, whose company I do enjoy, are either very similar to me (statistically, very unlikely) or the complete opposite to me (very empathetic). Working, as I did for many years, in Environmental Consultancy was perfect for me - giving me access to the to difficult IT and data problems I desired, the highly technical minds of the scientists and engineers and the immensely empathetic personalities of the environmental experts and ecologists, and I worked successfully on myriad projects from around the globe.
I recently asked my husband to take the standard tests (available online) that are used as part of the assessment process in diagnosing ASDs; The Autistic Quotient (AQ), Empathetic Quotient (EQ) and the Systemising Quotient (SQ) tests. I filled in the same tests (there are different versions available) to provide some context. Our scores were telling:
SQ: His score was 37 out of a possible 80, mine was 60
EQ: His score was 58 out of a possible 80, mine was 7
AQ: His score was 13 out of a possible 50, mine was 47
This certainly fits the pattern of 'exactly the same or completely different'. Although it appears my criteria for a successful partner is easier to find in professional circles, it makes me immensely grateful for the those (like my marriage) that are found and forged elsewhere...
It occurred to me that similar "Partnerships" have been forged throughout my working life, in lieu of friendships, that are much more difficult and complicated to navigate... As someone with such a woeful record in friendship, I am, I realised, actually pretty good at forming partnerships. I am a Designer: A problem solver. To do my best work, I need a problem (the bigger, and more complex, the better). In the absence of such stimulation, I can be like a machine waiting, dormant, in standby mode, for input. This is poor fodder for friendships that require regular maintenance and reciprocation. My strengths in this regard are welcomed in a crisis, but not in the everyday.
I find very few people easy to get on with. Those, whose company I do enjoy, are either very similar to me (statistically, very unlikely) or the complete opposite to me (very empathetic). Working, as I did for many years, in Environmental Consultancy was perfect for me - giving me access to the to difficult IT and data problems I desired, the highly technical minds of the scientists and engineers and the immensely empathetic personalities of the environmental experts and ecologists, and I worked successfully on myriad projects from around the globe.
I recently asked my husband to take the standard tests (available online) that are used as part of the assessment process in diagnosing ASDs; The Autistic Quotient (AQ), Empathetic Quotient (EQ) and the Systemising Quotient (SQ) tests. I filled in the same tests (there are different versions available) to provide some context. Our scores were telling:
SQ: His score was 37 out of a possible 80, mine was 60
EQ: His score was 58 out of a possible 80, mine was 7
AQ: His score was 13 out of a possible 50, mine was 47
This certainly fits the pattern of 'exactly the same or completely different'. Although it appears my criteria for a successful partner is easier to find in professional circles, it makes me immensely grateful for the those (like my marriage) that are found and forged elsewhere...
