Author Archives: Ryan Joseph Fritz

My Symmetrical Life

Since I became self-aware many years ago, I’ve known that I always have done things differently than all of the other kids I met.  Never being able to put a name to it, I always just put this off as everyone having quirks.  However, in class when we discussed the topic of disorders, I found one word on a lecture slide to be quite enlightening:  symmetry.  This concept was then strengthened by a story told by Dr. Wede.  The topic on which the slide and story were focused was obsessive compulsive disorder.

Thinking back on my childhood I always liked things to be symmetrical and to come in even numbers.  This may appear as trivial to some, but it was more of a way of life for me.  From refusing to eat an odd number of chicken fingers as a kid to stepping on side-walk tiles the same number of times with each foot, this concept seemed to find its way into every aspect of my life.  As a kid I was often confused about the subject, but could find comfort in the fact that no one tended to notice and that my mother shared many of these compulsions.

The aforementioned story told by our professor was about checking the lock on your door many times a night to make sure that it locked.  When living with my parents I don’t often check the lock on our door, because I never seemed to care about that as we live in a safe neighborhood.  In State College, however, I do find myself worrying about this sort of thing, most likely because it is not just my things that I have to keep safe and there is only one other person that can lock the door if it is found to be open.  Usually I can find solace if I possess a concrete memory of locking the door with some sort of time frame.

These compulsions have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, so now I don’t notice them very much if at all.  They can interfere with my life, but not nearly as much as the amount that is usually associated with a disorder.  That is why I think that my situation is less disorderly and just a slightly different way of living.

Colorblindness

I have known that I am colorblind since I was very young, but I never really knew what this exactly meant until recently.  Red-green colorblindness is when a person’s red cones are filled with green photopigments.  This alters perception of the world by disallowing me to see certain shades of red and changes how I see all colors that have red in them.  I never thought of colorblindness as affecting my life very much.  My way of thinking was challenged, however, when I read an article describing software to give the colorblind the ability to see everything easier on a computer.  The article portrayed colorblindness as more of a disability and tried to gather support to increase the accessibility of the internet.  I haven’t noticed anything missing from what I’m seeing on the computer, but this makes me think that on every site I visit there’s something that I am not seeing.  This then reminds me of every time that someone remarks to me that it must be so different for me and other colorblind people.  I always have to respond with, “I wouldn’t know,” but it still makes me wonder what it’s like to see normally.  I still don’t see colorblindness as an affliction that has made me worse off, but it’s nice to know that there are those out there that are trying to better my experience on the web.

The article describes how a young man in India is working to create an extension to Google Chrome that allows the user to change color settings, so the colorblind can gain the ability to see everything that the web has to offer.  This task doesn’t seem very difficult, but it gets much harder when you add in the fact that there are many types and severities of colorblindness and many people don’t even know what type they have.  The main difficulty is the nonexistence of a database of information with enough subjects to allow the software to work on all types of colorblindness with accuracy.  These difficulties can be overcome, but it will take time, especially with very few people working on the project.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3027162/a-teenager-redesigns-the-web-for-the-color-blind

Nativism vs. Empiricism in my life

It has been long debated whether a person’s personality is determined more through nativism or empiricism, nature or nurture.  These terms date back to the ancient Greek philosophers:  Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.  Socrates and Plato believed in nativism and Aristotle in empiricism.  Most early psychologists thought only one or the other to be the determiner of any person’s personality, but now we know that both play important roles in developing anyone’s character.  In most people, however, either nature or nurture seems to take a more overwhelming role in the creation of personality.

In my life, nurture seems to have been a stronger determiner of character than has nature.  I say this because I had a very different personality in my early childhood than I do now.  As a young boy I was very outgoing and always wanted to be the center of attention.  This gradually changed to until I became what I am today, someone who fixes to stay out of the spotlight and keep to himself.  My nature was to have a big personality, but through experiences in my childhood I was changed.

These changes occurred when, as a child, I went slightly too far in my openness, compared to the opinions of those around me.  I could say that my family taught me to be less outgoing, but none of these “teachings” were voluntary.  Usually the instances consisted of me saying something slightly offensive and my parents and siblings acting as if I had caused some sort of catastrophic disaster.  As a young and very impressionable child I took being outgoing to be bad behavior and thus slowly did away with it in my life.

Now I can look back and see that my parents were just embarrassed with my behavior and this embarrassment was then copied by my siblings, who then sought to share this humiliation with me in order to get me to stop.  The cessation however didn’t end with just one incident, it stopped my openness all together.