Dyslexia: Self Discovery Can Be Weird

     Sometime in middle school my mom mentioned that I have a learning disability. I don't remember it being more than a passing conversation, but aside from blowing my mind, it made quite a few things make sense: like how from approximately second to fourth grade I'd had to go to special education classes at certain times during the school day. It also quickly made sense why my mom hadn't mentioned it sooner, because I started milking that thing for all it was worth. A classmate commented on how I failed a spelling test: "I have a learning disability!" To be fair, my learning disability is directly tied to phonics and spelling, but still... Fortunately, spelling tests weren't so much a thing in high school, so that phase passed quickly. 

    However, I didn't remember what my condition was called and it was an infrequent topic of conversation, so for years I've referred to it as a "sight-sound retention deficit", which is technically accurate. For whatever reason, several months ago, my youngest brother mentioned me having dyslexia in our sibling group chat. As my understanding of dyslexia had always been that letters seem to shift position for the dyslexic reader, my immediate response was "I'm not dyslexic, I have a sight-sound retention deficit."

 

    Then recently, out of nowhere, the thought occurred to me: dyslexia is a visual processing disorder. My disability is also a visual processing disorder... So I looked it up. Turns out phonological dyslexia is the most common variety of the disability, and that I owed my brother an apology, which I promptly gave, even if he'd never have otherwise known he was due one. 

    As I've been amused and bemused by this little self-discovery, I've also been pondering why I didn't know this sooner. I think it's  down to a couple of reasons: firstly, my parents didn't like to limit our potential. They were always very supportive of our interests, and letting us pursue them, within what was financially feasible for our family at any given point. So my learning disability wasn't mentioned much because my parents knew me, and knew that I would let it define and limit me and my abilities (or lack thereof) from a very young age. 

    Secondly, my understanding of dyslexia, besides it being the letters mixing themselves up, was that it was an ongoing, omnipresent issue, and mine really isn't. I'm still not great at pronouncing new words or spelling more complex ones, but it's been a long time since my I've had any major consistent issues with it. Pretty much since I successfully started reading at the appropriate grade level, I haven't had a problem. 

    For me, learning to read was a lot like having to climb over a wall, while the average person is able to use the gate. It was a brute force process. I literally had to memorize words, because my ability to sound things out was, and is, largely nonexistent. At the same time, that's what everyone eventually does. It's not like reading routinely involves sounding out each word as you come across it. It's only the early stages that actively require that, but that stage was not accessible for me. Fortunately, I come from a family of bibliophiles and as a result knew the power of stories and the written word long before I started school. I knew what books made possible, and even though it was difficult, ultimately, with a lot of loving support from my parents and a couple of great special education teachers, I was and am able to be classified as literate. At least in English...