Dyslexia

[shiori_makiba]

 
I was trying to think of a way of describing the experience of dyslexia.

Based on my own personal experience and observations, this is what I have got.

The best way I have is for general route of communication is that words enter your brain and follow a trail, like walking paths in a forest leading a central meadow where the words are identified and interpreted.

And for some people, several those walking paths have been completely taken over by a tangled patch of thorns.

For some, some of the walking paths aren't completely impassable but they have enough thorns to cause problems.

The thorns mangle the words, catching and holding parts of them only for them to get stuck to later words. The result is what entered is seldom what reaches the central meadow and what ultimately leaves the brain is not what left the central meadow.

And the really bothersome part is a lot of the time, from my personal experience, is that mangling is invisible to you. You literally cannot see it.

Sometimes you see it if you look at your words later. But sometimes those mangled words stay invisible to your eyes until someone points them to you.

You can't cut through the thorns. Trying force your way through the brambles does nothing to improve reading, writing, or speaking. All it does is make you extremely frustrated and in my case, gives me migraine headaches.

And the moment you stop hacking at them, the bramble immediately grows back.

So what does one do?

One goes around the brambles. You have to forge new footpaths to the central meadow. This can be difficult. And it takes time. And often you need tools. You also have to maintain the new paths constantly to keep them from becoming another impassable mess of thorns.

Some people aren't given that time or those tools.

You develop little tricks to see if your words or parts of your words have been stolen and improperly returned by thorns. They don't always work but they help. And every little bit helps.

A lot of media likes to focus on the reading part of dyslexia and as a learning disability. But it is more properly considered now to be a communication disorder since all aspects of communications can be impacted.

And sometimes, for some people, the dyslexia is not acting alone.

And sometimes you have add in education-related bad tape and other related brain weasels making the whole thing even worse.

Anyone else have thoughts or experiences they'd like to share?

Comments

[alatefeline]

I do not have dyslexia and can't respond in that regard, but reading your individual perspective was helpful to me as someone who wants to be a decent friend and/or coworker and/or educator to people with dyslexia. My take-away is, "however the person without dyslexia thinks it's working, it's a bit different than that." Acceptable?

[shiori_makiba]

*nods* I'd say so.

I'm glad you found this helpful.

Most dyslexics can figure out ways to get things working in a way that lets them do what they need to. But that can take a bit of time and some experimentation to find a way that works for that particular person.

And not everyone in our lives gives us that needed time and experiments. My parents did and many of my teachers. But I've had a few bad ones and I've heard of people who are just told until they are convinced that they are simply too stupid to read, etc.

Or because you aren't doing it the "standard" way then you are doing it wrong. And no amount of explaining that standard way does not work can get past their hair.

Which has caused more than a few of my fellow dyslexics to never develop a taste for reading. Because it always a chore and a difficult, endless frustrating one.

I'm not one of them because aforementioned parents. But I know not everyone is so lucky.

[alatefeline]

Thank you for the added detail.

[alatefeline]

PS: I have awful handwriting and it hurts to write longhand very much because of poor fine motor control made worse by meds, and also I play brain weasel whack a mole often, so those are familiar experiences.

[siliconshaman]

I was a late developer as regards reading.. but when I did I think I took a flame-thrower and back-hoe to that particular path. I was soon reading stuff years ahead and fast I could get though a dozen or more novels in a fortnight [i.e by the time I had to take them back to the library] and at least half of those were science text-books at a university level.

Writing however....

It's like my auto-spell-check is permanently offline. Words ahve a shape, sort of, and sometimes I can sort of recognise it's the wrong shape but not know what the right one is. Plus my hands don;t entirely listen to what I want them to.. so writing long-hand is painful, literally, as I force my muscles to respond..and typing I gt missing letters and sequences that are scrambled. Because I hit the wrong keys or in the wrong order.

But somehow, typing goes around most of the bad wiring, forging new paths as you said. {and I took a hammer to most of brain weasels].

[shiori_makiba]

Thanks for sharing.

I was early on reading because they noticed the dyslexia early and recommended that my mother spent a lot of time working on my reading with me. She already read to us kids so simply increased the amount of time she did.

It helped a lot. My reading comprehension and speed is very quick. I can plow through novels and non-fiction reading (provided I don't find either dull as dirt) at pretty fast clip - which might explain why my walls are covered in shelves for my books.

Writing is and has been a struggle. My brain generally prefers to tranpsose letters, especially similar looking ones like b and d, as opposed to mxi them up.

Typing seems to help me too. :)

Probably helps that the similar looking ones my brain likes to mix and match aren't usually by each other on the keyboard.

Through sometimes getting my computer's spellcheck to understand which word I meant can be very difficult. Because sometimes my spelling of unfamiliar words can get . . . creative.

{and I took a hammer to most of brain weasels].

*nods* One usually has to. Through sometimes it can be a bit like whack-a-mole.

[thnidu]

Sympathies. I don't have this particular problem, but the major one I do have makes dealing with any kind of complication complicated². And when life gets complicated, as it inevitably does -- meaning that I have a lot of really important things-to-do (literally, what the Romans called agenda) -- they're all screaming at me and the less- and totally un-important things are screaming just as loud or louder.

[shiori_makiba]

Ouch . . . sounds like would cause a real log-jam of the proprieties.

Because knowing logically Item Z isn't as important as Item A on The List never seems to shut up loudly chattering brain weasels.

[thnidu]

Ohhhh yeah. The one thing that seems to help for a while is meditation. And then, if I could remember to KEEP pausing for meditation every so often through the day, that would help a lot.