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

[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.