Dyslexia

@amazingRainfall28 's personal story of Dyslexia

A friend here asked me to write a post on dyslexia to bring awareness to it. And like always I have procrastinated on it.

In the past I have been called lazy, stubborn, stupid, thick etc. Because writing is particularly difficult for me, and it took me a long time to realise it wasn't because I was any of those things people had told me I was but that I had a particular learning difficulty.

I may have the knowledge but I find it very hard to get it down in print.

It's a lot easier to vent or to even reply to people but doing things like projects or study related essays, or homework has always been excruciatingly difficult.

This is isn't meant to be a vent but when I read articles in relation to dyslexia I always find that they don't describe correctly what i struggle with.

For example : You google dyslexia and it gives you this definition "a general term for disorders that involve difficulty in learning to read or interpret words, letters, and other symbols, but that do not affect general intelligence."

But the truth is it's so broad and effects people in so many different ways.

For me I can read things no problem and I like reading as long as the font is clear and that there is plenty of spaces and clear paragraphs.

I read in block, by that I mean I find it very hard to start at the first word in a sentence or on a page, I read a whole paragraph together first then I scan through it to determine the meaning in it. Which means I can often miss typos etc. this is one of the reasons why for me spaces and paragraphs are so important.

I don't remember having to learn how to read so I must have been very you when I learned to do so. But I do very vividly remember learning how to write.

Throughout my schooling I was punished for avoiding writing without anyone trying to get to the bottom of why I avoided it so much. On report cards I was described as being intelligent but lazy. I never did my homework and if you told me to write about something knowledge based I wouldn't (couldn't) do it.

I could copy things but I couldn't put the knowledge in my head down on paper or construct sentences.

Then I would baffle teachers by being able to write essays, now when I say I could write essays, I mean if it was story coming from my mind I could write but very few could read it. But because I had a very keen interest in storytelling I worked very hard on it. And what they were given was possibly the 9th or 10th draft which possibly took 3+hrs to complete and would only be max two pages long. And I would have to read it out loud several times in order to put in full stop, commas apostrophes, paragraPhs etc.

people find it hard to believe that I went through the majority of my schooling without ever having done homework but because I was able to pass the majority of tests no one paid particular

wasn't exactly that I couldn't write it was mostly that I found it so difficult that I avoided it.I am also very good at spelling if you ask me to spell something out loud but find it difficult to spell when it comes to writing it down. I also moved school several times so that helped me slip through the cracks.

I left school with very poor writing skills and very poor exam results and believing that I was incredibly stupid.

It wasn't until I got a job where I got really high results in the aptitude test that I started to challenge that belief about myself.

After that I sought out an official diagnosis and learnt more about dyslexia and other learning difficulties, which for me came as a huge relief.

People with dyslexia simply have a different way of learning and processing that information.

one of my favourite quotes "Everybody is a genius, But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

Everyone has their strengths but writing is not mine.

@Katheryn @EnchantingSound