In the lake with a one-armed swimmer.

I was asked to write a piece of neurodiversity for the awareness week last week. I included my daughter as she is extremely dyslexic and I wanted her to feel seen and maybe part of being understood.

One weekend, about 12 years ago, I found myself in the lake at Blenheim Palace competing in a triathlon. I had taken on too much that weekend; it also involved doing a 1st?Dan in Aikido –??I was exhausted??and I soon found myself being overtaken by a swimmer with one arm.?

Having two arms I decided that I should try a little harder and I managed to finish ahead of the one-armed-swimmer… ( NB - he beat me in the running and cycling.)

In hindsight, this was one of the most insightful weekends of my life.?

Not only that I had taken on far too much and had done little to reconcile the time involved in travelling from London to Somerset back to London and then on to Blenheim (not an uncommon ADD trait) but also the insight into disability and visibility.?

Some 8 years later I was diagnosed with quite a severe manifestation of dyslexia and an attention deficit disorder which are both related to a condition called audio processing disorder – how the brain processes audio inputs. I normally wouldn’t list how these affect my life- I try, like most??people, to turn a blind eye but this week of all weeks I think it makes sense to quote them:

?‘…phonological processing, reading for meaning, letter and spatial orientation, automaticity with number facts, temporal sequencing, time management, organisation, clarity of articulation and verbal short-term/working memory. In addition, there appear to be challenges related to dyspraxia and attention within Joel’s profile, that impact upon close monitoring and cueing of his performance, and well-being. Moreover, Joel may experience a range of emotions as indicated by a noted difference between his stronger long-term and weaker short-term memory.’

This all came equally as a surprise and an explanation.?

For years I had known there was a disconnect between me and ‘normal’, but I had thought that it was quite an inconsequential form of the condition. I was after all managing…I was doing OK in my career even though it wasn’t strictly speaking ‘normal’, I’d had already had a reasonably successful career in words as copywriter at Saatchi and Saatchi, I read a lot and I love language.

It was also very inconvenient as I took the test while I was doing a part-time masters in creative writing. My first reaction was?google search ++ writers++ dyslexia++neurodiverse++ published.

Within seconds despair was replaced with hope. There were brilliant, diagnosed writers like Richard Ford (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Canada) and John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany, Cider House Rules, The World According to Garp)…. and a long list of the probables from a time before anyone bothered to test or care about neurodiversity??like Agatha Christie, Virginia Wolf and F Scott Fitzgerald.?

In this search, one quote popped out from John Irving – he said something like he was just as good as any other writer, he had realised he just had to work 10 times as hard to make his work as readable.?

When you tell people about a neurodiverse condition the normal reactions??are normally??‘I’m a bit like that’ – you could be but you could also be me in a lake and you may be able to start using the other arm you have, or ‘ …but, you’re doing ok’ - I am and in many ways I would rather not be treated any differently – most of us are fairly passionate about that; it’s just sometimes we do come unstuck and speak too much or say something impulsive, or we’ll take longer, seemingly procrastinating beyond the reasonable (which is more likely to be something called?Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria)?or we’ll baulk at a task that seems otherwise routine or well within the expectations of performance…we’re trying, we’re working 10 times harder or the thing is 10 times harder than it seems.

I think back to the swimmer with one arm and how much harder was he working to get through the murky water.??I think too that he must have learnt a special way of swimming and had made all sorts of adjustments for the transitions.??For people with neurodiverse conditions, you’re going through much the same process: working harder, learning a different way and making adjustments in order to compete in everyday life. It’s just that the disability isn’t visible.?