My Experience With Dyslexia (a four minute read....for some)

Hearing that this week is Neurodiversity Celebration Week prompted me to put a virtual pen to paper and share my experience with dyslexia in an effort to help break the stigma associated with learning difficulties.

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School wasn't an overly fun time for me other than when I was playing sport. Growing up on a small island of only 60,000 people certainly had it’s limitations, both for me personally and no doubt the teachers operating within that environment. I was only diagnosed as being significantly dyslexic in my late teens by which time I'd already completed the bulk of my academic year's and I had built up my fare share of resentment towards the academic establishment. What many people found to be simple, rudimentary tasks?seemed like quantum physics to me.?And I had absolutely no idea why. Nor did it seem did anyone else.?Sustaining any period of concentration, spelling and reading were my biggest challenges and on reflection, the three went hand in hand.

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Even when I was in junior school, reading was something I never really enjoyed and in part that's because from as young as I can remember, I wasn't very good at it. It always seemed like such an effort to sound out a simple 4 letter word and my reading development seemed incredibly slow. As the number of letters per word increased, so did the effort it took to read them. By the time I'd spelt out words of 7 letters or more, I'd often forgotten the meaning of the sentence I was reading and I would have to start again. Reading one page would take forever and the other kids in class would be two or three pages ahead of me by the time I finished Page 1. Cue the labelling of being ‘slow’.

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Reading out loud was even worse! Even as I write this, I can feel the palms of my hands growing more and more clammy at just the thought of what it was like. It’s something I still struggle with to this day. No longer was I thinking about the simple task of reading. Before a word had left my mouth I was already worrying about not making a mistake. 'Just read' I would tell myself but as soon as I made my first mistake, stumbled or pronounced a word incorrectly my mind would go into overdrive, only making things worse. Ask someone to walk along two scaffolding poles 6 inches off the ground and it’s not a problem. Ask them to walk along the very same two scaffolding poles thirty feet in the air and most people crumble. Same task, very different outcome. Reading out load at school was my equivalent of walking along two scaffolding poles three hundred feet in the air.?

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Spelling was also a real challenge. Consonants were OK but the use of vowels was a nightmare and I’d often use the wrong vowel when spelling simple words. When spelling words I also found myself writing the correct letters but in the wrong order. I once wrote an expletive on an exam paper thinking I was writing the word ‘hits’. It landed me in front of the Principal with my dad being called in for a please explain before being sent home. I had absolutely no idea that I’d done it. I remember being shouted at by one English teacher for spelling the word 'spelling' wrong...such irony right. That particular teacher would lean in 6 inches from my face?speaking really, really slowly, spelling words phonetically thinking that actually helped, when in actual fact it only served to make things harder for me to understand. Nowadays, I have to laugh?when I hear myself spelling words out phonetically to my 6 year old son during his online phonics class.?

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Here comes the concentration connection. Carrying out simple tasks took so much more effort than they should have done and as a result, I think this caused a level of mental fatigue. Was this one of the reasons I was quick to stop focusing on the tasks at hand? I’m no longer looking for excuses or reasons but I can’t help but thinking there is a link. Losing concentration would generally mean looking out the window or talking to and distracting others, more often than not resulting in me being sent out the class or put into detention.?Perhaps not ideal to reduce the learning time for someone who if anything, needs more time.

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Looking back I just wasn't aware of the reasons for my learning difficulties and if I was, I wasn't able to articulate them in a manner that others were able to understand, even family members. I also think that having been labelled lazy, slow and bone idle, often meant that I just accepted the fact and would just sit back ready to bear the wrath of yet another scolding.?

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Once diagnosed I initially rejected the notion that a disorder may have contributed to my learning difficulties. I was given the opportunity to have previous exams papers remarked however I chose not to do so. No rear view mirrors! Slowly I started to explore certain coping mechanisms, some of which made a reasonable difference instantly. This meant printing off emails, documents, proposals and reading through them with a pen in hand, underlining each word as a read them, making sure it was good to go before hitting send. Even then mistakes were still made however over time they became have become less frequent. A small thing but I quickly learnt to minimize the width of windows on my PC as reading across a wide screen was really challenging and I would tend to lose my place and have to start again. As I became more and more aware, I made a firm promise to myself that I wouldn't allow myself to be impacted by my learning difficulties within the workplace as I was at school.

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These days I'm fortunate that technology has advanced to the extent whereby many of my spelling and grammatical errors are picked up on and auto corrected in real time. Whilst I try not to get lazy and rely purely on technology, this has been a significant time saver for me. I've also learnt to enjoy reading and I've built up a decent collection of sporting autobiographies. During the lockdown I tried to make the time spent at home more purposeful by trying to read every day. I'm still a slow reader but during that time I got through five or six books, probably the same amount as I've read in the last ten years. Progress!

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I've never really spoken about this before and certainly not in a public forum. I'm not entirely sure why I've chosen to do so now either.?I guess I'm far more comfortable with myself and I no longer see it as a negative or reason to hold me, or anyone else back from being the very best version of themselves possible.?Perhaps I'm also ready to bury a few demons once and for all.?As a father of two beautiful children I also take great comfort from the fact that far more is known about learning difficulties these days compared to when I was their age. There are excellent support mechanisms in place to help identify children with learning difficulties at an early age and programs in place to help overcome them. ?

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I personally feel that I coped fairly well with dyslexia however there are others who suffer far worse than I have. 1 in 5 people have some form of dyslexia. 20% of the workforce, yet 55% of employers acknowledged that they have a poor or non-existent understanding of dyslexic strengths. Stats on Autism are even more confronting. Only 29% of autistic adults are in some form of employment. There's a fantastic pool of talent that companies could and should be tapping into however aren’t doing so. This Neurodiversity Celebration Week, I hope in some small way to be able to help break any stigma associated with learning difficulties and more importantly, I want to help close the employment gap for those individuals without visible disabilities.