Dyslexia Awareness

My own personal experience

Dyslexic awareness and technology support has come a long way.  When writing essays and formal letters it can be helpful.  I was screened a year into university and overwhelmed at the amount of technology offered to make life easier. Personally I don’t find the technology that helpful to me because I’m 43 and have a lifetime of compensations. However I have a wonderful support guy who helps me to understand the question, as I often interpret it into 100 different scenarios in sheer panic and become confused and stressed. He unpicks my scattered, over excited thoughts and helps me to put them onto paper. He gives me confidence and validates my knowledge.  He is the reason I am able to complete my degree and I feel very grateful for that support!

 My husband is dyslexic and went to dyslexic private school, he has never let it hold him back! but struggles to read at speed and lacks confidence in coursework. My eldest daughter was gifted and talented in sports throughout school and fortunately had teachers who put in over and above to help her overcome barriers and my son has tendencies and struggles to read, but is on target at school, so they are reluctant to screen him. Each one of us has different struggles within information processing and overlapping neurodiversity’s.

There is an abundance of help out there, but fundamentally we can’t change who we are and how we process information. In day to day life interacting via messages and social media, things can be tricky. Life is busy and it is exhausting having to check, re-check and analyse everything we write.  It’s an added layer of time and stress to have to completely change the sentence because predictive text can’t even imagine the word we are attempting to spell. Punctuation and grammar is a mind field. and then there is word blindness, the most embarrassing of all! when you have spent hours writing a message or a post and you have checked it 20 times, finally plucked up the courage to send / post, to then look at it four hours later and feel mortified that you have made  a catastrophic mistake for the world to see and you spend the next three days cringing at yourself. It is particularly frustrating for me as I love to write and create. Both my husband and I struggle to find words and often say half sentences when we are tiered. It has held me back socially and in career, due to not understanding what dyslexia is and how to manage it.

Yes, we have options, I could pay someone to check my work. I could avoid posting anything and pay someone to do it for me and I should not get over excited and post things quickly, as I invariably make mistakes.

Things that help us are:

The positives are:

I can sense people’s emotions and find it easy to gage what people need from me most of the time, in a one-to-one work setting (this is tricky in group situations, I don’t fare well in groups).

I don’t need long drawn-out meetings to find solutions to problems.

I can quickly see what steps people need to make to achieve their goals and enjoy seeing people flourish

To feel confident in a subject I have to research and practice it to death, therefore acquiring a lot of deep knowledge

An abundance of empathy for others

I can manage multiple projects at once

I have many creative ideas

These traits are similar in my family also.

If you have neurodiversity's, never give up! seek out support and embrace your qualities and find ways to enhance them.

Brain connection exercises: