Scrolling through Instagram recently, I stopped on a post. It was meant to be a joke β a word intentionally spelled the wrong way and its meaning misinterpreted because the person posting it supposedly had dyslexia. I was diagnosed with dyslexia in the third grade.
I spent years in school fighting to get into classes I believed I deserved to attend despite my learning disability. Having children with learning disabilities in classrooms often means more work for the teachers as well. Once I got myself into higher-level classes, I often had to work harder than the other students just to stay there. Seeing posts like the one on Instagram, met with comment after comment of laughing emoji, makes me believe we still have a lot of work to do on how we view people with learning differences.
Often, the first thing a child feels after they are diagnosed is shame. That spurs a need to conceal the disability, which is often carried into adulthood. As a result, once a person learns the accommodations they need to navigate the world undetected, they may rarely talk about their learning differences again. For years I knew there was a lot of misunderstanding about dyslexia, but I stayed quiet because I feared my work would be judged differently if I told the truth.
I now feel a responsibility to be honest about who I am and who I was back in school. It is a neurodivergent condition in which the brain works in a different way than the majority of other brains. You may wonder what people with dyslexia see when they read.
Are all the words backward? The answer is no. People with dyslexia do not have a vision issue; they see words the same way that everyone else does. The difference is how they process and decode those words. And although dyslexia is not a condition that people outgrow, as we age we gain more skills to compensate for the differences. How might this play out in real life? In a recent meeting, I was reading aloud from a sheet of paper.
