Do you take your reading and writing abilities for granted? I don’t. I was in my twenties when I learned that expression. Before then, I thought the expression was “taken for granite.” Yes, I thought that because granite is a hard rock often used in the foundations of old buildings. It made sense in my mind as a metaphor for something that is fundamentally overlooked. Honestly, that is the story of my dyslexia. It is how I think—inside out and sideways with a mixed metaphor to boot.
Often people think that dyslexia is a problem with spelling. Ah, if it were only so simple as memorizing the order of letters as they spill across the page! If it were so simple, then spellcheck would have solved all of my problems. Let’s be clear dyslexia is not a unified condition that plays out exactly the same for all people. For me, dyslexia is a way of thinking about the world that does not flow in straight lines or even in circular curves. My brain skips from brother to sister to aunt to ant. I read red and record the record.
That is to say, what most people think happens for dyslexics with words and letters moving around out of order also happens for me with sentence clauses and paragraphs. Things are out of order, always and continually, and that makes sense to me. This is where people fail to understand the beauty of the creative dyslexic mind. To fit in and understand the world around us, we reorganize and reconstruct ideas all the time. This is our super power—solving puzzles and piecing things together. It is a kind of translation from one language to another. Of course it is only a super power when we have cracked the code and have learned to switch gears and reprocess. Before that, it is a mess.
I hated reading as a child. I loved stories and learning, but I didn’t finish a full book until I was a teenager. I looked at lines of text as if they were straight rows of black ink that somehow revealed the pictures all around. Even now, though I surround myself with books, I read slowly and methodically with intention. I don’t have time to finish things that don’t interest me. I’m such a poor reader that my Kindle mocks me saying that I read at “learning speed.” It is true—if I read it I will remember it because it takes me so long to process it and really get things. Nowadays, my life hack is to watch YouTube summaries or listen to podcast interviews instead of focusing on the written words. As the internet has become more audiovisual, I have become more literate. This multi-modal learning has improved my ability to read and write.
So for all of this struggle with the written word, it seems curious that I want to be a writer. Sometimes, stubborn resolve makes us prize the things that come hardest. On other days, I know it is because I have something unique to say. Unabashedly, my dyslexia makes me see the world differently and it makes me talk about it with an unusual turn of phrase—phrase turned on its side and reimagined anew. What’s more, writing is a way for me to tame my dyslexia. I can write a sentence, look at it, reorganize it, reread it, and make sense of what I think I am trying to say. Writing and revising help my dyslexic mind find clarity as I push my thoughts into new forms.
Do you write with dyslexia? How do you think it helps and hurts your creative endeavors?
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