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My Life As a Dyslexic: |
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I've been told that there is technically nothing wrong with my eyes, but having a small head (I was 5 pounds at birth), the shape of my orbits is slightly skewed, causing my focus to be off center. My prescription has virtually not changed in all these years. It is a frustrating fact that has significantly added to my struggles.
I remember that particular day, copying a chalkboard full of notes in the morning. My new glasses arrived at noon. I returned to class and didn't recognize a thing on the board. Is it any surprise that on one of those Grade 4 spelling tests my mark was 4 correct words out of 100? If the word dyslexic existed at the time, it certainly hadn't reached our part of the world.
Perhaps for the time, I was blessed. I was in a country school with huge class sizes of 40 to 45 students. The class behind me was even larger. They couldn't afford to fail me. So I graduated!
Today, I consider myself a recovered dyslexic. This means that my dyslexia is no longer noticeable. I am happy to say that it's been a long yet rewarding journey.
I'm told that many famous people have suffered this dyslexia: George Washington, Albert Einstein, singer Cher, and actor Tom Cruise to name a few. The latter two are confusing to me. One of my great hurdles is to memorize text. How singers and actors do this is a trick I'd love to know! Obviously, this is not one of the hurdles of these famous dyslexic people.
Albert Einstein? Clearly he didn't suffer as I do with numbers: mathematics on any level, counting money, reading numbers in the correct order, dialing telephones, or telling time are just a few of my daily dyslexic struggles.
Perceiving a timeline is equally as difficult. Take getting to an airport for instance: I need time to pack, time to shower and get dressed, time to drive to the airport, and time there for check-in. That's four time issues! Unless I can leave the organizing to someone else some interesting and complex anxiety levels can be reached. I'm ever thankful for the many delays suffered by airline companies!
I often wonder how I made it through life at all. I believe both luck and incredible blessings have been part of my success as a dyslexic person. Today I have two careers, Medical X-ray and Ultrasound Technology. I have co-authored and published a children's book of epic poetry. I am presently editing two completed novels, written independently by myself. I have traveled and worked internationally (I spent 5 years in Saudi Arabia, 1990-95) and presently hold a part-time job in Ultrasound with many accolades to my name. I even have, after about six tries, a healthy, happy relationship of two years. Remember that dyslexia and low self-esteem dance intimately together. As I recovered from one, I recovered from the other. Ten years of therapy also helped a great deal!
One can ask, how can someone who can't even differentiate between left and right achieve such heights? First, I've worked at it every day since my diagnosis at the age of twenty-four. The incredible blessing is that I posses all three "gifts of a dyslexic." Intelligence, intuition and creativity. It is these three gifts that have propelled me through life.
That, and a bit of luck.
I was in Grade 7 when an aunt introduced my second oldest sister to Medical X-ray. I was fascinated. I knew immediately that I wanted to follow in my sister's footsteps. I had no idea how, I just had this insatiable desire to have RT (Registered Technologist) tagged on to my name.
What I really wanted was to be a scientist, preferably a physicist or astronomer but these were totally out of the question since I was dyslexic. I still can't divide more than one number and the success of addition is still based on how many times I can go through my fingers before confusion set in. A calculator doesn't help much. The numbers in my head somehow flip on their journey to the ends of my fingers. Additionally (no pun intended), I had achieved only a Grade 11 Business Math with a 51% average (compliments of my frustrated teacher who wasn't allowed to fail me).
This meant taking a post-secondary pre-technology math course at a college. My first two exam rendered me 0%. My wonderful teacher was baffled. I was trying very hard, but I'd reverse a number or two, and bingo, zero! He made me check everything twice and thrice, and I got a pass. Luck again. The course was either pass or fail, so it looked just fine on my resume.
With two languages (French being my first) also on my resume, I was accepted into a 27 month X-Ray course which included a 3 month Lab Aid program. This was in the 70s, the good old days when one wasn't worked to death and I was allotted plenty of time to study. Being socially about as adept as a rock, I used the time wisely.
The most puzzling aspect of this course was that all the "smart" students couldn't seem to understand the concept of radiation, or visualize the structure of an atom, or understand spatial dynamics. As a dyslexic I had no problem. Those simply appear in my head in 3-D, along with bones, muscles and organs.
As for the four small formulas, forget it. Here is where the others could understand mathematically while I was drawing a blank. To my great relief these small formulas were not that important. By studying three times harder than the others, I managed to pass with an 83% average.
X-Ray is all visual and dimensional, and there I saw my potential. In Lab Aid, students had trouble drawing blood while I could palpate a vein, visualize it in 3-D, and rarely miss. My first job, two years in small rural town, was relatively easy. I didn't learn until years later that it took them five years to repair the damage I did to their filing system!
Meanwhile, I married and learned about low self-esteem, an inevitable side effect of being dyslexic, especially if one is undiagnosed.
It was during my second year of this marriage (I was 24) that I was diagnosed. There was very little help at the time, but the few pointers I received from a gracious university student, along with the words, "You're not stupid, you're dyslexic," changed my life. My former husband was a good man and became instrumental in helping me see my patterns, especially with phone numbers and supposedly simple things like counting money and balancing my bank statement.
Fortunately, my father had ingrained in me never to owe money. With "stupidity" such as mine, I always made sure I had extra cash in my account in case I screwed up, which was pretty much every month. Thankfully, purchases were no greater than a bit of furniture and clothing, so mistakes could, and were, absorbed by my cash buffer (Note: I still work this way. Benefit? I'm one of the few North Americans with no debt.)
After I learned I was dyslexic, I took on a few challenges that I had previously avoided. I took a first year typing course. Here I learned the true nature of my dyslexia. I was shocked at how often I would transpose letters from one word to another, for example, "Th sune is sinhing." Copying from a text for practice made seeing and correcting my mistakes immediate.
It's only been two years since I've stopped experiencing anxiety attacks every time I type a number. Today, the medical field is full of numbers, so every day I have the opportunity to get it right! I've found I now make fewer mistakes than my coworkers simply because of the concentration and awareness I exhibit with every patient number I type into that ultrasound machine. The rest of my job? Easy, Ultrasound is also 3-D, my forté.
Driving was a bit of a trick. Accurately reading road signs, which I don't think I clearly understood in the first place, and gauging distances, were a bit of a problem. As a result, I caused three accidents (no deaths!) before moving to Saudi Arabia (more later) where women are not allowed to drive. At that point, I happily let that pesky driver's license of mine lapse. This was the best "mistake" I ever made. Upon my return to Canada, I had to re-test for a driver's license, in a standard, no less. With this, I gained a whole new understanding of the road, and have since been accident free. Note: I had no idea the yellow line had any meaning. Nice color!
I often look back and marvel at my luck, or blessings. If it wasn't for X-ray (and how many people consider that as a career?) what could I , as a dyslexic, have done? I couldn't be a secretary because, first off, computers and spell-check didn't exist until the 90s. (I graduated from X-ray in 1978, from Ultrasound in 1986.) I couldn't dial a phone. I couldn't count money at all, so jobs like waitressing, store clerk, or even working at McDonalds were out of the question at the time. I probably would have ended up pushing a broom somewhere, not a bad option for one prone to daydreaming, I suppose.
Ultrasound was again sheer luck. The idea was basically brought to my attention via a friend in college career counseling. I had no desire to do Ultrasound, having observed it during my X-ray years. To appease my friend, I decided to apply, figured there was no harm in that. There were 160 applicants with 6 positions available in the course. By this time, I had learned something about social behavior and to my complete amazement, I was often labeled "intelligent."
I was living with my husband 150 miles from the city that offered the course, so I had no real desire to be accepted, except that my relationship was failing. Then, three rounds of interviews later, the last in front of three different panels of radiologists, I was accepted. I was in shock, actually. As I thought about it, I realized I was still using the motto I'd found scribbled on the inside of a Grade 7 text: "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit." I didn't really expect it to work yet again, but it was another great lesson in what I could achieve in spite of being dyslexic. In retrospect, it's obvious that several professionals saw the brilliance that was oblivious to me.
Emotionally I floundered that year and my marriage ended. Academically, I soared. Ultrasound was again dimensional, especially with its physics on a visual rather than mathematical level. I marvel at this particular blessing. I would seriously fail both these courses today. They've since made the physics very complex.
As a medical person earning just enough to prevent revolt, I pursued my wanderlust by taking a job in Saudi Arabia, plentiful just prior to the Gulf War. Those five years are a story unto themselves, so I'll stick to my progress as a dyslexic person. One of the reasons I went to Saudi was to buy a computer, not affordable on my wages in the late 1980s, especially if one wanted to travel as well. Saudi fulfilled both these needs.
My first computer was a pre-286 IBM (an 8086 for historians). It was so slow that it gave me plenty of time to clearly see what my mistakes were, then learn from them. I'm not sure I'm any more error free today, but as I type, the awareness of my errors are immediate. I still make mistakes nearly every word, but awareness/correction mentality allows me to be nearly error-free in my final copy: from the 5 to 7 errors per line when I started to the same per page today.
This work goes on constantly for me, often by the minute. Unless, for example, I'm watching TV or staring at a sunset, I'm overcoming dyslexia. Please take courage in the fact that I've corrected each word in this document at least once.
Once in Saudi, I immediately began to follow my foremost dream, writing a novel of Science Fiction Romance, a genre not technically born at that time. We dyslexics can be very prolific. My first draft was 230,000 words. I'd read somewhere that an action adventure could run from 200,000 to 300,000 words. I thought I'd done pretty well. This was before the internet, and when I started sending drafts back to North American publishers, I was horrified to repeatedly hear, "Thanks, but no thanks, and by the way, we don't accept anything over 100,000 words from first-time authors."
A note of interest: after approximately 17 personal edits, this first manuscript is now down to 180,000 words and is again due for another major overhaul. This endeavor will happen soon, thanks to my editor (Does little ol' me really have an editor?) Audrey Owen who's actually editing my second novel (a more sensible 125,000 words!) down to something a publisher might actually look at!
Sadly, there was no kindergarten where I lived, but I can tell you that this first full-length writing experience was like taking my entire twelve years of school over again. I discovered through trial and error things I had missed as a dyslexic peron. I learned how sentences form. I learned just by writing what a clause meant, how paragraphs should be structured and what adverbs and adjectives were. And then I used them profusely. Grammar had never made sense to me, and now the words were teaching me.
A built-in thesaurus saved me literally hundreds of hours. Being dyslexic made me unable to efficiently use a dictionary, a click or two was like magic. The limited vocabulary I'd been so embarrassed about began to flourish. I wrote hundreds of words and their meanings in a scribbler, which I still review, in order to use the tool of hand writing, effective for me, to further imprint this new knowledge in my head.
I began to understand how and why words are spelled the way they are. This was also aided by my medical background, a moderate knowledge of French and a smattering of Latin, compliments of my Catholic roots (ps: I'm also a recovering Catholic).
I now understand the complexity of this often strange language. I understand its roots, yes, but I also condone my "New Language" friends who promote the idea that spelling needs to change, if not for the sake of ourselves, at least for the sake of all those not privy to extensive and often expensive education designed to uphold the privileged few. Simplified spelling would help dyslexic people.
"We shud awl, blak, whyt, or wred, be abl to reed and rite, with eez, the langwije that now prezidz over the internashinal bizness wuld."
A note to parents and teachers: Please do not give up. Do not judge or pressure a dyslexic child to achieve the same level of cognizance as the "normal group." If you can, give us space. We are not normal, and this is our blessing. We will achieve. Given just a little encouragement, and the recovery tools available today, we will flourish beyond your wildest dreams. It may not happen in your lifetime, but it will happen.
To the students: (note: it just took me four tries to get to with a capital, correct. Darned if that capital O just didn't always get there first!) Again, to the student: if you are dyslexic, don't worry about high marks in school. Just get that diploma in your hands, no matter what it takes. You can achieve little in life without a piece of paper that says you have achieved, or can do something concrete.
Take heart in the fact that I was about 38 when I actually caught up to my "expected literary level."
Yes, I was "lucky." And yes, I've had many blessings. Take a good look. I'll bet you're no less fortunate than I.Much courage to you, my friends.
© 2004 Alice Taylor Used by permission.
Alice's Update (August 2007): This year I have published two Science Fiction romance novels.
After 17 full edits and the help of an editor, Solar Sensations was finally down to 130,000 words was something a publisher was willing to look at. My second novel, Azar, was easier, at a slightly cooler 125,000 words. These books are presently in e-book format (Ah, that exploding Internet!) with print scheduled for late 2007.
Audrey's Comments
When Alice sent me her work, she didn't tell me she was dealing with dyslexia. When I finally learned that part of her story, I was inspired by her determination to write in spite of the difficulties. Since she wrote this story of her journey, she has begun to use a computer that recognizes voice. Now there's a blessing!
Stay up to date with Alice's writing life at lataylor.net.
If you want to learn more about dyslexia, visit
www.dyslexiacanda.com
and Dyslexia: 37 Common Characteristics.
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