When I was in first grade, I really liked Mrs. Hanks. I was attending Kennydale Elementary School and she was my first real school teacher. Of course, I had attended kindergarten, but it wasn’t like real school because all we seemed to do all day was finger paint and play with toys all day.
But 1st grade was different. I was in big boy school. I was even scheduled to be the door monitor at recess the next day. I was supposed to hold the door open while my classmates went to recess and returned. A big responsibility.
I never got to be door monitor, though. Instead, I got moved to Mrs. Williams’ class across the hall. I didn’t know why. No one ever told me. At least not until I was in high school.
It was then that my mother one day blurted the truth out. She was talking to a fellow mom when she casually said, “Well, you know Robb had that same problem. That’s why they moved him into Mrs. Williams’ class.”
I was just grabbing something to eat in the kitchen at the time. I spun on my heels and looked piercingly at my mom. “What problem? What are you talking about?”
“Oh, you didn’t know? You had Slow Learning Disability and Mrs. Williams was one of the first teachers in the country to be trained in teaching kids like you.”
I didn’t know whether I should feel real special at the moment or like a leper. All these years I had wondered why I had been suddenly taken out of Mrs. Hanks’ class and placed in Mrs. Williams’. I thought I had been bad or something.
It sounded horrible. Slow Learning Disability, or SLD for short. What I would later come to understand was that I suffered from dyslexia. Or should I say, I still do. It doesn’t go away. You always have it.
And boy, do I have it. For those who know me, I think you’ll agree this describes me pretty well:
- High in IQ, yet may not test well academically; tests well orally, but not written.
- Talented in art, drama, music, story-telling, sales, business, designing, building.
- Seems to “Zone out” or daydream often; gets lost easily or loses track of time.
- Learns best through hands-on experience, demonstrations, experimentation, observation, and visual aids.
- Extremely keen sighted and observant.
- Has extended hearing; hears things not said or apparent to others; easily distracted by sounds.
- Clumsy, uncoordinated, poor at ball or team sports; difficulties with fine and/or gross motor skills and tasks; prone to motion-sickness.
- Has difficulty telling time, managing time, learning sequenced information or tasks, or being on time.
- Has difficulty counting objects and dealing with money.
- Excellent long-term memory for experiences, locations, and faces.
- Poor memory for sequences, facts and information that has not been experienced.
- Extremely disorderly or compulsively orderly.
- Strong sense of justice; emotionally sensitive; strives for perfection.
- Mistakes and symptoms increase dramatically with confusion, time pressure, emotional stress, or poor health.
I know. Scary, isn’t it. An average person only has to show 10 out of 37 signs to be considered dyslexic. I clock in with 18 to 20.
And yet, I have learned to use my dyslexia to my advantage.
As I have written previously, misunderstanding has helped me name a couple companies, including my own. I hear differently and that ability has helped me as a writer because I often turn a great phrase not because I am so creative, but because I had either jumbled something up in my head or had misheard it.
I think it’s also caused me a lot of problems in relationships. It certainly did in the last few. Because I can’t follow logic very well — never have — I would eventually stop following the train of thought and loop back around on a conversation. Instead of a logical A-B-C-D discussion, mine would be more like, A-B-E-N-G-A-E. It wasn’t that I was trying to be difficult. I just couldn’t follow the progression of thought. To quote Jessica Rabbit, “I was just born that way.”
Sure, you could say I’m using this as an excuse. But I only came to know about the symptoms a year or two ago. While I knew I was dyslexic, I never understood how it affected you, even down to being prone to motion sickness and having a high pain threshold. And, of course, I have always sucked at sports. What an eye opener.
With all the issues I have had flipping letters and numbers, it’s kind of humorous that I ended up being a writer. I couldn’t be an accountant. It just doesn’t add up. And I never would have cut it as a surgeon because I have “shiny object syndrome” as well. As I said, I really have trouble keeping track of sequences. So I would probably not only leave a sponge or two in the patient, but probably forget to suture them up as well before calling it a day.
It’s kind of odd learning all this now. I look back at my years in school, jobs and relationships and I can suddenly see patterns. It wasn’t that I was trying to be difficult or that I was trying to cause trouble. I simply don’t always understand the world around me or what others are trying to say. And, of course, I am often off in some other world, connecting the dots where there are no dots and no straight lines.
It happened to me again last night, as a fact. I was talking to my girlfriend and out of the blue she said, “You look at me funny sometimes.” I asked what that meant. She just said, “You look at me oddly.” I knew what she was saying. Because sometimes I can be in the middle of a conversation but my brain is skipping ideas like they’re flat rocks on a stream. My brain can be doing several things at once and it really has a hard time staying on task.
Now what was I saying?
From the Treasure Coast, thankfully flipping letters instead of burgers,
– Robb