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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
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?”<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And boy, do I have it. For those who know me, I think you’ll agree this describes me pretty well:<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And yet, I have learned to use my dyslexia to my advantage.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Now what was I saying?<\/p>\n
From the Treasure Coast, thankfully flipping letters instead of burgers,<\/p>\n
– Robb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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