I can’t claim my dyslexia expresses itself in the same way as the majority of people who have it; though I suspect a great many of them will relate to what I write here.
I’ve been studying myself, over the last 4-5 years in particular, and think I have a better way I can relate some of what I, and others with dyslexia, go through on a daily basis to those who might have a hard time grasping/realizing the processes involved internally.
First thing; I want to try a little exercise with you. With the following exercise I want you to try to be aware of what is actually going on in your brain as you process the task I put you through. Simply, try to be aware of the demand of focus your mind shifts into, how it closes off the external to some degree, and engages a part of the brain that is required for the process.
Exercise (you are allowed to round up, the exact number to the decimal point is not required)
Take the number 13 and divide it by 2.
(Remember to try and be aware of how your mind is shifting into another mode)
Take that number and add 4.
Divide by 2 again.
Add 23.
Now that you have that number, and hopefully paid attention to how your brain shifted to a more intense mode of focus, I will relate that to dyslexia.
With dyslexia, that process you just went through, is nearly the same focus required to discern SMIPLY into SIMPLY.
Same effort, or focus.
More focus is required to process the following:
“Teh which standard by aech known is hcaracter.”
Into:
“The standard by which each is known is character.”
You can see how great parts of phrases can be interpreted in a mixed-up fashion, not just character switching, but also structure order.
I have had numerous corrections in the writing of this article so far, where the letters were jumbled and needed to be back-spaced and deleted and retyped to make something easily legible for you - and that’s what slips past the “overseer” in my head that regulates my particular pathway to the written word (it also applies to speech).
Most everything I write has to have a pause period in my mind, where the words are un-jumbled and corrected with a feedback mechanism I have developed over years and years of writing and listening to people (which is a task all on its own sometimes).
What I envision in my head is entirely visual, words too. They take place in my mind as objects with a physical “presence” or feel. (Now I realize there may be a bit of synesthesia going on here, but that is another article all it’s own.)
Try translating the feeling of “mud” into words, and you’ll get an idea of what I have to process when changing my visuals of even text into written word.
This translation process came into conflict with my job at an international shipping corporation, especially during the first year or so there.
In order to reduce the chance of placing the wrong package on the wrong truck on the wrong shelf, supervisors would tell employees to take their marker and circle the printed numbers on the package (that identify truck and shelf location) so as to help focus their minds on getting the right number into the right truck.
My mind doesn’t work like that.
My process is seeing text as objects or impressions; letter and number shapes, color, and feeling that are associated with other impressions in my mind related to which truck it goes into (and many other associations for that matter - thus the need for a specific amount of focus).
When I shift from an interpreting/associating mode to a drawing mode, as in circling the number on a package, my brain goes into a realm where there are no restrictions, no end to possibility - and no easy link back to which number/letter shapes goes to which truck.
Drawing mode, for me and other artists, places me in the immediately realized environment; in the now, with little to zero attachment to language or language-related data. In fact, I’ve experienced writing after a drawing session, one where I’ve spent a good hour or so immersed, and I cannot accurately explain the difficulty reattaching to what letters meant.
For other people at work, the circling thing seemed to help them focus. For me it made things even more difficult. There were two distinct battles going on in my mind for dominance; one pertaining to language processing of data I didn’t write, but needed to interpret-relate, and one to the ever-potential where my creative mind wanted to fill in it’s own words, visuals, impressions within the circle I drew.
I stopped doing the circling thing and my rate of getting the right package in the right truck on the right shelf went up; well above everyone else.
Poetry
What I write is related to visual impression. To me, a visual in my head = physical feel. Not just what an object actually feels like in reality, but some interpreted impression I actually feel in my mind. It also equals emotional context, and continual branch-pathways to other related information.
This rich pool of information makes my poetry visually rich.
You may ask, “how on earth do you do anything with all this going on in your head for everything you hear, feel, smell, taste, or see?”
The answer is simply that I filter out a lot of data, rather it is subdued in its importance. It’s the equivalent of not paying full attention to the sound of the air flowing through the A/C vents, or the refrigerator humming in the background, or the hum of overhead fluorescent lighting while I listen to someone speaking.
When I write poetry, or much anything for that matter, I have to sort through a lot of relational data. Strong impression to feeling is associated to strongly connected visuals in my mind and experience, and they are then translated to word. Most everything is done in my head, and with some exceptions, what you see as a final draft is actually my first draft. I have an editing process that whittles away some extraneous words after, but for the most part it is all processed internally.
This has an interesting relation to how I would do math in school. When a teacher would say “show your work”, I would have a difficult time translating what was going on in my head to get to my answer. Asking someone like me to show my process may require quite a bit of time :) Back then, I didn’t have the awareness I do now of my own internal process.
Reading
For me the challenges of getting past some of my twisting of letters is less of an effort than to read an author who does not connect visually to me. I struggle through some text, some sentences and structure that is dry and not immediately related to a visual flow. This makes reading some authors an immense labor, where my mind tries to interpret not only their foreign sentence structure , but their conceptualization of material.
Prior to my own self-study, I would get frustrated and have little use for text that hit me that way. Now I get frustrated because of the labor involved, but I now understand it isn’t me, it’s the author. In my perspective, good authors and less have everything to do with how well they translate imagery.
Early on in my childhood, comic books held sway and directly connected text to visuals. This kept me reading and later, writing. I still read some of them to this day, they are a great foundation for those with dyslexia.
Listening, or: sound words
Dyslexia doesn’t limit itself to just written text. Some of us have auditory dyslexia too (yes, I am included here).
The same way the brain has to process text for visuals, the brain has to translate sound words into the same. The translation difficulty also works in reverse, where my own spoken words can sometimes come out jumbled, mixed up. Then there are times where the brain gets overloaded and someone speaking words at me makes no sense whatsoever. At those times you may see me straining, tilting my head, or hear me say, “Excuse me?”,or, “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that first part…” which has very little to do with my hearing in most cases, which is excellent; I know, I’ve been through extensive medical testing trying to figure myself out. This has everything to do with understanding the sound words coming at me.
When the brain gets overloaded, nothing spoken makes sense. It doesn’t last long, seconds, but in that time the brain gives up completely trying to figure out what was just said. It’s an in-the-moment process, where word sounds come to me as a complete garbled mess, as if all the consonants had been smeared with the vowels into a paste, or some alien vocalization that has absolutely no substance or related meaning. Sound is translated into a visual and texture, and it too has to make some sort of related sense to me. And when it does, it then has to go through the same letter and word-switching process that written text does.
Hopefully, this will give you a better understanding of the processing the mind of a dyslexic has to go through, so that understanding can be passed on to someone near you who may be having difficulty with this disability. Awareness is the first step to understanding.
We each have to find the process that works for us. And though we can try other options, we have to understand that in the end; what works for us - works for us.
