An interesting mix, wonder how I got through school at all. Yep, that’s me. I imagine people outside of driving in a car with me and giving left-right directions, probably don’t know of my peculiarities. In fact, it was in just that case that a dear girlfriend of mine commented to the likes of, “Oh my God, you really are dyslexic.” Left and right have no attachment in my mind, if given a direction of “turn left”, I have a 50-50 percent chance of getting it right, though in truth it’s less chance than that in real practice. Now, if you say turn left and point to the left with your hand, then I got you covered.
I am assuming a lot of people who know me, don’t know this about me, and it’s certainly not something I go around telling people. Well, until now. Why? For one, I think it’s quite interesting. I also think that if anything I say here can help someone else who’s having the same challenges, then it’s worth the exposure.
Things really hit home with me when I started working at UPS three years ago, where I part-time load the brown trucks for delivery. When I started I was loading anywhere from 900-1300 packages in three or four trucks in about a 4-hour shift. Accuracy is big with UPS (though one could accurately claim some managers lose sight of that when feeding their ego, but I digress). If I have trucks designated 6A, 6B, 9D and so forth, it becomes more a mental workload than physical - and the physical workload is substantial. Here’s a little in-depth from two perspectives:
I heft the box from the conveyor belt, grasping it by its opposite corners, and noticed its label: 6A-4000. I move to the truck nearest me, glance at the placard with the 6A designation, and enter it, placing the box on the appropriate shelf and leave to get another package, which may be for this truck or one of the others.
That’s what I grasp to be how other people do it. For me, it goes something like this:
I heft the box from the conveyor belt, grasping it by its opposite corners. I sharply focus on the 6A designation, a mental pause that has to be enforced internally lest the numbers “reshape” to the ones from the truck 6B I just came from and had in my head, the other numbers don’t quite matter yet. I turn to the nearest truck and spot the placard, again sharply focusing on the designation, look at the label on the box in my hand again, and enter the truck. Here the second numbers matter, I find the 4000 shelf and place the box there, tilting it again to make sure the label does indeed have a 6A designation on it. If I am at all distracted with other thought or simply under pressure of time or other stress, an interesting thing happens: as I walk away from the shelf, the remembered image of the label can actually reshape in my mind, or quickly shift to be remembered as a 6B or even a 9D. I mentally doubt the accuracy of what I had just seen, and go back to re-read the label, confirming it was indeed the 6A. I leave the truck to go get another box.
Sometimes, I have to go back more than once.
This process is mentally fatiguing. After 200+ boxes you actually feel your brain is sore (it’s more like after the first 50 or so, but practice lessens it some). It’s the focus that has to be enforced to keep the image of the numbers in your head accurate. And it’s easy to doubt them. My double and quadruple checking has its benefits, it made me the most accurate loader in the entire building for years. People just have no awareness of what I have to go through to maintain that.
During the first year I came to an impasse, where the effort was so difficult I asked if I could change the label designation to something else. I had to tell management it was simply getting too difficult to keep a 6A or 6B straight (didn’t mention dyslexia). They allowed this, mostly I think because of my performance level, and they wanted to keep that high. So I got them named words for the most part, instead of full alpha-numeric, which helped greatly, but I had to be careful there as well. In truth, I have difficulty with ODIN and MING and other combinations I tried, my brain doesn’t do well with their similarities. ACAL and MING work for me, different enough, not as many same straight vertical lines.
Most dyslexics are visual thinkers, I am nothing less than. This helps when remembering situations, people’s faces and the like. Names to faces is difficult unless I can attach the “meaning of that person” to the name, and even then it isn’t a guarantee. Some of my marital arts students may often noticed me calling them or others by a different name. Let’s say a girl named Anna, bears similar qualities in that moment to one named Paula, then for me it’s easy to slip out Paula’s name for her when addressing her. I’m sure plenty of people do that once in a while, for me it’s frequency that makes it stand apart, and the difficulty of trying to reattach the proper name to the person even after knowing I made the blend. Often times I will pause, or appear to be going on to another thought, as in, “that was really great…” where I am trying to insert a name. I’m actually pouring through a lot of mental attachments and hoping the right one connects in time.
Being a visual thinker has its advantages, though. Especially when doing things I am passionate about or have great interest in. In high school, in classes I enjoyed (as well with teachers I enjoyed, and this fluctuated), I could mentally recall full pages of text and images as if reading them, chapter after chapter. Today I don’t have the word-for-word accuracy I did back then (at least not in that quantity), but the content is there. Anything less than interesting or passionate is like loading boxes on the trucks.
There are other problems, writing a “d” and substituting a “b”, things like that, but those relating to writing aren’t as difficult to catch for me for some reason. Probably because I’m a bit passionate about the expression process of writing. In that I’ve been fortunate, I’d dislike not being able to communicate properly this way. With reading it’s a mixed bag. Writers who tap into a more visual expression when writing tend to be easy reading for me. Writers like theoretical physicist Brian Greene, novelist Peter David, Octavia E. Butler or Dan Simmons are worth mentioning in that area. And there are many others. Some writers for me, however, make reading like sledding on rough gravel, not only is the ride bumpy, but quite disturbingly loud.
And then there’s that counting from 100 to 0 test. I really thought I’d sail through that. Quite surprised how my brain tripped and struggled through some of it. I made it to zero, but I mangled about twenty digits and their order along the way. Like I said at the start; interesting. And did you know there is such a thing as auditory dyslexia? I’ve tasted a little bit of that.
Writing this article is a rather big thing for me. It’s about revealing things we consider weaknesses about who we are. No one likes to do that. Especially me. I went through a period of time where I had every eye exam possible (every one, all the way to CT scans) and in-depth hearing exams as well, because I simply didn’t want to admit that there was something else, something of the brian’s interpretative functioning that was the cause of problems I was having. I discovered that my body is in great shape, my mind too, I just have to work harder at some of the things I didn’t know others didn’t have to.
We’re in good company, though, there are some impressive, successful dyslexics out there, and historically. And there are many things we do excel at.
Maybe this article will help you look at people, or your children, differently. Certainly, no matter what our outside presentation, we all struggle with something. That perspective at least might help you in dealing adverse characters in your life. We are all not what we seem.
I’ll voice about the left-handed and middle child in the next articles. Thanks for reading.
