Living with Dyslexia
One thing I’m slowly learning through therapy is that talking about myself isn’t a waste of time—or something I should stop doing because that feeling of unimportance is my own anxiety turning against me, not an actuality. And talking about my struggles might help someone else feel like they’re not alone. If you’ve followed my writing on the Authors 4 Authors blog, you might have read my post where I talk about my dyslexia.
What is dyslexia?
To put it broadly, dyslexia is a learning disability in reading, but it’s a lot more involved than that. This disability makes learning to read much harder for sufferers because it’s hard for our brains to connect the accompanying sounds with the letters, and the combinations they make. Not only that but letters and words often get flipped around both on paper and/or orally. Another area that gets affected by dyslexia is in math where numbers will flip, especially if they are similar shapes like 6’s or 9’s. (This is not the same as dyscalculia, which is not a form of dyslexia.)
Dyslexia also makes it incredibly difficult to learn a second language—which makes sense when your first language is already hard enough. This isn’t to say that sufferers are of low intelligence, it’s actually quite the opposite. According to Yale, dyslexics are very fast and creative thinkers with strong reasoning skills.
As with many disabilities and disorders, there are many subtypes that go into the broader definition. I’ll only be talking about a few of them, but if you’d like to read more, you can check out several websites: Dyslexia Reading Well, Understood.org, or Homeschooling with Dyslexia.
Phonological dyslexia
Phonological dyslexia is just what it sounds like—it’s the difficulty connecting sounds with their accompanying letters and combination of letters. Because learning the sounds is the first step to reading, this is what makes learning to read so difficult for dyslexics. It’s also typically what people think of when they think of dyslexia. Interestingly enough, people with dyslexia don’t have trouble processing the sounds they need to speak, it comes with identifying the individual sounds that make up a word. This is particularly difficult for native English speakers because there are multiple ways of spelling the same sounds in a word.
Surface dyslexia
Surface dyslexia can also be called visual dyslexia. People with this subtype don't necessarily have trouble identifying the sounds in a word, but they do struggle to recognize words by sight. They will often take a longer amount of time recognizing a word without having to sound it out first, and will have particular trouble with words that don’t sound the way they’re spelled (for example, pterodactyl). This is because the brain struggles to remember what words look like. This can also impair learning how to spell if the sufferer cannot remember the way letters look or in what order they’re supposed to sit.
Double deficit dyslexia
A double deficit means that the sufferer is struggling with two aspects of reading. This is often ascribed to people who have trouble identifying the sounds in words and those who also have trouble with naming speed.
Trauma Dyslexia
Trauma dyslexia can also be referred to as acquired dyslexia. This is when someone, either in childhood or adulthood, has a brain injury either from trauma or disease that can result in dyslexia.
My experience with dyslexia
Like many others, dyslexia is a big struggle. I got diagnosed when I was in the second grade, as well as my ADD. It was certainly something that I got bullied over when I was younger, and even occasionally as an adult. I’ve been called stupid more times than I count when I’ve had multiple spelling mistakes. I’ve found plenty of ways to help me cope with it: changing the font to a dyslexic friendly font like comic sans (which everyone hates on for some reason) or the specifically designed dyslexie; putting a more red tint on my screen to bring out the lettering more or darkening the screen so the backlight doesn’t effect my eyes; changing the spacing so it’s less likely for the words to switch lines.
Honestly, the fact that my chosen profession involves words still astounds me.
How do I write with dyslexia?
It’s a daily struggle—one you’ll notice in a lot of my Twitter posts. Oftentimes, I genuinely can’t notice when I’ve added extra words, put words out of order, or have spelled something nonsensically.
I think Twitter is probably the place where I display my dyslexia the most because I tend to live my best chaotic life and not bother to read my tweets until after I hit send. And even when I’m typing them up, I don’t tend to notice that I’m actually making spelling mistakes. I’ll give you an example of one of my more egregious ones lately.
Getting over an #OCD trigger is as as simple as not letting it bother you and and ask complicated as not letting it bother you.Trying not to let myself backslide on a lot of the work I’ve done in therapy letting some triggers go.— Rebecca Mikkelson (@zebookverm) August 1, 2021
I legitimately didn’t even notice until after someone liked my tweet that I had a misspelled word. And then I didn’t notice until someone liked it again that I had plenty of repeat words in there.
As for my writing writing...it can be a bit of a challenge. I have found that with my writing that I try to make sure everything is just right when I’m doing it, and that often stalls the writing process because I can’t move past a sentence until it’s “just right.” (This also plays into my “just right” OCD where my brain compulsively needs to fix things.)
I’ve killed a lot of trees printing out my books to edit because I find a lot more mistakes on physical paper than I do on the computer. I’ve gotten better with some of the techniques above so that I’m not wasting paper and harming the environment. I also use the trick of reading aloud something that I’m struggling with because when your brain is forced to say every word, you can find your mistakes easier. I’ve found many sentences where I’ve read them back to myself and wondered if I was drunk while writing because words will be way out of order and not make any sense.
I know this seems a bit of a contradiction to my above statement about perfection, but like we’ve covered with my example Twitter post...I sometimes can’t tell that I’ve added extra words or spelled something wrong.
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