Tales from the Dyslexic Side: Part 4

People who love books and read them quickly are said to devour them; this bestows books the quality of food, as though they are sustenance keeping the avid reader alive. For some of us, that’s just what they are. Books are more than just bound paper and printed lines, they are doorways to other worlds and experiences to live. I developed a passion for books which was never matched by my ability to consume them. I could taste the stories they held and I wanted to munch my way through them, but I couldn’t say I devoured them, that would give the idea of reading quickly. It was more like I nibbled my way through them, and if we’re holding to the analogy, probably dropped a fair few crumbs on the carpet while doing so.

I fell in love with stories long before I was able to read them myself and had been immersing myself in their pages since the books I was reading had started to have more than twenty words per page. Even at primary school, I can remember walking back from school reading a book as I went and deciding to take the long route just so I could finish the chapter before I got home. Not that reading was frowned upon, but when walking on my own, I was consumed by the story and no one could interrupt me.

Why I hung so tenaciously to books and reading at this point, I don’t know. They were perfidious objects which yielded their secrets to me only after great effort and dedication. I could have let them go at any point, but I didn’t. Reading became ever more important to me. Learning to read had been a mountain I had had to climb and now I was (at least a good way) up it, I wanted to look around and take in as much as I could. It was the ponderous tomes of epic fantasy, like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings which captured my imagination, weighed down my school bag and would eventually go on to fill up my bookcases.

Try as I might, I was always vexed by my slow reading and I was jealous of how quickly classmates could get through books. My envy of rapid perusers has stayed with me throughout life. When my Italian girlfriend was pregnant with our second child, I had to leave her at the hospital one night and, in a way that was completely incomprehensible to me, she had forgotten to take a book with her, so we stopped off and bought something for her from the hospital bookshop. The next afternoon when I went to pick her up I was amazed and quietly seething that she had practically finished it in one lonely overnight stay and hadn't even found it particularly interesting.

I spent years reading about and researching speed reading techniques. There are many different strategies and techniques out there, like humming while you skim since apparently, the internal vocalisation of words slows down your reading speed. You can also try reading just the central eighty per cent of the passage and let your brain intuit the first and final words of each line; you can run a finger along under the line you are reading to help your eye stay focussed (this one might actually work). I tried all these and many others, but the only thing I ever got was less comprehension and a lack of enjoyment. I have since accepted that I read at the speed I read at, and the only way to finish books faster is to read them more.

Yet all through life, no matter how slowly I read, it never occurred to me that it could be connected to dyslexia. In my head, these two ideas could never meet. The memory I had of being dyslexic at school was slipping further away, or maybe that read, being stuffed further down. As an adult, I viewed the way I read as something I needed to and could improve upon. The connection to dyslexia, something my mother and a few teachers had spoken about half a lifetime ago wasn’t one I was going to make. A large part of me just refused to acknowledge that reading slowly was due to a learning disability I had had in primary school. Reading was to be improved. I hated the idea of being limited by birth, that an innate quality was something that could hold me back, my ability wasn’t set and with enough effort and practice it could be something I excelled at. Years later, and I think I have dyslexia to thank for my tenacity in life.

Even back at school, I had convinced myself that by trying harder and working more, I could be like everyone else, and initially, I managed it as well. I would never start working earlier to compensate (and I still don’t now), but I would work longer, well into the night once the thrill got me. I worked hard because I wanted to, never in an attempt to hide my dyslexia. Yet the idea that it might one day be discovered held a paralysing fear over me. On one occasion, I had a school friend round to play and one of my elder sisters started discussing my dyslexia in front of us with my mother. I remember freezing and willing her to shut up, to just shut her stupid mouth and go away. She didn’t and afterwards, my friend apologised to me for laughing about how slowly I read. I tried my best to play it down, saying it wasn’t real or that even if it was, it didn’t make any difference. I was already learning what would later become my skills in dyslexic deception.

The only way to read all the books I want to is to bury my nose in them whenever I get a chance. I want to read them but I also feel that by reading I am improving myself. Like an athlete who trains every day, reading lets me know that dyslexic does not negate what I want to do. As I was growing up, reading wasn’t just a way for me to deny my dyslexia, it was like the shield I erected to keep it away. As long as I was reading, dyslexic wasn’t having a negative impact on me. Now I know that it always has an impact on my life, it has affected me every day and will continue to do so. The difference is that now I have acknowledged it, the effect is no longer a negative one.

Before realising I was dyslexic, I left errors in my work, I was unorganised, and I often failed to read attentively. Since realising I am dyslexic, I leave errors in my work, I am unorganised, and I often fail to read attentively. What has changed? Nothing and everything. I realised that those things would have happened anyway. Each one would have caused me anxiety at work and edged me further along a path of self-doubt. Now I no longer judge myself for doing them and get on with what I want to do.

All the time I was ignoring my dyslexia, it caused me problems, at school, at work, in life; it limited what I could do and was always something I needed to hide. It’s not - I know that now. It is something to be embraced and loved. Yes, it has thrown me a multitude of problems over the years, but it comes with benefits which I now appreciate and wouldn’t be me without. While dyslexics might not see every tiny detail, we often see the big picture, quicker and in doing so find solutions to problems others might not see. My need to break information down into simple segments helped me communicate more effectively as a copywriter. The rules I needed to learn, and the patterns I needed to see, were all things that made me an effective teacher.

Slow at reading, I might be, but that never stopped me, just as bad spelling never discouraged me from being an aspiring writer. Reading and writing go hand in hand, and even if I don’t get the chance to write every day, I always make sure I open a book which is important too, when you consider the words of the great Harlan Ellison, “a writer who writes more than he reads is an amateur”. I love books, I love reading them and I love buying them. They accumulate in our house at a rate that makes me think they are reproducing on their own somehow. They multiply and inch along my bookshelves like coloured bricks, eating up space and ignorance as they go. Much as I love them, I don’t afford them the luxury care they deserve. By the time I have finished with them, they look weathered, with a cracked spine, curling covers and dog-eared corners. A book should look weathered and lived in with its own character given to it by the reader. Writers create worlds in their books but readers bring those worlds to life as they live in.

One of the dyslexic traps I often fall into when reading is that of the names of people and places. We read by scanning sequences of symbols on the page and relating these to concepts and objects which are defined through mutual and historical consensus. Each of these sequences also has a corresponding pattern of sounds which we articulate and use to communicate verbally. In most situations, the relationship between written symbols and vocal sounds is learned and comes easily. Dyslexics have greater problems associating these two elements quickly and translating one into the other. Familiar patterns aren’t learned quickly and aren’t a problem as we use them every day. But when it comes to obscure place names and words, translating the written symbols into their corresponding sounds can be difficult and even embarrassing. An example of this for me would be the word “archipelago”, I now know it means a small group of islands and I’ve heard it pronounced, but you will never hear me say it in public. I just can’t reconcile that sequence of letters with the sounds they correspond to and I worry about saying it wrong.

It isn’t just random geographical words which cause occasional embarrassment, it is an issue that continues to cause me trouble in life, such as when my partner asks me about medicine for our children. My response is to look at the packaging, where I see a complicated combination of letters, the first few sounds I attribute to these bear a fairly close resemblance to those on the packaging, after that my brain takes its best guess and splurts out an audible approximation of what comes next. For me, this is close enough but causes problems when my non-dyslexic, non-English native-speaking partner takes my newly-coined word as the actual name of the medicine with her the next day causing a bewildered pharmacist to ask if she’s sure that is the actual name of the medicine she wants.

My shaky understanding of the relationship between sounds and letters has got me into trouble and caused embarrassment more than once. These internal approximations of sounds and letters tend to stick in my head and I start to use them instinctively when I see certain combinations of letters. Such as when working in a bar I asked a customer if they wanted a glass of avocado, the pronunciation of which had, a long time before, fused with the word advocaat in my mind.

Long and unusual words can be intimidating for dyslexics and in conversations, there are certain words which I know but skate around to avoid slipping up on pronunciation. This confuses people when they hear it, since most people think dyslexics only have problems with written words. But this isn’t the case, it’s the relationship between audio and visual that causes us problems.

While it may sound obvious, one way for a dyslexic to get around issues with comprehension is concentrated reading. The ability to skim an email and get the gist is often taken for granted. For dyslexics, the ability to read something quickly and accurately requires effort just to make sure we slip up on simple things like skipping words or misreading “can’t” as “can”. This and other similar mistakes have tripped me up more times than I can remember, so many, in fact, that it undermines my confidence in what I have read. As Richard Lavoie says in, It’s So Much Work to be Your Friend, “dyslexics, indeed any children with a learning disability, are less confident in what they are saying since they learn to trust the facts and input of their own brains less due to the frequent mistakes which occur”. If I’ve read it wrong a hundred times before, maybe I’ve read it wrong this time. This undermines our confidence in ourselves and in what we say to others. Even now, when I’m questioned on what I have written or said, my initial reaction is to assume that it was me who read the instructions wrong or got the wrong end of the stick. These indirect attacks on our abilities and perceptions lead to dyslexics doubting their abilities and clawing back the confidence we should have in what we say and write is a long and difficult task.

Over the years, I’ve found ways to help me stay focused and have more confidence in what I read and write. I know that I can’t concentrate indefinitely or even for very long and so I break my time down into small manageable blocks, the same way I break down what I read into small parts. I take each sentence individually and make sure I have the meaning from each before moving on. Lack of comprehension creeps slowly, building up word by word and then sentence by sentence until suddenly you have lost not only the meaning but the desire to carry on reading as well.

I’ve always been envious of casual readers (as I once was of casual smokers), people who can pick up a book or magazine, quickly read a random article, and come away with new useful information. I never read anything casually. Reading anything is never something I undertake lightly. It’s my time, an investment, and before starting I want to know what I will get from those pages.

Next: The Dyslexic Copywriter