A confession: I'm mildly dyslexic with some ADHD tendencies.

Well, to be honest I haven't gone to a doctor for a diagnosis of dyslexia or ADHD, but I do know that my mind is very different from most people's, and I have the tell-tale signs of being dyslexic.  Of course, I could have some other neurological problem -- yikes! -- but like I said, I've had these quirks as far back as I can remember.

For one thing, my mind jumps around all the time, and sometimes it just tries to skip ahead too quickly.  All my life, whenever I've taken a multiple choice test, my mind would know what the answer was, but would scan through the answers and pick the opposite answer, i.e. Fred didn't read carefully as opposed to Fred read carefully.  I'd feel ashamed frequently, for picking the obviously wrong answer.

Have you ever listened to Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach?  The first time I heard this (see embedded YouTube clip), I thought that this might be me.  Let me explain the narration:

The choir counting is the conscious mind counting while staring at the clock (or attempting to process logic); the whispering female voice is the subconscious mind worrying and thinking about all sorts of things; the loud male voice is the willful attempt to get the mind focused on a particular matter.  All this, going off at the same time, would you go crazy?  Well, that's what goes on all the time in my head.



Written logical tests are sometimes difficult, because my brain ends up dissecting each word, and before I know it, I'm trying to figure out what the word "IS" is.  If I stare at some words too long, they start to look foreign.  The next thing I know, my mind is either riffing off variations of words with "IS" in it, or repeating ad nauseum the same, written statement, as it considers how much time is left on the exam.  This is not to say that I can't figure out the logical problem, but that my mind gets cluttered and loses focus on the logical statements, and until I scream at my brain to stop it, I can't get back to figuring out the problem.

Spatially, I could always see things others couldn't.  If you gave me a medium -- clay, wood, plastic, paper, Lincoln Logs, Lego, etc -- I'd build things constantly.  Form mattered to me long before function.

Yes, I too get characters backwards.  It's the oddest thing I tell you, that I'll be typing in a word and I'll switch the placement of different characters around.  I can tell my mind, "Okay you idiot, it's A-L-W-A-Y-S", but my fingers will pop out "A-Y-W-A-L-S" or some variant of that.

No kidding, over the course of this post, I've switched over a two three dozen letters backwards in different words. It's an inevitability, because even though I know how the word is spelled, my fingers will type words backwards.

Speaking is an issue of sorts.  I sometimes do not pronounce words carefully and they come out wrong or blurred together, even when I speak s-l-o-w-l-y.

And why haven't I bothered to get a diagnosis?  Well, because there's no point to it.  I clearly know how to work around my shortcomings, and it does not impede me from doing what I want to do, although I do worry that I might be regressing (doesn't everyone?).  I'm already obsessed with a lifetime of learning and fostering an analytical mind; that's on top of my very high IQ (again, I hope I haven't regressed!).

But don't worry.  I have a fallback in case my dyslexia and ADHD increases: become a beach bum and do nothing but swim, snorkel, sleep, eat, and sell expository writing poetry and drawings.

Why confess?  Because having dyslexia and ADHD isn't the end of the world; in fact, I see it as a gift -- a gift to think different.