My Life with Dyslexia

I want to tell you a story…   it won’t be about my fear of flying this time.  For the most part, constant air travel has cured me of that phobia.  It’s about something else that has plagued me my entire life, but went undiagnosed until I turned 50.   A true disability, from which, I adapted, like a three-legged dog, and never knew I was disabled.  I don’t know if this is a success story or some other commentary on the political landscape we created when we started holding ceremonies for our kids graduating from kindergarten…giving each one a trophy.   I do remember, in New Jersey, on or about 1974, my soccer team came in second place in the League.   Satisfied with the team’s performance, our coaches took us out for pizza and gave each one of us a second-place trophy. I cherished that trophy.  It stills sit’s in my office today. It didn’t make me soft. It made me proud.  And with pride, and confidence, much like any four-legged dog, I moved through life wagging my tail and compensating for the things I lacked without realizing I was even a dog, let alone with three legs.

From a very early beginning I was detrayed by my words.  My mom always told me I couldn’t spell because I learned phonetically in public school and the failure of phonics must have been the reason I sucked at spelling.  She had one data point.  How could a smart kid like me not be able to spell?  It plagued her for her entire life.   It must have been the phonetic spelling lessons she reasoned countless times when I asked her how a word was spelled.   Imagine one day early in my life, while trying to spell the word detrayal, I realized it was actually spelled with a ‘b”.  Well, I felt betrayed by the system.  How could I have missed that one so badly?  Sure, they knew about dyslexia back in the 70’s.  I even remember my best friend David’s mother, Mrs. Simms, explaining to me that if you had dyslexia, you would flip your “S’s” backward.  From then and there I was on the lookout for the telltale sign of the flipped S.   As it turns out, to a dyslexic, a flipped “S” is the absolute least of your problems.   A flipped “b” and a “d” on the other hand, robs you of your innocence.  Let’s not even talk about a flipped “p” and a “q” because that’s just mean.

So, with that very first betrayal of the school system going off fully undiagnosed, I launched into my mediocre school life never quite understanding I had a issue, or is it a problem?  Fast forward another 40 years. Successful completion of high school, college, a BS in Engineering, a Master’s in Liberal Arts, and a Second Master’s in Operations Research.  I was an officer in the USAF.  A system’s engineer at a large corporation.   I ran my own business and also became a federal civilian for a number of years.  And now in my twilight years, I’m still a high functioning dyslexic with abysmal hand-writing skills.  And I still can’t spell for shit.  How did I discover, finally, about my disability?

Let’s talk about something that is a flaw in my character.  I never wanted my daughter to fail.  She struggles in math.  I’ve written extensively on what I believed to be the root cause of her math failures…her 6th grade math teacher…who called all of her students, young mathematicians.   I called her Bloody Mary for the way she forced my daughter out of STEM.  If you want more of that story you can read about it here, “Blood Mary and the Paradox of 6th Grade Math Teachers”.  My daughter had to successfully complete some math to graduate high school.   Maybe, and I’m not confirming or denying this part, her dad helped her with her math homework.  Perhaps he actually completed some, or all, of her math homework.  When this caring father, we will call him dad, completed his own work in school, he never checked his math.  He’s kind of confident dude, bold, gusting to arrogant on most occasions.  But he never checked his math.  Why would he check his math?  It’s right!  The math is right!  That’s probably a longer story…and as it turns out…the very subject of this essay.  But because Dad was completing the math work for his daughter, he felt that if he was doing someone else’s work, and turning it in for a grade, he ought to check the math.  Imagine, for the first time in his life, checking his math and finding some of it wrong.  WTF?  How did he make that mistake.  He flipped a 25 and a 52.  That’s a rookie error, not a disability.  Imagine, however, after a semester of math, and checking his own homework over and over again, for the very first time, finding many similar errors.   Not a lot of errors, but a sufficient number of errors to turn an “A” homework into a “C” homework.   A passing grade.  Had there been sufficient errors to turn his “A” homework assignments in school into failing grades, perhaps Dad wouldn’t have a story to tell.  He would have known.  As it turns out, his disability slipped through the cracks.  A passing grade.  Two-O and go.  As they say.  He stayed on the edge.  It was seemingly more than enough to get by.  But it was a mediocre, at best, getting by.

But now, at age 50, it caught his attention big time.  Also, he had just changed career paths.  Moving from management, into program support, that required relearning a bunch of math.  And, not just relearning math, working in computer programming with lower lever machine language, verse higher level languages.  It would be hard enough, for a dyslectic to write code…but perhaps no harder than writing, and perhaps easier because a complier will find errors caused by misspelled variables, for instance.  A built-in editor.  But now I was working in hexadecimal and binary.  One of the first things you learn when working with hexadecimal and binary in a computer architecture is the endianness of the processor.  Since in a computer architecture, it’s arbitrary, which end of a circuit is on the left or right, the original designer can choose which side to start the significant bit of an 8-bit word when they stuff it into a memory circuit.  Can anyone see why this might be a problem for someone who flips letters and numbers?  Safe to say I’ll never quit my day job to design computer architectures.

So, looking at a lot of hexadecimal code became incredibly laborious. It was hard to tell left from right.  I just thought it was hard, or my vision was failing.  It had not quite dawned on me yet that I had a problem.  However, other clues began surfacing.  Particularly when you start researching the symptoms of dyslexia.

• Poor spelling

• Left and right confusion

• Messy handwriting

• Trouble reading unfamiliar words, often making wild guesses 

• Pauses, hesitates, and/or uses lots of “um’s” when speaking

• Mispronunciation of long, unfamiliar or complicated words

• Trouble remembering dates, names, telephone numbers, random lists

• Extreme difficulty learning a foreign language

• Avoids saying words that might be mispronounced

• Struggles to retrieve words; frequently has “It was on the tip of my tongue” moments

Oh wow! The story of my life begins to unfold.   I don’t just have messy handwriting because I’m lazy.  I don’t just have trouble mispronouncing words out loud because I’m illiterate. My brain simply flips the details at a lower level and decides to compensate in unusual ways.  When I read, for instance, I’m just going to see the word, not the letters.  That’s why it’s hard to pronounce words.  I know what they mean but forget about me trying to read it out loud, particularly if I have to pronounce it.  My mom thought it was the phonics simply because I couldn’t pronounce words, so the phonics didn’t teach me so the phonics must suck.  No, I can’t pronounce words because I don’t know if its pronounced “de-trayed” or “be-trayed”.  That’s a big difference and an embarrassment to a kid because one of those words doesn’t actually exist in the English language.

Then it turns out I began giving a lot of white board lectures at work.  More than a lot…I’m probably giving several three-hour lectures a week at work-- all with just a white board and markers.  Turns out I have to spell words in public.  Not just words… I have to use a lot of letters and symbols as well.  Spelling words, by writing them, in real time, in public, is agonizing.  And I can watch it develop in real time.  I can watch, almost apart from my body, as I begin to write the same word I have written, hundreds of times, in front of me, with the wrong order of the letters.  How do I compensate?  I write quickly and as messy as I can. And I keep talking.  Keep the lecture going, maybe no one noticed.   It’s not clear anyone has detected my disability yet.  They probably just think I sloppy AF.  But that’s ok…if they understand what I am teaching them…and most of them do.

I still don’t know how I hopped through life as a three-legged dog.  But I did.  Perhaps my dyslexia is not as profound as others, but clearly, I’m on the spectrum, if that’s a thing.  Now that I’m paying attention to it, I find even more things I do wrong…flipping letters and symbols, not just left/right but also up/down.  When I look at a phone number, I stare at it for a few seconds.  If I stare long enough at the numbers, I know they will be playing tricks on me.  So, I wait, to see if they jump.  And then I wait some more.   They are tricky bastards.  But I’ve stopped letting them fool me.  I don’t know if I would have gotten better math grades in school, had I known, but I do now, I finally check my math. And, when I'm making a right turn at a cross street with a sign posted for a "No Left Turn", I sit and wait, like a pig, staring at a wristwatch, for the confusion in my brain to settle. And then I hop on three legs, blissfully into the intersection, with my tail wagging, to make my right-hand turn...