The curious tale of how I mistook my dyslexia for stupidity - and talked, sang, and drew my way out of it. 

Sometimes I tell people I’m dyslexic and they don’t believe me. I love to read, I can mostly write without error, and I’m fluent in more than one language.

Also, I don’t actually technically know if I’m dyslectic cause I was never diagnosed. Instead I thought I was pretty dumb but if I worked really hard no one would notice. Later I felt inordinately angry about why anyone could possibly care about the exact order of letters when the gist is perfectly clear even if if if I right liike tis.

I mean, clear to me anyway.

I was 25 before it dawned on me that all the tricks I was using were not remotely related to how other people process language. One of my friends of six years was specialized in dyslexia, and I contacted her, full excitement about my latest insight.

“Man, guess what? I realized I am dyslectic! This explains so much! I wish someone had told me sooner. It would have saved me so much grief.”

“Oh, yeah, I know.”

“Wait, what?”

“You are very obviously dyslectic.”

“Wait, why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t seem bothered.”

“Oh…”

Turns out my dyslexia was a public secret that dated back all the way to my childhood (and this was obviously unrelated to my constitutional lack of self-awareness).

Anyway.

How come I kind of did fine? I’m fluent in English (not my native language), wrote my PhD thesis of 150 pages in 3 months without much effort, and was a localization tester for Dutch-English video game translation for two years.

I also read out loud till the age of 21, trace every letter like it’s a drawing, and need to sing new word sounds to be able to remember them.

I thought everyone had to but no one sent me the memo.

Dear reader, not everyone has to.

When I recently shared my information processing techniques with old and new friends, they asked if I had ever written them down so maybe other people could use them too.

I hadn’t.

So here is my arsenal of alternative information processing techniques. 

Read Out Loud

Honestly, I didn’t realize there was an age where you were supposed to stop doing this. In school you obviously had to whisper to yourself. At home you go to your room and read at normal volume. If it’s a fiction book, you do voices for the different characters. It’s great.

I remember my sister sometimes walking in to my room when I was little cause she said it sounded like so much fun in there. It totally was.

Later I found out my mother made sure my siblings never made me aware it was unusual I was still reading out loud. Instead she signed me up for competitions to read books on the local radio. This was before the wide-spread internet and audio books. Later I’d read to my parents sometimes, who were always excited about how much energy I threw into the endeavor.

I didn’t know any different.

In college I was still reading out loud. Research papers have a voice. Mathematical equations especially. They take longer to say out loud than to read in your head, but you can never be sure what’s on the page if you don’t.

According to my brain anyway.

When I was 22 I moved in with my first boyfriend and reading out loud got a little obstructive. I started subvocalizing, and that was definitely less fun. I still subvocalize now. But if I struggle to follow a passage, I go back to reading it out loud.

I’ve probably read out this essay a dozen times by now. I keep checking the cadence of every sentence. It’s easier to spot word duplications, cause I find myself repeating myself. Missing words also stick out like inverted pot holes. They destroy the flow. So I jump back and smooth them over. Sometimes when I talk, I finish the sentence differently than it’s written. Then I go back and compare the two. Often what I say is better than what I wrote.

I’ve been told most people’s brains don’t work like that. All I can say is, I hope more kids get a chance to grow in to adults who keep reading out loud if that is what they need and enjoy. 

Draw the Letters

The year before high school graduation I decided I wanted to get a 7.5 grade average (out of 10). In the Dutch school system, that’s kind of high, and it allows you automatic entry to any program of your choice. I studied hard, and diligently, and generally enjoyed it.

Except I still failed every language I hadn’t managed to drop.

My first fail grade was French, everybody breezed through German (Dutch with an accent) except me, and then there was mandatory Latin - an entirely logical life decision for a dyslectic. I managed to drop French and German. I could breeze through English cause I spoke it better than the teacher (thanks, Dad!^[1]) but with Dutch and Latin I was stuck.

Now when it came to spelling Dutch words, I could not for the life me remember the rules or see the individual letters making up a word. I’d just be reading or writing, and it’s like little packages of word shape went in or out of my brain, but I couldn’t really see in to those packages. Write and right are the same word. So are father and dad. So are foruthwly and fortunly and forrtunaly. And that’s not even getting in to reading a sentence and managing to notice all the words. My brain automagically skips along a sentence kind of like:

This is practice sentence to you how my brain. I wonder how noticeable differences are to to other people.

I didn’t find it baffling that my brain worked like this. I found it baffling other people cared to give me fail grades about it! I was pretty sure I was intelligible. And with my Reading Out Loud trick (that I didn’t know was a trick) I could read just fine.

In the mean time I was failing my Dutch exams three times in a row. The teacher made an exam you had to pass to be allowed into the next year. It was entirely a spelling exam. I was sure she had invented this inane rule to torture me personally.

Luckily I didn’t invent my solution till the year after. Shows her who’s boss!^[2]

Ahum. Anyway.

I kept banging my eyeballs against the teflon of word images. I could not get any of it to stick. Till, for whatever reason, I realized words were just drawings. Drawings made up of letters. And letters were also drawings. I really liked drawings. I had always liked drawings.

What if I pretended to draw every single letter as I wrote it?

You know those magic spells in books where suddenly you get an extra sense or you look through the invisibility cloak? It was kind of like that. (I just apparently spelled “cloak” like “cloaca”. Have I mentioned I was often the class joker cause I read and heard everything wrong and my first 5 guesses were completely bonkers? I wonder if there is a dyslexia/creativity link purely because of that).

Anyway, long story short, I was immediately cured of my writing dyslexia.^[3] Yay! 

Sing the Words

My first boyfriend was Swedish. His English was great and so was mine, so really there was no reason to strive for anything more. But I had some desire to be able to communicate better with his family so I did end up facing my well known demon again: foreign language learning.

Every time he said a word in Swedish I just … didn’t remember it? Humans are supposed to have an auditory loop of a few seconds - You don’t have to memorize or pay attention to what you hear. You can just repeat the last few seconds back. It’s standard functionality.

I can do that too. Thankfully.

Unless I don’t recognize the sounds. It’s like asking me to beatbox the last 5 seconds of the gurgling of a nearby river. How the fudge would I do that?

Wait, are there people who can do that?

Anyway.

It was making me feel mighty stupid though. I had been in enough self-flaggelation language learning courses to know no one else seemed afflicted by this micro-amnesia pointed exactly at the new word they were trying to learn. Also, this was not an issue for me for new words in a language I did know, nor was it an issue with new words in languages I didn’t know where the sounds were familiar (I went through 5 years of trying to learn Spanish prior to this, much to the confusion of anyone who knew me, but Spanish doesn’t contain new phonemes compared to Dutch).

Again, I don’t know why I thought of this. My best guess is, I like experimenting. But at some point, I asked my then-boyfriend to sing the word to me that he had repeated to me roughly 30 times before that without effect.

Yes. I got it the first time. And it reproduced. I could remember the word sounds first from singing, and then after a few repetitions, I could just say them. Hurray! 

Substituting brain processes

This was more a personal account than a course on how to manage dyslexia. I never got help or training. I have no idea how common my techniques are. But my friends pointed out I should share them so others can find them and use them, so here you go.

There is, to my mind, one common thread though: If your brain is bad at doing something the regular way, try something else. Anything else. Human brains have areas dedicated to language processing - encoding and decoding. Dyslexia covers all the ways that these encodings and decodings might fail. If you notice your default setup not working, try using a different mechanism instead. I think in practice, I’ve covered my major dyslexias in word image processing and phoneme processing by using my verbal center, my visual center (not language related), and the apparently highly specialized area of your brain that takes care of singing.

They are not supposed to take care of reading, writing, and learning word sounds. But they can apparently do the job using their own toolkit. I’m slower at all the language related tasks than you’d expect for my overall mental functioning, but these techniques allow me to do the job without error.

And I can tell you, being trapped in never being able to reliably parse the true information that is written down or said is a weird and maddening curse. It’s hard to explain if you don’t have any dyslectic tendencies. I used to think I was stupid. Turns out I’m just a special form of deaf and blind. I wish someone had told me how to deal with that. So for what it’s worth, if your brain is anything like mine, maybe try to talk, sing, or draw your way out of it.

This was a cross-post of my first essay on my new blog Think Feel Play. Consider subscribing there if you liked this post, and would like to read future essays about learning, learning about learning, and learning about learning about learning ... ok. Yes. Hi. Or maybe just to make me smile :D

1. ^{^}

   My father is American, and I’ve spoken some English for as long as I can remember. I can’t recall ever having to put in effort in to learning English. Something I remain eternally grateful for considering my dismal language acquisition skills.

2. ^{^}

   I can’t remember how I made it through. I only remember how miserable and angry I was, as the only student in my year who had to keep redoing the exam. I think I got infinite redoes? Got lucky? Was proffered divine grace?

3. ^{^}

   Maybe that description was too minimal to help anyone recreate the effect. What you do is you pretend the roman alphabet is a foreign alphabet. E.g. Kanji. Whenever you write or read, trace every stroke of the letter like you are illuminating an ancient manuscript. Channel your inner Sumi-E brush artist. Imagine yourself a true artisan of calligraphy. It’s a bit of a semi-meditative process of noticing every single stroke of every single letter. Yes, this is excruciatingly slow at first. Yes, it will be only kind of slow eventually. But, even better, you can probably still drop this technique at will and then just switch back and forth between high and low error modes of processing languages. Also, you are likely to lower your error rate in fast mode over time cause mental skills are porous. Or maybe magic? Anyway, it does seem to cross-over a bit.