When I was growing up, I was taught that some kids had a really hard time learning to read. They had something called dyslexia. "Okey dokey," I thought to myself, in my profound gradeschooler way.
Like every kid, I had subjects and activities I was good at (at which I was good), and other that, well, not so much. I loved reading. And I was good at it. I was an only-child of parents who read a lot and who instilled a deep love of stories and language in me. I had a large vocabulary, lots of patience, and loved the praise I received from my parents and teachers alike for being "good at reading".
My addiction to praise and success made other areas where I was not so fluent quite painful, as it must be for all kids. It took a long time to master the difference between "p", "q", "b", and "d". I had trouble telling time and couldn't understand why we even needed traditional clocks when digital clocks just flat told you the time without making you work at it. Learning to tie my shoes was a real chore - so much so that I faked a stomach bug to get out of a field day race that involved finding and fetching your shoes, putting them on, and racing back to the finish line.
And maht (gonna leave that one there as an example), well, math and I didn't see eye to eye. I understood simple addition and math. Long addition was a pain and division gave me nightmares. But my full discontent with math came along in the fourth grade when we were required to memorize the multiplication tables. ("Memorize" - that's a phrase that doesn't sit well with me.) My teacher put up a big chart on the wall and during free time you could come up and recite one of the tables and get a star put on the chart for each one you completed successfully. Many of my classmates soared right through. I marveled at the ease of it - these numbers tumbling off their tongues. I sat in the corner silently trying to keep pace while I ticked off numbers on my fingers, tapping them against my blue jeans under my desk.
That chart came to be my archnemesis. It might as well have read, "Julie's Big Shining Chart of Failure!" I was second to the last to finish the chart. For a girl who never scored less than an A, it was horrifying.
Spelling was a close second to math. I was abysmal. Spelling bees and spelling base ball (anyone else do that in school?) were just plain mean, in my opinion. My vocabulary was off the charts, but my spelling remained below grade level, and the gap between the two only became worse. By high school, my spelling grade level on standardized tests was more than five grades behind. I would misspell the same words over and over - and not always the same way. It seemed to me that there were at least four or five options, phonetically, and I never understood how one was supposed to remember the correct combination.
(Side note in support of my general thesis: I have misspelled or mistyped and then corrected, thus far, more than 45 words.)
In high school, I continued to excel in writing and English, while simultaneously counting on my fingers under the table in math. But something changed with I took algebra and calculus. I discovered that I was really great at complex, abstract math. Math that allowed you to use a calculator for basic calculations; math that drew pictures; math that told stories! That, my friends, I could do.
I drove my mother batty with all of my high school projects. I was a procrastinator of the highest order and she could not understand that I was, in all honesty, working on papers and projects in my head - just not on paper where she could see them. I saw the big picture first, and then drilled down to the smaller parts. By the time I sat down to type, the whole thing already existed in my head. It practically made her head explode when I spent two hours working on a paper the night before it was due and pulled in an A+, or forgot entirely about a science project and then threw it together the last Sunday of Spring Break for a blue ribbon.
My "I'm not good with numbers" issue bled over into my everyday life in lots of other ways. I could not and cannot to this day remember phone numbers. I have to turn them into a song. And if it involves an area code that isn't my own - FORGET IT. I will transpose the digits or forget them wholesale. If it's a number I must remember - say, my own - then I use all sorts of methods: songs, the pattern it makes on the keypad, saying it as two-digit numbers "twenty-five oh-eight".
Tips in restaurants make me nervous. I'll over pay or agree to split a tab that was wildly in someone else's favor simply to avoid doing math while others watch. If you've served me, your tip was either 10% if you pissed me off, or 20% if you were decent or better. That way I only have to move a decimal or double it.
In college, there were a few more indications that I might be different - but none that clued me in. The biggest was when, in the course of a sociolinguistics class, I learned that other people didn't assign genders and personalities to their numbers when they were little. Seriously, I had no idea that I was the only one who did that. I thought everyone did.
I also began to notice that not everyone was as aware of spacial organization. I can spot whether or not a picture is straight, an angle is plumb, where "half-way" is just by looking. I performed off the charts on spatial (see?! which is it?) organization tests when the armed services came 'round in high school. Those "what shape would this make?" puzzles are right up my alley. The crooked picture thing is particularly frustrating for me since I now live in a house that has no right angles or planed surfaces.
Then there was the time I realized that I can't follow moves in a mirror, like say, for instance, in a step class. I took one class one time and laughed so thoroughy and heartily at my own utter ineptitude that I never came back. And yet, I could pole vault. Given that it didn't involve a mirror.
Still, none of these little idiosyncrasies seemed to mean anything to me until about six months ago. I had been bemoaning how frequently I mis-type (transposing letters), reading about synaesthesia at Jo's, and the other Julia's Patrick's assigning colors to letters, and then I heard an actor on TV mention adult dyslexia and how he hadn't known he had it until his son was diagnosed.
A few googles later and I was beginning to see myself in the descriptions of dyslexic learning style and coping mechanisms. A phone call to my mom revealed a mention of "You know, your piano teacher when you were little asked me if you were dyslexic." My mom told her in no short order that, "She reads extremely well, thankyouverymuch," and ended all further discussion.
Since then it's been like unraveling a ball of yarn. Every day I see some new characteristic that makes sense when I think of it in terms of having a specific, mild form of dyslexia. The way I glaze over and simply cannot comprehend long, detailed processes. The way f-stops and shutter speed numbers simply have no meaning for me (I use other strategies to remember what end of the spectrum yeilds which result). The way my father and husband get supremely frustrated with my inability to understand dates without seeing them on a calendar, or remember names, or understand step-by-step processes when described out loud.
But I also see some very interesting and beautiful things that resulted from understanding the world differently. I like that my numbers have personalities and genders. I know that that was probably my way of remembering them and caring about them long enough to get through basic math. I love that I see the whole world in terms of "stories". It's what gave rise to my career. And I even like the fact that I had no notion of dyslexia as potentially applying to me as I was growing up. I think it could have become too easy to just throw my hands up and say, "Eh. I'm dyslexic. I can't do that." Who's to say.
I have no formal diagnosis - this is all just my own research and thoughts. But I think it fits, and I find it interesting. And I'm dying for even just one of you to tell me your numbers have genders.
