Neurodivergent Rights...

[shadowkat]

Found on Face Book of all places:

Apparently, I'm neurodivergent - since I have a grab bag of a lot of these:



For those who can't see it? It breaks down visual and audio coordination issues into categories:

1. Dyscalculia - Difficulty with visual/spatial coordination, counting, doing numbers in sequence or sequencing (example? Unable to count by sevens), difficulty working word problems...

2. Dyslexia - difficulty reading aloud, mis-pronouncing words (often substituting words or finding another word), difficulty reading aloud, problems retrieving words, difficulty with writing or spelling, slow and labor intensive reading

3. Dysgraphia - symptoms include cramped/sore hand, poor spatial planning of sentences and margins, frequent erasing, inconsistent letter and word spacing, poor spelling and missing words and letters

4. Dyspraxia
Symptoms include: difference in speech, perception problems, poor hand-eye coordination, poor balance and posture, clumsiness, fatigue.

Better late than never, I guess? But I wish this information was more accessible and prevalent in the 20th Century and early 00s? Along with the advocacy.

Comments

[cactuswatcher]

I just knew about dyslexia back in the 1970s

Me too. I have an unabridged dictionary from the 1970s and it is the only one of the four to show up. A professor, who became my good friend, and I were chatting one day in the late 1960s. She started mentioning the things (particularly missing syllables in Russian words) that she found amusing about my work. It suddenly dawned on me that if it happened enough that it was odd and funny enough she'd mention it, it wasn't that normal. And dysgraphia or no, I was one of her best students. She thought it was funny, something to laugh *with* me about. I was just stunned.

Yes, I knew that I had problems writing, but until then I didn't know it was anything unusual. I'd dreaded every time a teacher said "I'll be grading this (written assignment) on neatness," never knowing it was worse for me than most.

Then too, there were times in school when I had something very boring to read, my eyes would glaze over and could barely read at all. So after college I'd tell people I had minor dyslexia, since I didn't know the word dysgraphia anyway. (On some standardized tests a passage would be so dull, I'd give up and skip to the questions. As long as they were asking about facts I could just go back skim and find something.) Philosophy class had the worst reading. I could sit and listen to the professor lecture and get everything and enjoy it. But I don't know if I ever got through any complete reading assignment in that class!

[shadowkat]

Had similar issues and very similar experiences - although much later - in the 1970s and 80s, and in the 1990s. (So this went on for all the 20th Century.)

I had a poetry professor pick up on it in undergrad. I was reading a poem aloud and she was sitting next to me and caught what I was doing. I wasn't even that aware of it. I was running my finger beneath the line, sub-vocalizing it under my breath, then when I thought it was right saying it a loud. She pulled me aside and pointed it out to me, and said she thought I was dyslexic.

And I often rewrote papers six times, until my hands were sore, to ensure they were neat. (They never were - I always was using white out. I still write the wrong words now - if I'm handwriting. Typing? I proof as I type? I run my eyes back over the text, and correct it as I'm typing it. Then run it over again. And then a third time - often without thinking about it. And get really annoyed when I leave out a word or use the wrong one.) I also read it back to myself.

I didn't know it wasn't normal. I thought it was. I remember a college friend discussing her dyslexia with two people who were doing a study on it. They asked her what it was like, and she said, from her perspective, normal. It's how she sees things. She doesn't know it's different from how others see them? She doesn't know there's another way of seeing them? From her perspective - and her brain - that's how the word looks. I've never forgotten that statement - it really resonated. We see the world differently, and most of us don't realize that everyone does. That perception varies.