A Writer's Notebook, Day Nine-Hundred-And-Sixty

A lot of complex thoughts have been coming up around my dyslexia.  Some of this I have already discussed, but I think a lot of it is leading me towards coming to understand certain aspects of my writing more clearly.  One thing that it has taken me a long time to come to terms with is the recognition of my sense of reality being somewhat alien.  It is inherent in the concept of neurological divergence.  If one experience the world through an altered apparatus, the experience itself will be different, thus the world will itself be different.  In a way, that is central to a great deal of the writing I do, and in a way that I had not considered before.  It is not that the books are, in specific, about being dyslexic, but that they are about a sense of the world being uncanny, of seeing what is considered to be normal from a perspective that renders it warped and partially abstracted.  That is to say, it is a reflection of my experience as a person for whom the world seems off much of the time, in ways that are hard to explain or understand because they seem normal and functional to others.

There is a deep sense in which it can be very difficult to elucidate the problems or experiences of being a dyslexic.  Their is no point of comparison, no way for me to know the non-dyslexic paradigm to which I would be comparing my experience.  I can offer aspects of my experience, but that often does little, unless one is already prepared with a degree of understanding.  I had a number of teachers, as well as a few college professors, who could not undertake to engage with my issues.  They held the attitude that it was my responsibility to be capable of what was needed, even including things that were specifically challenging for me.  For example, I had teachers who insisted I do work by hand and told me, explicitly, that my bad handwriting was a choice.  Dysgraphia is a real disability, however, and one that not only makes the handwriting itself atrocious, but causes a great deal of physical and mental pain and stress.  These are real things that I experience as a part of the act of writing by hand.  Now, I also have a lot of added stress, due to the trauma of being forced to write and then being punished for the inability to do so.  I know that a part of my present aversion to writing is likely not inherent to dysgraphia, but I cannot know which part is which, and I do not care to know either.  I don't feel I should need to know.

In part, it is those lines that become blurred, those places where I know a part is dyslexia, but I cannot know what else is impacting me.  I do not trust myself to describe my experience, because I might be making it up or imagining that this is dyslexic.  I might say something I believe is true, something I experience, and be told I am wrong, that I am not the expert on my own mind.  That is, for me, a part of what being a dyslexic person is like, and I think it is a major thing that I have tried to express in my writing, in one way or another, though I do not know for certain how directly I am able to express it.