Quite recently I have had some very public and furious criticism and quite possibly the most cutting and hurtful was the criticism that revolves around my disability, with critics referring to me as ‘Thick’, ‘Illiterate’ & ‘stupid’. All these points more hurtful because of the fact that they are inaccurate and are born out of ignorance, bigotry & a self serving desire to make themselves appear more intelligent at the expense of another.

I hope to in this article to explain my take on Dyslexia, recount some personal experiences and explain why public humiliation is not a good idea, my reasons for doing this are not only to get it all off my chest, move on and counter the stupidity but hopefully to illustrate to other people suffering from bigotry over a point of difference that they are not alone. Finally I hope to at least educate one or two would be perpetrators that it is not acceptable.

Dyslexia is a point of difference

Dyslexia is a point of difference from the main populace, just like being of a racial, sexual, religious, or even hair colour minority is, and like theses other points of difference there is nothing we can do to change that and nor should we. People with a point of difference should not feel ashamed for being different and neither should they be objects or ridicule. If you genuinely want to help a dyslexic then do it privately and ask if they want help first. You wouldn’t approach a blind man walking down the street and escort him across with out asking if he wanted to cross first, just as much as you wouldn’t stand and shout ‘look at the blind fool, bumping into stuff, what a dick, get a guide dog you idiot’. So why is it acceptable to publicly copy and past stuff a dyslexic person has written to a public forum call them ”Illiterate’ and proceed to jape and correct there spelling and grammar without even approaching them first and saying ‘by the way, what you have written here is wrong would you like me to correct it for you?’ and its also down right rude to say ‘Get a friend to read it through first’.

We are not stupid we are just different (even from each other)

Its a commonly misheard belief that Dyslexic people are stupid, the traverse is often true, most Dyslexics have a higher then average IQ, in-fact the test that are used to define if a person is Dyslexic are in my experience made up of a mix of IQ tests and reading & writing tests and if the margin is significant then a diagnosis of ”The specific learning disability know as Dyslexia is present’.

Every Dyslexic presents different symptoms and they should be seen as symptoms. Dyslexia is not an inability or difficulty in reading and / or writing but these are symptoms of the difference. There are many different theories as to what Dyslexia is and what causes it and I cant really comment on what I think it is, because I think that its more complicated then one reason and that just like the symptoms differ from one person to another so do the causes.

For me at least, Dyslexia presents its self as word blindness, and its something that I just can not beat, I can use spell checkers, I can re-read stuff time and time again but the so called ‘rules’ of grammar and differences in spelling for the phonetically same word just refuse to settle in my mind. I find the rules of grammar irrational, inconsistent and pedantic. I have no such problems with other language sets that I use in my working day as a Freelance Digital Creative like CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), XHTML (Extendible Hyper Text Mark-up Language), similarly I have no problems with the more visual languages of art, design & information architecture. I would also like to add that I have no aversion to reading & find that I read almost obsessively and more then most non-dyslexic people I know, but I think that this is more down to my thrust for knowledge and information then anything else. I also have appalling short term memory and have to constantly make barley legible lists and notes.

Personal experiences

I was diagnosed relatively late in the second year of my degree, and suffered for most of my educational life without understanding why. I remember teachers confusion as to why I was verbally eloquent and bright but could never spell properly, I remember being forced to have hearing tests as they though that I just wasn’t hearing the words right and when it was found my hearing was fine it was put down to laziness as may of my School reports will be testament I can also remember being physically abused because I consistently could not remember the difference between a trimaran and a catamaran I now know the difference but to be honest have never needed to use the information in conversion or anything else, so the whole experience was nothing but a useless one that only cased deep resentment on my part towards the educational institution and its staff.

Other experiences include doing a public exhibition as part of my degree assessment and having a non teaching member of staff covertly correct the grammar on my exhibited pieces with a large red pen along with personal comments.

In employment I have also had similar experiences where I went for a job as a graphic designer for a large UK based printing franchise and was offered the job but told that they would only offer me 80% of the advertised wage because of my Dyslexia (I refused the job). Subsequently I didn’t mention that I was Dyslexic when applying for further jobs and after subsequently landing a role as a Software Engineer in web technologies, was told that if I should have let them know that I was dyslexic when applying because if I had they would have given the job to someone else.

I also on returning to the UK and making a trip to London to talk to a handful of new media recruitment consultants had to suffer the indignity of a consultant using her tongue to push out her bottom lip and making retard noises on explaining to her that I was dyslexic and that is why the form they gave me to fill in wasn’t perfect. (They lost out as I refused to work with them and sought representation elsewhere).

What concerns me most is the unseen bigotry that almost definitely is happening to me how much potential freelance work am I missing out on when potential clients are hopefully impressed by the calibre of my portfolio only to be put off by a tendency to read the words and not the interpretation of the words. But to be honest if a client is going to start off like that then the relationship probably wouldn’t work anyway, and I can understand it if I was marketing my self as God forbid a ‘copywriter’.

Humiliation does not make you clever it makes you an Arse

I fail to see how an apparently rational member of the human race can hold the belief that it is acceptable to prejudice a person because of what in some cases can be a mild learning difficulty and that in some, and indeed in my case has no bearing on my ability to do my job. I could be argued that the transverse is true in that as a trade off for my symptoms I have a recorded much higher then average understanding of spacial positioning and relationship of objects. But then again I fail to see any rational argument,justification or excuse for any form of bigotry and prejudice, be it based on any point of difference.

Humiliation of the sort detailed above and others that I have experienced is not acceptable in a modern society, and especially not when it is made in a public forum. I can understand what you believe you are doing, you may genuinely be trying to help, or you may be attempting to show off your grammatical and spelling superiority and personally you are welcome to your superiority, it is of no interest to me and you will always win on that one, just like a dwarf will never be a giant, I will never be good at that, and your finger-waving and mockery dose not make me look stupid or illiterate it makes you look like an arse, so point and wave away and I encourage all people who are different in any way no matter how minor the points of difference not to let these arse’s effect you as all they serve to highlight is their own lack of understanding, humility and self control.

Pressure to dance to another’s beat can be crippling

If the arse’s are tolerated by society and we allow them to effect our confidence then we will have denied the world the benefits of our points of difference. Don’t let your difficulty with expressing yourself verbally or in the written medium stop you from doing so, don’t let its stop you from exploiting your gift. The list of hugely commercially and creatively successful dyslexic people is huge and they are testament to what can be achieved in the face of idiocy and prejudice.

Go forth be strong and if all else fails then just repeat after me ‘bolocs to them, I’m going to do it anyway!’