YES, I AM 'DYSLEXIC' TOO

YES, I AM DYSLEXIC TOO

The story goes that the shy young dyslexic got married to the sweetest, most gorgeous young thing that he had ever set eyes on. On the big day he was a bundle of nerves knowing full well that he had to make some sort of speech. Years of struggling with language - speaking, reading and writing - a crushed self-concept from teasing about repeated classic stuff-ups, together with a total fear of exposing himself and his disability yet again, had him wound up, a ball of nerves.

Knowing the tactical advantage of pleasing his new in-laws, he was determined to remember to graciously thank them for their wedding present – a top-of-the-line coffee percolator – but more specifically, for their daughter, his new bride.

A quick sip of the bubbly settled his nerves, if not his balance, and he stood, composed himself, and eloquently thanked the bride’s parents for gifting him such a wonderful perky copulator.

Yes, I can tell the dyslexic stories too – and I do, to remind myself not to take it all too seriously. I’m dyslexic, I always have been, and always will be, and I live with the implications every day. Few people understand ‘dyslexia’ – most think it is a reading and writing problem. It is too hard to really explain how it has affected my life – so these days I just say “Go see the movie THE READER, everything that woman does in that movie, was as a result of her ‘dyslexia’”.

Naturally enough, as a young man I gravitated to the company of others like myself. It was only many years later that I realized that every one of us showed some of the classic indicators of a style that was later to be identified as ‘dyslexia’. As young students we ‘institutionalised’ some of the characteristics, tamed them and turned them into a code, an in-code that made light of our dyslexic tendencies – that at that stage few of us recognized. The word ‘dyslexia’ had hardly been invented (in the 1970’s) and even if we had heard of it, none of us would have laid claim to such a dubious personal label.

I mixed with a group of like-minded guys, flatting together, struggling with the education system, covering our tracks with motor-bikes and cars – and our coded language. Our cars persistently had ‘fat blatteries’, ‘tat fliers’, and ‘tappety ratlets’, and parts were often reassembled ‘fack to bront’. Getting our macts fuddled was par for the course.

Linguistic mix-ups, fascination with machinery and a struggle with academic education – looking back I now identify some of the classic signs of a young man suffering the daily impact of ‘dyslexia’.

Personally I had struggled through primary and secondary school with all the typical report-card comments; ‘Laughton could do better if he tried.’ ‘Will not pay attention in class’. ‘A dreamer’. – comments that I now recognise as being indicative of ‘dyslexia’. My school-days were confusing and hellish, and although I understood the words, I couldn’t understand the meaning of classroom instruction. I day-dreamed by day and night-mared at night, and now, 50 years later, my sleep is still commonly punctuated by those same hellish night-mares.

My difficulty with academic learning – ‘literacy’ in the jargon of educators - was masked by the fact that I was reasonably bright. The teachers could somehow sense that I was not stupid, so deduced that my lack of success was obviously my own fault – my lack of application, my lack of due attention, my lack of care.

So I covered, I strategized, I assumed an act and became cunning - to cover the fact that I was dumb and stupid. Yes, I accepted that part of me was dumb and stupid – the evidence was abundant – and yet part of me suspected that I was also astute, intelligent and perceptive. Only many years later I came to realize that the cause of all this was that I am a pictorial thinker, and as such I struggle to put my ideas into words. And yes, I struggle with reading and writing too. Thank God for lap-tops.

Like most people, I never stopped to consider that I might think differently from other people. It would be many years before I discovered that while most people think in words, I, like most ‘dyslexics’, think in pictures. The rule of thumb is, the more pictorial my thinking style, the less competent with words, and therefore the more ‘dyslexic’ I am.

As a teenager I was very shy (‘shyness’ = being dominated by the fear of being wrong, of failing yet again), but fortunately I recognized that introversion would only let this thing get on top of me, and it could predictably control my life - so I created an act of deliberate and calculated confidence, and this progressively became my style.

I learned to hide my confusion through bold and arrogant challenges of my secondary teachers, and reactions of indignation and anger to their put-downs of my efforts. At 19 I left school and enrolled at University in sheer protest, with no inkling of what it involved, or might lead to.

Acting lessons, elocution training, writing lessons, and dogged determination to achieve (otherwise known as ‘fear of failure’) finally saw me create a personality, a deliberate act, that eventually allowed the accumulation of some elements of ‘success’.

I still regard myself as a ‘non-reader’, but I have learned to write. My three Psychology degrees were achieved on the back of close observation of human behaviour, of good listening skills, (both developed in my desperate urge to understand) and these allowed me an ability to debate the content of books and research that I could never read.

Now at 60 I have an accumulated view of ‘dyslexia’. I see my picture-thinking style as being like a diesel-engined car, and word-thinkers as being like petrol-engined cars. School is a place of words and could be viewed as a petrol-station – where this little diesel ‘dyslexic’ got tanked up with petrol on a daily basis.

The result is predictable, and the child so often gets the blame. That is why I now travel the country running seminars on ‘dyslexia’ for teachers and parents and anybody who will listen.


Laughton King is a retired Educational Psychologist who is travelling New Zealand on a self-funded four year tour, running seminars for teachers and parents, sharing his insights into ‘dyslexia’.