An idea I though of to talk about is Dyslexia. As a dyslexic myself I have been assessd several times and qualify for extra time in exams and I use a laptop for most work.

The typical response is to me saying that I get extra time is,

‘I wish I could have those things when I have exams ! 

To give a idea of how far i’ve come in the last 6-8 years i’ve come from being bottom in the year scrapping through exams, to be predicted nearly all top grades this year.

However i don’t think that people who don’t have dyslexia how much of a struggle it is. It’s a daily battle to get the simplest things right, for example  just finding little things.  Imagine that you have been on holiday for a week and you were trying to find your keys which you had left somewhere in your house, and you have to turn half the house upside down to find it. This is a typical day trying to find the simplest things which i new exactly where they were a mere couple seconds before.

Spelling’s seem like such a mundane thing to get wrong over and over again, for years on end of getting such simple spellings wrong. Its infuriating seeing red pen all over your work and realising such simple mistakes, the short fix of this is to use a laptop for  as much as possible, which is one of the main things that has really helped me keep up with my peers.

Reading to a non-dsylexic person, may seem simple, and when i pull out my tinted glasses which are designed to allow reading without discomfort i get some very weird looks . Some but not all people with dyslexia read, it is very hard to read, with especially white paper causing large amounts of discomfort, which i think in the past is why i could not read for long without getting a head ache.

I think what i’ve been trying to describe about dyslexia is that for anyone who has just been confirmed with it, is its not something you can change, its the hand you got dealt and you’ve got to move on, and there’s always something you can do…