Turns out one of my eyes doesn't work...and i'm dyslexic.

I'm dyslexic--did you know that blogging world?

Please quickly get rid of the stereotypes of dyslexic people that you are conjuring in your head (it's a little rude).

Ok, just to be fair it's a self diagnosis of being dyslexic but i'm literally 99.9% sure it's true and here is why.

I can't spell. Originally, I wanted to blame my teachers but that's not entirely fair and my mom is a kindergarden teacher and you think if I could be taught how to spell she probably would have tried it. Anyway, I have never been able to spell and it's frustrating and embarrassing. It's not just normal frustrating and embarrassing, it's like "you're a college English teacher and you can't spell? Higher education is going to the dogs" embarrassing. But, never one to be deterred, I decided to do what I love, which is to teach, read and write, and enter a profession that mandates one impossible skill-spelling.

So about an hour ago I was sitting in my office talking to the other instructors and saying that I can't spell and it's beyond just not being good at it. It's an irreversible problem. So, to convince them I turned to the internet (which of course we can trust) and found one of the most hilarious and descriptive article by a writer who is incapable of spelling but other then that is very successful. After a lot of mocking from editors from the Washington Post he went to a specialist and got tested. Turns out he has a mild form of dyslexia.

In the article he wrote "I have some of the symptoms of dyslexia: horrible spelling, serious difficulty remembering names and numbers, a failure to learn the rudiments of a foreign language in spite of two years of college French and a summer in Normandy. But I'm missing the big one -- profound reading trouble." If I were to have written this same statement I would have said this "I have some of the symptoms of dyslexia: horrible spelling, serious difficulty remembering names and numbers, a failure to learn the rudiments of a foreign language in spite of three years of ASL in college and three years of French in high school. But I'm missing the big one--profound reading trouble. In fact, that's one of my strengths."

Apparently, what he and I have is " the underlying threads of dyslexia, but you've (WE'VE)compensated for it really, really well. When you (WE) have time, you (WE) do well. But when you have to do things very quickly, it's not automatic. Your autopilot, for spelling and for reading, just isn't there. As a youngster, Shaywitz says, I (WE) was probably getting just enough information and pleasure from reading to push through some amount of dyslexic drag. And the more I (WE) read, the more compensatory tricks my brain wired into itself until I (WE) became fluent, at least under relaxed conditions. It's only when the heat is on that my (OUR) reading goes a little wobbly and, even more often, my spelling collapses in a heap.

--emphasis added.

If he has dyslexia, based on the symptoms, I do too.

If you too are interested in self diagnosis, or a hilarious read, go here