Can being dyslexic really be seen as being a gift? Parenting and neurodiversity coach shares his thoughts on this positive view on dyslexic thinking.
People view having dyslexia from differing perspectives. Some see it as a disability (it supported by the Disabilities Act 2010). Some see it as a way of thinking differently and some see it as a gift.
I thought I would share my own thoughts about the perspective of ‘dyslexia is a gift’ as someone who has a neurodiverse profile that experiences some aspects of dyslexia. I will also approach this from the perspective of a parent of a child with dyslexia. Then finally as a neurodiversity coach who works with young people and adults who seek to find strategies to manage the challenges that so often come with being a dyslexic thinker.
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My personal experience of dyslexia.
I remember at the age of six or seven struggling to be able to pronounce words and spending time with a speech and language therapist. I remember being someone who seemed to grasp concepts being taught in class a little more slowly than those of my peers. If something was explained verbally, it would be like chunks of essential information just never got to my brain or that somehow, I had slightly misunderstood concepts. Extra time with the teacher often helped.
Times tables were a nightmare for me. Just remembering them by rote and reciting them was awful. My working memory was shocking. It would be embarrassing to have to recite them.
Reading was never fun. I don’t have problems with reading text, but somehow the meaning doesn’t get to my brain on the first pass. I had to read again, and again and again. My brain needed repetition before it got the information in. Reading made me tired. Even books that I really wanted to read, made me feel tired reading them. It still does today.
I started at that point in my life to build a belief about myself that I was simply not as clever as my peers and that I wouldn’t amount to much. Significant adults in my life e.g parents and teachers, where telling me that I was intelligent, I just couldn’t seem to prove it within the school system.
I felt different and I just seemed to put loads of effort into work that only delivered average results. I was frequently told by teachers, face to face, or via end of year reports that I was intelligent, sensitive and could do better. It was meant to be encouraging, but I interpreted it as I wasn’t good enough. Day-dreaming, being chatty or cracking jokes, seemed to be the aspects that I was known for in the classroom, I now relate to them as defence mechanisms for coping but I didn’t know this back in the day.
In hindsight, I believe that if someone with understanding about dyslexia and neurodiversity could have sat with me and listened to me as I told them about what I was experiencing, then maybe my academic outcomes may have been different. I had a number of educational professionals try and ‘fix’ me but my own mix of dyslexia and ADHD and possibly dyspraxia made it difficult to do anything apart from me simply keep putting more and more effort in and hoping for the best. In a sense it paid off, I eventually got a 2:i in a BSc. Hons in Chemistry after a long journey of part time learning and since then I have trained as a coach as well as a therapeutic counsellor.
So does my personal experience enable me to see dyslexia as a gift?
I see a gift as something instantaneous. It is given to you, you unwrap it and then somehow your life is improved by it.
As a child or teenager, if someone had told me that the way that my brain was thinking was a gift and that I should think of it in that way, then I would have politely pretended to have listened and then ignored them afterwards. I would have just felt patronised!
I can still feel the awkwardness and embarrassment from my childhood and teenage years, even today. I still have poor self-esteem, but I have simply learnt to turn the volume down on those thoughts and allow the volume on my more hopeful thoughts to be turned up.
I recognise that my experiences have made me who I am today and on the whole I am comfortable in my own skin, but it took until my 30’s to invest in my emotional well-being with counselling and coaching to be able to reach this point. My experiences have brought about strengths in resilience, empathy, listening, building relationships and I have a career now that is unusual but fits the way that I think like a glove.
I feel grateful for being in this place right now. My neurodiversity has helped me in negotiating the challenges of life that my neurodiversity has presented me with. Calling it a gift would be a stretch for me from this personal perspective, but I definitely have strengths honed in the fire of being a ‘different thinker’ and sometimes I do wonder who I would have been if education hadn’t of been as difficult as it was.
For me, I believe that if I had had access to professional emotional support in my teenage years then I perhaps would have learnt to have utilised my neurodiversity differently. I would perhaps have recognised my value in the world sooner in my life time. It is this thought that drives me to do the work that I do now because I want all dyslexic thinkers to believe in how their unique way of thinking could change the world. The sooner dyslexic kids recognise their value the more their dyslexia will seem like a gift!
I certainly wouldn’t change my experience though. I love my life and I love the family that I have and I especially love seeing how my neurodiverse daughters have played their neurodiverse lives differently to that of mine.
Is dyslexia a gift? My thoughts from a parental perspective.
If you have been following my articles on The Studying With Dyslexia Blog you would have read about my daughter Jess who has dyslexia.
Jess was diagnosed at the age of 12 after a number of years in primary education, with myself and my wife suspecting that she was struggling with aspects of literacy. We both did not know anything about dyslexia but the word certainly came up as a possibility for why our child was struggling with reading.
At the age of 12 Jess was extremely concerned about how she was going to be able to deliver upon her GCSE exams at the age of 16. I remember thinking about how much stress my daughter was putting upon herself concerned with something that was going to take place some years later. In our meetings with Jess's form teacher and year manager there were times when she would breakdown into tears as she talked about how she wanted to do well at school but felt that she wasn’t able to.
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In reality, Jess has really good people skills. She knows how to build relationships with people and she knows how to get people on her side. She also knows how to ask for help. Self advocacy is such an important skill and she had this early on. She couldn’t see her own value that had, for her, been hidden by the challenges of being a dyslexic thinker at school.
With a diagnosis and then the resultant reasonable adjustments put in place, Jess was able to move forward with her studies and at the end of her time in secondary education she came away with excellent GCSE results. Jess was fortunate, many children with dyslexia do not get support as easily as she experienced.
So can I say that dyslexia was a gift for my daughter?
Again, the challenges of having dyslexia versus the benefits of overcoming dyslexia make me think that it is very difficult to talk about dyslexia purely as a gift. As I indicated earlier in this article having a gift is very transactional it is a very simple thing that happens that makes it impact quickly. It is my opinion that Jess's dyslexia was very much a catalyst for growth and development in her life. She certainly developed skills that enabled her to relate to people effectively during her time at school. She loved being creative. Creativity is often seen as a dyslexic strength.
She is certainly resilient and even now she is negotiating her initial steps into the workplace having just graduated with a first class degree in Musical Theatre. With her passion for Musical Theatre grown from a young age, Jess is seeking to find their career in an industry that has been blighted by the current pandemic. There simply are not any musical Theatre jobs available right now and yet despite that she has been able to find herself acting roles during this period and in the meantime she works as a teaching assistant in a special needs school in London supporting children with autism. Jess is rolling with the punches and she is tenaciously focusing on the wins. Jess is a great example of resilience in action. Yes, I know that I am biased!
The strategies that Jess uses to manage living with dyslexia has resulted in her thriving as an adult despite the wider challenges of living within this pandemic.
As I was writing this article, I asked Jess about her thoughts about dyslexia being a gift, on Facebook Messenger and this is how that conversation went:
Photo of Jess courtesy of Laura Wilson Graphic Design, Cambridge
We went on to discuss her creativity and her patience when working with children. Jess made the point that it is hard to know how dyslexia has been a gift for her when she has not lived without dyslexia.
As parents, my wife and I have supported Jess, not ‘Dyslexic Jess’, not ‘Disabled Jess’. For us, dyslexia hasn’t defined Jess, it has simply been an aspect of her life that at times has needed support. Certainly, within secondary education it needed to be focused upon in order get support for Jess to be able to thrive and be successful. We never believed that being dyslexic would ever hold Jess back and it really hasn’t. Due to her staunch approach to overcoming hardship, her creativity and her people skills, dyslexia is not the dominating force in her life, she is.
Do I believe that dyslexia is a gift for my daughter?
I really can’t emphatically say yes to that question but what I can say is that it has shaped her way of interacting with people and her views on life and it has certainly resulted in Jess having a fantastic work ethic. It has positively contributed to her life.
Can I say that “Dyslexia is a gift from the perspective of someone who works as a neurodiversity coach?
A coach is a professional who works with clients to help them find strategies for dealing with challenges or to find change. The relationship is set up in much the same way as one might expect with a counselling arrangement in that the client does all the talking about themselves and professional facilitates the interaction.
I have been a neurodiversity coach with adults and young people for the best part of five years and for young people with dyslexia that I coach, I have seen many challenges that they have had to deal with, mostly related to poor self-esteem. They don’t initially see their value compared to that of their peers, whilst understandable but also avoidable.
With adult clients, I have seen the stress and anxiety of being dyslexic within the workplace. It is stressful if you feel not able to fully deliver upon work objectives dues to issues associated with reading and writing. Being dyslexic also affects working memory, planning and organisation, skills so often required, but are not always natural for many. Interestingly I have worked with many trainee doctors who are dyslexic and failing exams, not because the are not good doctors but because their exam techniques at that stage in their lives need improving.
Strategies that have worked in the past for them at university have not worked so well now that they have young families, work 80-hour weeks and still have to fit in time for studying for exams!
What is fascinating about being a coach, is that when clients get to talk about their challenges, they give themselves the time to articulate and explore what it is that they want to change.
As the coaching process unfolds it is as if a dawn of realisation comes over the client that they do have the power to change their circumstances and do well. When that happens those lovely dyslexic strengths of creativity and thinking out of the box (as well as many others) start to unlock and the client starts to achieve their within the workplace as well as within their wider lives.
As a recipient of similar coaching, when I realised that I had what it took to achieve so much more there was an excitement and belief about myself that tasted so sweet. It really is the best feeling in the world and it just boils down to understanding who we are and what our strengths are and being comfortable in getting help or develop strategies for those things that we are not so good at.
So as a neurodiversity coach do I see how dyslexia can be a gift?
Weirdly, given what I have said previously, I would give a tentative “yes”.
It is a “yes” because of the “dawn of realisation” moment. It is a gift when one realises that they can use their strengths to thrive and do it in a way that only a dyslexic thinker can, in the case of my clients, the strategies that they employ, that they have developed for themselves, inspire their colleagues too because their colleagues would not have thought of developing those types of strategies in the workplace. Why? Because they simply do not think in the same way.
Final Comments
As I compare the perspectives that I have shared, I realise that I simply don’t like the phrase, “dyslexia is a gift”. I know that in the past I have even used that phrase in countless talks but only because it is a positive view of being a dyslexic thinker. I subscribe to that positive view, but the wording, for me, doesn’t take into account the years of emotional hardship that can be endured by someone with a dyslexic mind until, if they are fortunate enough, they get to a point of realising the value of their strengths.
If I was forced to use the word “Gift” in this context, then, for me I would attribute it to that point in life when the dyslexic thinker realises that they have a treasure trove of strengths that they have simply taken for granted or perhaps they have ignored fearing that these would make them different from their peers and yet once embraced can help them to thrive in their community with distinction because no one else can claim to be able to approach the challenges of life with their unique way of thinking. It is from that point of “empowerment” that dyslexia starts to feel like a gift.
This is why I advocate for our young dyslexic thinkers within our education system to not only be supported academically with various styles of dyslexia intervention but also with emotional support that empowers the child to believe in themselves and how their unique way of thinking could change the world.