"People with dyslexia have skills that we need, says GCHQ"

I love this so much and there are a couple of takeaways that I'd like to pull out that stuck with me:

Charlotte, a data analyst at GCHQ, said her dyslexic thinking had helped in her career, although she had also benefited from working in a supportive environment that understood the challenges her condition poses.

“I’m often looking through a lot of data and I find that my dyslexia helps me to see the bigger picture and spot patterns that aren’t always obvious to everyone else around me. I also find that my approach to finding solutions is very different. I often think quite fast and outside of the box,” she said.

It's often said that neurodivergent folks are amazing at some stuff as part of our spiky profile.  Our neurotype allows for us to gravitate to some tasks and do really well at them like Charlotte and pattern recognition.  We also are a great benefit to a team because we add an alternative approach to problem solving.  However like all staff we have needs and they have to be accommodated.  Often they will differ from other staff and whilst they can be simple to arrange some flexibility and time needs to be put into making that happen.  All of us do better, and are at our best, with support.

This was an interesting article and it led me to the site https://www.madebydyslexia.org/ and their test for "dyslexic thinking skills" at https://www.madebydyslexia.org/survey -- weirdly, the test asked about stuff like creativity, problem solving, logic, empathy and love for learning. Only at the end did it ask if I had ever had any trouble with reading.

I have ADHD and I have seen a lot of this sort of talk around ADHD. There's been a push for a long time to reframe ADHD as a superpower, attributing these same qualities to the ADHD mind. I understand the impulse, to reframe something as a positive that is still so stigmatized that I have been loath to tell people at any job about this diagnosis for fear of it limiting my career prospects. (I guess by posting this on the website run by the company that's dominated my entire professional life, I'm hereby coming out. While I'm at it, I also have developmental prosopagnosia, also known as faceblindness, which means it takes a lot longer for me to learn to recognize people's faces.)

On the other hand, I took to reading so naturally, I remember thinking in first grade that it was weird some people talked about "learning to cook" because in my mind, almost everyone could talk, if you could talk then you could read, and if you could read then you could read a cookbook and follow its instructions, so what was there exactly to learn?

Despite my affirming to this quiz that I'd never had any trouble reading, it told me my results suggested I was probably dyslexic. If I'm dyslexic, the word "dyslexia" means nothing.

I've done extensive reading about how people learn to read and why they can have trouble with it. I started looking into it decades ago when I spent some time as a volunteer adult literacy tutor. I'm fascinated with the topic! From what I understand based on all this research, many people who have trouble with reading are not dyslexic, but just have not been taught using effective, science-backed methods that include systematic, explicit phonics instruction. (Long story, but there's been an educational philosophy that has held sway over many educators for the past hundred years or so that argues that kids will pick up the skill of decoding words naturally, just by being exposed to great books, which is demonstrably false. Learning to speak and understand spoken language is natural, if you don't have any hearing troubles. But reading is a cool new trick that our brains did not evolve to do, and lots of people just will need to be taught explicitly how to do it.)

People who have a brain difference that makes them diagnosable as dyslexic have trouble with speech sounds in some way - they find it much harder to separate, combine and manipulate the sounds in words, which makes it harder to connect individual sounds (phonemes) to individual graphemes (written letters and letter combinations that represent sounds) in an alphabetic writing system. This website that is supposedly about people with dyslexia barely mentions reading or phonics.

Are people who manage to be successful in our society, despite this very specific brain difference which society stigmatizes, more likely to be visual thinkers? Probably! They need to do a lot more memorizing of whole words than those of us who can use the standard way of learning new words, which is that once we encounter a word a few times, sounding it out each time, we lay down a pathway in our brains that lets us recognize it much more quickly and not have to sound it out in the future. (Side note, I recently took up learning Russian again, after having learned some in college and then not used it for many years - I still remembered all the sound/letter correspondences and easy words in Russian but it's really fascinating to actually feel this process at work when I come across a long Russian word I don't know yet, don't know what it means, and that I have to carefully sound out, vs an equally long Russian word I know by heart and recognize quickly. That "oh, UGH, what's this now?" weary feeling that, once I learn the word, goes away!)

Dyslexic folks also have probably come up with creative solutions to get around their trouble with reading, and logical and problem solving strategies to figure out words from context rather than simply decoding what's on the page. And a strong love for learning probably helps you persist with school even when it's super hard because of the dyslexia. And having troubles of any sort can often promote empathy when you see others struggle and understand what that's like. Of course, like with anything else in this society, if you happened to come from a privileged family, you were much more likely to succeed because your parents could buy you the support that the public schools were unwilling to pay for.

But there are also probably lots of dyslexic people who are not taking a written quiz on a website because our system has not provided them with the one-on-one, carefully tailored teaching and support they would have needed to eventually master reading despite their troubles, and so their options have been unfairly limited. And there are probably lots of lucky neurotypical people who also have developed their creativity, logic, empathy and love for learning, while also not having any trouble with reading.

Similar statements hold true for ADHD, and for that matter for faceblindness. The strategies I've developed have helped me get by in a world built for people who are naturally organized, have a sense of time, can easily train their focus on boring things just because they are important, and know who people are after they have met them. But I feel like it's just luck that I've had the other qualities I needed to develop these strategies, and that maybe if I didn't have these troubles I would have had even better success. I've certainly had a lot more success since I started taking meds that reduce the ADHD troubles, and the meds have not made me less creative or empathetic - just less likely to forget what I was trying to accomplish in the middle of a task.

I just think it would be neat if we could recognize and compensate for the troubles some of us have with specific aspects of our brains without attributing every awesome quality that brain also happens to have to that diagnosis. 

This was an interesting article and it led me to the site https://www.madebydyslexia.org/ and their test for "dyslexic thinking skills" at https://www.madebydyslexia.org/survey -- weirdly, the test asked about stuff like creativity, problem solving, logic, empathy and love for learning. Only at the end did it ask if I had ever had any trouble with reading.

I have ADHD and I have seen a lot of this sort of talk around ADHD. There's been a push for a long time to reframe ADHD as a superpower, attributing these same qualities to the ADHD mind. I understand the impulse, to reframe something as a positive that is still so stigmatized that I have been loath to tell people at any job about this diagnosis for fear of it limiting my career prospects. (I guess by posting this on the website run by the company that's dominated my entire professional life, I'm hereby coming out. While I'm at it, I also have developmental prosopagnosia, also known as faceblindness, which means it takes a lot longer for me to learn to recognize people's faces.)

On the other hand, I took to reading so naturally, I remember thinking in first grade that it was weird some people talked about "learning to cook" because in my mind, almost everyone could talk, if you could talk then you could read, and if you could read then you could read a cookbook and follow its instructions, so what was there exactly to learn?

Despite my affirming to this quiz that I'd never had any trouble reading, it told me my results suggested I was probably dyslexic. If I'm dyslexic, the word "dyslexia" means nothing.

I've done extensive reading about how people learn to read and why they can have trouble with it. I started looking into it decades ago when I spent some time as a volunteer adult literacy tutor. I'm fascinated with the topic! From what I understand based on all this research, many people who have trouble with reading are not dyslexic, but just have not been taught using effective, science-backed methods that include systematic, explicit phonics instruction. (Long story, but there's been an educational philosophy that has held sway over many educators for the past hundred years or so that argues that kids will pick up the skill of decoding words naturally, just by being exposed to great books, which is demonstrably false. Learning to speak and understand spoken language is natural, if you don't have any hearing troubles. But reading is a cool new trick that our brains did not evolve to do, and lots of people just will need to be taught explicitly how to do it.)

People who have a brain difference that makes them diagnosable as dyslexic have trouble with speech sounds in some way - they find it much harder to separate, combine and manipulate the sounds in words, which makes it harder to connect individual sounds (phonemes) to individual graphemes (written letters and letter combinations that represent sounds) in an alphabetic writing system. This website that is supposedly about people with dyslexia barely mentions reading or phonics.

Are people who manage to be successful in our society, despite this very specific brain difference which society stigmatizes, more likely to be visual thinkers? Probably! They need to do a lot more memorizing of whole words than those of us who can use the standard way of learning new words, which is that once we encounter a word a few times, sounding it out each time, we lay down a pathway in our brains that lets us recognize it much more quickly and not have to sound it out in the future. (Side note, I recently took up learning Russian again, after having learned some in college and then not used it for many years - I still remembered all the sound/letter correspondences and easy words in Russian but it's really fascinating to actually feel this process at work when I come across a long Russian word I don't know yet, don't know what it means, and that I have to carefully sound out, vs an equally long Russian word I know by heart and recognize quickly. That "oh, UGH, what's this now?" weary feeling that, once I learn the word, goes away!)

Dyslexic folks also have probably come up with creative solutions to get around their trouble with reading, and logical and problem solving strategies to figure out words from context rather than simply decoding what's on the page. And a strong love for learning probably helps you persist with school even when it's super hard because of the dyslexia. And having troubles of any sort can often promote empathy when you see others struggle and understand what that's like. Of course, like with anything else in this society, if you happened to come from a privileged family, you were much more likely to succeed because your parents could buy you the support that the public schools were unwilling to pay for.

But there are also probably lots of dyslexic people who are not taking a written quiz on a website because our system has not provided them with the one-on-one, carefully tailored teaching and support they would have needed to eventually master reading despite their troubles, and so their options have been unfairly limited. And there are probably lots of lucky neurotypical people who also have developed their creativity, logic, empathy and love for learning, while also not having any trouble with reading.

Similar statements hold true for ADHD, and for that matter for faceblindness. The strategies I've developed have helped me get by in a world built for people who are naturally organized, have a sense of time, can easily train their focus on boring things just because they are important, and know who people are after they have met them. But I feel like it's just luck that I've had the other qualities I needed to develop these strategies, and that maybe if I didn't have these troubles I would have had even better success. I've certainly had a lot more success since I started taking meds that reduce the ADHD troubles, and the meds have not made me less creative or empathetic - just less likely to forget what I was trying to accomplish in the middle of a task.

I just think it would be neat if we could recognize and compensate for the troubles some of us have with specific aspects of our brains without attributing every awesome quality that brain also happens to have to that diagnosis. 

Congrats on coming out.  Identity is always worth celebration. I loved reading all that you wrote and I have so much to say.  Dyslexia is pretty badly named, which fits with the badly named other neurodiverse pals.  ADHD is not about a deficit in attention (it's about regulation of attention or too much attention), and autistics aren't alone at all by choice. Dyslexia (like just about every neurodifference) is so complex and varied that attributing it to just reading was always going to be a mistake - but humans love to over simplify.  In this article about coaching it's found that training programs aimed at dyslexic adults are most effective if they go beyond their literacy skills.

Calling the peaks of spiky profiles "superpowers" is a response to the dominant exploitative tragedy narrative and fixing broken people.

However in this article Nancy Doyle talks about the burden of reframing assets as "superpowers" leading to imposter syndrome when we struggle to live up to the myth.  The divergent as savant fiction is unsustainable and as damaging as the tragic figure creation.  And it creates stereotypes like cishet white male geniuses that are exclusionary to so many people in our community. While I'm on a Dr Doyle roll I'll include this article on universal inclusion.

I 100% agree that the we should be able to celebrate our wins without it being that "other" diagnosis that appears to exist separately from us.  In truth is is part of us and can't be separated.  Attributing wins and loses to a diagnosis not only removes our agency and ownership but also leads to the idea that neurodiversity can and should be separated from individuals and society.  I don't have autism - it's not an article of clothing that I can take off - it's as much a part of me as my heritage and culture.  My successes are mine.  But also are the accommodations that I might need to be a success.  I might need the lights dimmed in the office so as to not get a migraine and irritable as a winter bear, and that may be because of my autistic sensory sensitivities, but those dimmer switches in the office should be an accommodation for all. 

Diagnosis is also a privilege not available to all.  And THAT is an unacceptable tragedy.  It took me years to be financially and emotionally in a position where I could spend $4,000 on an autism diagnosis and $1,500 on an ADHD diagnosis.  Before then I negotiated an alienating and unfriendly world without support, and it sucked.  I'm lucky enough to be in a position where I can safely be out and proud and accepted.  Self diagnosis is largely stigmatised and we need to change that so that - as you say - "we could recognize and compensate for the troubles some of us have with specific aspects of our brains without attributing every awesome quality that brain also happens to have to that diagnosis"

Identity is incredibly important to us humans.  Before I sought out the neurodivergent community I was exceptionally alienated and alone from society.  I've never felt like I've belonged. The bullying, otherness and exclusion that I still am exposed to can be overwhelming.  But I really hope we can find a balance between inclusion with the celebration of our diversity.