Julie Hayward gets diagnosed

I’ve always thought I wasn’t very bright: I never shone at school, I failed the 11plus, I couldn’t wait to leave at 15, and since then have blundered through life leaving a trail of paperwork scattered behind me. Don’t ever give me a back to back photocopy of anything, as I’ll spend ages looking at it, turning the paper over and upside down and back to front trying to make some sense of it and generally getting into a right old fluster!

It might be totally unrelated, but I’ll never use one word when 20 will do and sometimes struggle to find the words I need to explain myself. But despite all that I can read and write pretty well, so never suspected a thing, I just thought I was a bit thick. Finally it’s all become clear, why I can look at information printed on a page forever but not absorb it into my brain; why I can’t read more than two pages of a book at a time without getting restless, not for me an escape into the pages of a good book, but a tussle against them. I’ve found out I have dsylexia at my grand old age… unbelievable.

I would never have thought about having dsylexia until last year when my daughter started university and she was struggling to keep up. Until then she’d never had any particular problems at school and college, (apart from Facebook taking over her life). She even had to write an essay to get into uni, as there were over 1.000 applicants last year and only 34 places, and she got accepted. In an attempt to cut a long story short, she was tested for dsylexia and discovered she had it and some of the things she has problems with – organising her work etc, are similar things that I struggle with. So when I also started a university course this year, I was tested for dsylexia and voila!

So many people have dsylexia in some shape or form, it appears to be the new Apple Mac.Someone on my course even admitted that he hoped he was dsylexic so that he’d get a laptop! A plus is that I may get an hour’s help with a tutor once a week – I really need it, as since starting my course I have even more paperwork piling up around me and have taken to eating my dinner on my lap as the kitchen table’s finally disappeared beneath a heap of ever growing course handouts, such as ‘how to study’ and ‘how to write an essay’. I need a handout on how to stop paperwork breeding.