Growing up Dsylexic...

This week is Dyslexia Awareness Week in the UK. I happened upon that information reading Hot Key Book's blog last night.
Having not thought of such things for a long time,  I did some dyslexic "surfing" on the web, and yep...I'm as dyslexic as I have ever been- still strong in fourteen  or fifteen traits of thirty something, when ten is all that is needed.
I'm Ambidextrous- though haven't doodled with my right hand for a bit. Pretty impressed with my drawing, even though it kind of made me dizzy doing it.
I still mix up words and phrases- Feed the Whale (see here) instead of fill the well.
Still don't have a sense of direction and still don't know my right from my left.

You can test yourself (here). But can you read this?

if not flip your laptop of tablet over

Its funny, something that can be so overwhelming for so long can eventually move into the shadows and you kind of forget about it.

Perusing the web I also found...

To be honest, whenever I come across any idea of Dyslexia being a "gift" my initial reaction is to laugh, though reading and writing upside down comes is awful handy teaching kids, working across a table from them, though it freaks my husband out.
But growing up, there was no hint that I had been blessed, instead I have memories seared in my brain of spending part of my day in Special Ed, or my fourth grade teacher's look of disgust when I wore my shirt backwards or couldn't put my shoes on the correct feet. One summer I had a large R and L drawn on my hands and I was continuous drilled on my right from my left. I couldn't remember, either, after the letters faded.
I was deemed lazy by the history teacher in Middle School, because he knew I was smart and had no excuses for the grammar on my papers. Thank God for Word and spellcheck now.
But I could draw...
Princesses in ball gowns for my friends and so was not considered too much of a freak. Though when
anyone would go on about my artistic abilities, my family's favorite joke was "Don't you mean autistic?"
Which, according to THE DYSLEXIC ADVANTAGE, could not be farther from the truth!
Apparently, there is a thin sheet of cells in the brain called the " cortex" where cells, called mini columns,  are stacked on top of each other. Well in Autistic brains, the minicolumns are tightly clustered together and in Dyslexic brains they are...well loosely spaced and in Autistic brains only make connections between the minicolumns locally, where the Dyslexic brain have long connections, well, all over the place, surprise, surprise!  Literally according to one theory, Dyslexia is the exact opposite of Autism. Autistics  see the trees where Dyslexics see the forest.
I don't know how I feel about that I just read it last night, I'll let you know, only on Chapter 4.