A distant diagnosis

I’ve written before about having dyslexia but I don’t often write about the impact of it on me personally. I think in part this is because I was diagnosed more than twenty years ago at university, and while research and understanding have moved on since then, I’ve not been keeping up. Dyslexia is commonly understood as a learning disability that predominantly affects a person’s ability to read and write, but I think recent research is beginning to show it’s more complex than that and comes with an array of advantages too.

I’ve always thought some of my odd quirks were just that, personal oddities that were unique to me, and not the consequence of structural differences in the brain. For example, I’ve always found it easier to read reports and documents I’m working on off physical paper rather than a screen, while this seems to bother other people a lot less. When we moved in my day job over to mostly remote working I didn’t get a home printer as part of my setup, and I think it took me a lot longer to adapt than others.

One of the things I’ve not reflected on is the impact my dyslexia may have on my mental health, specifically the sometimes crippling anxiety I’ve had in the past around work and ‘being productive’. I had always assumed that I was one of the people who had adapted to their dyslexia, after all I have completed a Ph.D., regularly write, and have a job as a researcher in mental health in the charity/ non-profit sector. However, this week something happened that demonstrated to me that the two things may be far more closely linked than I had realised.

Visio-spacial memory and text editing

I did know that there was a link between dyslexia and strong visio-spacial memory, but I didn’t really draw the link across to how this would affect the way I work with text. I’ve always put that in the ‘why you like arts’ bucket of understanding myself and didn’t really think it was relevant to my writing, which I also like to do a lot of.

However this week an incident happened that showed me very clearly how I use visiospacial memory when I work with text-based documents, and how that can go wrong in collaborative endevours. I’ve been working on a project with another person. I think that person is a bit worried I won’t finish before my babies come, and while I was poorly over the holiday they decided to try to help by doing some work on the document.

We’ve moved over recently to working on a shared digital document, rather than having individual drafts that we share after the fact. I think this is really common practice for many people, but we are a bit behind and still getting the hang of it. So without talking to me about what would be helpful, this person went into the document I was working on, re-wrote sections, added sections and moved blocks of text about.

It turns out that for me, having a clear visual map of where the text is on the page in memory is key to being able to progress a piece of work. When I returned to work to find my document changed so significantly in its visual layout, I actually couldn’t remember what I was meant to be doing or what I had planned to do anymore.

I think the worst aspect of this is that because we had been working on a live document, there wasn’t a previous version to go back to in order to catch up with myself, and the other person hadn’t tracked their changes either. For at least an hour or so I felt truly stuck.

Personal links between neurodiversity and mental health

Even on a good day, my anxiety levels are probably set a bit higher than the average person, and in the past, I’ve suffered from significant anxiety, both in relation to work and my personal life at times. At the moment I’m full of pregnancy hormones and riding a bit higher than usual with my anxiety, so emotional regulation is proving to be challenging.

Being confronted with a document on an important project that didn’t seem to be mine anymore sent me into a panic, and within about fourty five minutes I was having a mini breakdown in my bathroom.

I think overall I’ve been set back by a few days as I’ve tried to retrace my steps and get back to where I was before Christmas so I can work productively again. It’s probably taken longer to settle my anxiety back down to a comfortable level again too.

Learning

I guess my big learning from this is that if someone is going to help me write, I need them to agree ahead of time on how they are going to do that helping. I don’t think this is controversial and probably applies to anyone with some form of neurodiversity or work-related anxiety.

I think for people who have some form of neurodiversity, workplaces or creative projects that are set up by people who don’t have those experiences may be more stressful, and contribute to more mental health challenges than they would for a neurotypical person. This is because processes that work well for those people may often have the opposite effect for someone whose brain just works differently.

I know plenty of people who would have been really pleased that someone did some of their writing for them, but for me, it was disorienting and completely disruptive to my thinking and creative process.

It’s certainly helped me think about how I ‘help’ some of my own staff in my day job. I know that several of the staff I have line managed in the past have some form of neurodiversity. Do I always agree with them ahead of time what would actually be helpful? I think I do most of the time, but there are probably moments where the pressure of deadlines and workloads mean that I have fallen short of my own advice here, so that’s been helpful to reflect on, too.

Thank you for reading. I also write, make art and films. You can read my short fantasy stories here on Simily. If you like these prompts and want to get a copy of a free short book of them I wrote, and to hear more about my writing projects please join my mailing list here. You can see my films at my YouTube channel here. You can see things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying. If buying art is not your thing, but you would like to support what you see you could buy me a KoFi, and I also have a Patreon Page.