Dyslexia: a general term for disorders that involve difficulty in learning to read or interpret words, letters, and other symbols, but that do not affect general intelligence.

I call it Petunia Art. Sometimes I call it Pansy art, as I can usually not tell one flower from another, which upsets the Garden Police no end. There are lots of Social Media Police out ther, Garden Police,  Grammar Police, Animal Rights Police,  Spelling Police and PC Police.

Social media is a great gift to the law enforcement groupings of the online world.

About eight years ago, almost by accident,  I was finally diagnosed with  a several learning disability – dyslexia. A medical doctor noticed my struggle to fill out an information form and referred me to a specialist in learning disorders. How ironic that me, of all people, would have to learn to struggle with words.

I guess I always knew I had a learning disorder, I barely made it through school and dropped out of two colleges. Dyslexia is any one of various disorders associated with impairment of the ability to interpret spatial relationships involving language and symbols, or to integrate auditory and visual information.

Although the disorder has nothing to do with intelligence or sight, it has greatly affected my ability to absorb certain kinds of spelling, grammar or names of things or material and spatial objects – like flowers.

When I was a child, teachers had little understanding of learning disorders, and no patience for them.
This resulted in my life-long distrust of teachers, people who lecture me, or figures of authority.

It is also responsible for a perpetual low-yield conflict with people writers often call “Grammar Nazis.” I don’t use that term myself, because these people are not Nazis in any form, they were simply taught in their own youth to believe that good writing and moral grounding are connected to spelling,  antecedents and compound objectives.

Even though dyslexia has nothing to do with intelligence, my teachers assumed I was stupid or lazy, and treated me accordingly. I couldn’t count the suspensions or after school punishments or parent conferences.

I went to war with systems. I fought back in every way I could, and still do. I still can’t grasp spelling sometimes, I’ve never been able to learn the rules of grammar and I can’t do any form of math, including long division or most multiplications. No matter how many flowers I might plant, I could never tell you the name of a single one.

This inspired me to become a teacher of writing, which I’ve been doing for more than three decades. The first thing i tell my students is that good writing is not about grammar and spelling, a belief that has destroyed more books and writers than the Nazi’s ever could.

And I am so proud to say I am responsible for the rise of a number of fine writers who can’t spell or grasp grammar or do long division either.

I told my first editor about these problems, and she was the first person to tell me not to worry about it, that I was a good  writer and writing had absolutely nothing to do with grammar. She said I probably had a learning disorder, and it didn’t mean I wasn’t a good writer.

She was important to me, and it was devastating when she dropped dead of a brain aneurism, after my first novel. I never got over the loss of her, she saw right into me and knew what might be possible.

I am proud of the fact that I have written 26 books and countless blog posts despite being dyslexic. It was gratifying but always difficult.

American teachers were routinely and unknowingly destroying countless gifted writers like me, making them feel dumb instead of helping them deal with disorders like dyslexia. But I can’t blame them, not as I get older and wiser. Nobody knew much about these disorders, or wanted to know.

I was plagued with bad grades and was held back in math class four times. I wet my bed until I was 17. My parents lectured me endlessly about my lost potential.

This disorder has affected much of my life. Since I no idea why I had so much trouble learning, I thought I was crazy. Or stupid.  I got angry and fearful and defensive about school and my mind and about the mistakes I was making. I was almost insanely frustrated because something inside me wanted to come but was trapped.

Dyslexia did make me stubborn. I just learned to fight and fight. The more someone told me I was dumb, I became smart. The more people told me what I couldn’t do, I did it. Miss McCarthy, my sixth grade English teacher, guaranteed my career as a  writer when she told me I could never be one until I learned to spell. I hope you are looking down up there somewhere, shaking your head, Miss McCarthy.

I just couldn’t get on top of learning how to cope with many things people took for granted, I was too confused and then anxious to understand math or complex grammatical principles (I can’t say I care about them anyway), I think I knew on some level that I wasn’t stupid, but I didn’t know why everyone was treating me as if I were.

There  are other symptoms of dyslexia beyond writing and spelling and screwing up the names of flowers. If something isn’t in front of me, I don’t know that it exists.

That was an expensive and confusing habit, one that plagued me for most of my life.

Dyslexia, for example, caused  me to buy things I didn’t need – underwear, jackets, socks, sweater, groceries.

Maria saw this problem and diagnosed it instantly, something no teacher, parent or other person had ever done. Now, I have a protocol for buying things. I check to see what I have, or ask Maria for help. I see the world anew. I buy what i need, and  save a lot of money.

I know many parents worried about the labeling of their children, they tell me proudly they refuse to get them tested. I sympathize but I also wince. There might be something in those tests they really need to know.

Curiously, photography is known to be especially helpful to dyslexics like me, it helps us see and compose images and photographs in a visual way that is natural and and often beautiful to me. It is healing.

Nobody really knows why, but I know it to be true. As much as anything, photography has helped me to see the world clearly and differently, one reason I was and am so drawn to it.

Until this morning, my editor was the only person other than Maria that I had ever told about being dyslexic. I’m glad to share the news here.

When I started my blog in 2007 and committed myself to writing daily, sometimes four or five times a day, I knew this would be a struggle in many ways. This, of course, would set me in perpetual conflict with the many people online who live to correct other people’s mistakes. The good English teachers see that I can  write, and scold me gently. The legions of pompous jerks are not so gentle.

People are generally not nice to children with learning disorders, neither are most people online. It never occurs to most people that there are reasons for getting things backwards, or slightly out of whack. Some  people nicely point out my mistakes, and I appreciate that. Some people are pompous and nasty, and I love attacking them, it makes me stronger every single time, even though I need to get over it.

People online love to spot the mistakes of others or tell people what to do. It will always be thus.

But I promised myself that I would not let my disorder curtail my writing or productivity. I would write about  my life, as often as I could, and not spent my precious days fussing over spelling and subjunctive clauses. If people didn’t like it, they could go elsewhere, I didn’t bow to Miss McCarthy, I won’t bow to anyone else.

The blog has been nothing but a joy, and has helped me with my dyslexia.

I have a number of tools and methods to limit mistakes, but not eliminate them. There are plenty of software programs to monitor spelling, but I don’t use any of them. I decided early on that I wanted to e an authentic writer, not one whose real voice was hidden or distorted by software. What you get is what is really there.

When I was diagnosed, the shrink gave me all kinds of cards and tools to help me content with my “impairment.” I misplaced them and forgot about them.

So, as I said on the first day of my blog, my living memoir, I will be open and honest with you You get the good Katz and the bad Katz. But  you always get the real one. I am learning to be authentic.

As there are now more than four million visits to my blog each year, that seems to have worked out for me and my writing.

Nuts to the people who don’t like it, or who believe good grammar and good writing are the same thing.

Before I even got dressed, I rushed down to my computer and wrote this. It is about time.

My dyslexia has been nothing but a gift to me, and this morning, as I struggled to figure out the difference between a Petunia and a Pansy, I realized that I owed it to all of the other kids out there who are different from other kids and sometimes made to feel stupid and crazy over things they cannot help or control, to keep the faith.

 

You are not  stupid, and you are not crazy.You can even write 26 books if you can’t spell or do long division.