As a dyslexic, I dislike being corrected for my many mistakes.

And as a dyslexic I make mistakes all the time, so I will often be corrected. I think the physics professors have a name for this kind of convergence, like Wave Particle Duality, or the idea that matter exists as a state of energy, while waves of probability spread throughout the universe.

I like the latter idea.This business of mistakes and corrections may be a wave of probability.

Dyslexia, like many chronic learning disabilities, is itself a great teacher, you have to think about things more than many people need to think about things. You either become self-aware or just go mad.

This is the yin and yang of Dyslexia. When you have it,  many people assume you are lazy or stupid, especially when I was young,  so you quite naturally become defensive, even hostile, about mistakes and corrections.

When smart people are called stupid – when anybody is called stupid –  this is a kind of scarring that is slow to heal.

In the Spring, I am a happy photographer. I love taking photos of flowers. But as a dyslexic, I really don’t stand a chance of remembering all of their names.

Nor do I have the time and will to look the real names up every time I take a picture of a flower. Besides, in the time between Google and my blog, the names would be long forgotten or scrambled.

Gardeners, like photographers, tend to be fussy about names and details, so the end result is that I get the flower’s names wrong about half the time the gardeners (so many are retired English teachers, I think) go to town, quite understandably pointing out the correct names of the flowers I am photographing, but whose names I can never remember or even learn.

Then there are the retired English Teachers who are not gardeners, they are vigilant and meticulous, they also love to  correct the typos of a Dyslexic who writes a dozen times a day (a feast for grammarians.)

So this is Season Of Corrections,  you can read many of them on my Facebook Page. And there is nothing that makes social media lovers happier than finding a mistake to correct.

Compound this with the fact that I don’t care about spelling or grammar anyway – it has absolutely nothing to do with good writing – and I don’t care what the flowers are called either, since I am not gardener, but a photographer who loves gardens.

This is recipe for trouble, so I am working to get to a good place with it.

I have to laugh when people on the nastier side of the spectrum write to scold me for not proofreading my posts. And I do laugh. I proofread them all the time! Any dyslexic will burst out laughing at this.

I am learning about grace all the time, and I do understand that people who correct me are not calling me lazy or stupid (well, mostly), but for someone who was called lazy and stupid for much of his early life by teachers and parents who might have known better, this is definitely  salt in the wounds, depending on my mood.

The gift of my mistakes and the corrections is that I am learning all the time to see corrections in a different way, and accept them in the spirit in which they are offered. To be accurate and precise, the former easier than the latter.

I have never let my Dyslexia stop me from writing, even though I know I am letting myself in for it.

A specialist once told me that one thing I could never be with Dyslexia was a writer.  The words would not come out right. Nuts to you, I thought, do not tell me what I can or can’t be, and I went right out and started writing.

And 99.9 per cent of the time, the words come out just fine. I did have five New York Times Bestsellers, and even though that means nothing now, it was good for me.

Nowadays I tell people not to tell me what to  write. But then was then and now is now.

One fellow dyslexic suggested I call all flowers “posies” like he does to avoid confusion, but that does seem lazy to me, even cowardly.

When I look at a flower, a dozen different names might come into my mind, and I often see a different flower than when I am looking at the one in front me. Something like having a viewfinder that is a spinning kaleidoscope.

There is no really happy ground to find here, but there is a better one, and a healthier one.

People will always correct mistakes, it seems to be built into the human DNA. So suck it up and move forward.

That is on me, to understand that this new world I have built for myself is different from the earlier one. It is cruel to make any child feel stupid, it is thoughtless and callous. Because it will never quite get out of his head, as it has never quite gotten out of mine.

I am a writer now, I don’t have to fear having someone take that away from me. I’ve done 26 books with Dyslexia, and written 20,000 blog posts.

So I know now that I am not lazy or stupid, and Dyslexia is like anything else,  life is what  you make of it. Every single day.

Since a dozen people messaged to tell me these lovely blue flowers are Lobelia’s, and since I printed out some of the messages, it is easy for me to pass thing along. These are Lobelias. That should buy me some peace for the holidays.

Until tomorrow, when I put up a photo of Gardenia that I think are Petunias.

Don’t they look a lot like posies?