It may seem like an odd statement, but its true.

Last year I spent the first few months confronting anxieties around my abilities to write effectively, with conviction and clarity. With my job, a group of the management team were working through training, in part to confront how we think and how we approach life, personally and professionally.

I'd identified my dyslexia as a point that I felt was holding me back in a number of areas. My goal was to challenge that.

I had known for a long time that I'm dyslexic. Since primary school where I had faced some of the typical difficulties someone with dyslexia often encounters. Unfortunately I never had professional help and learned to mask it, use tools to help, and shift focus. Sometimes when I was a kid, sometimes when I was an adult.

Masking took the shape of many different forms. I leaned heavily on my creative side, where I could spend less time on writing. I grew up as a creative, and perusing a career in design was the perfect mask of my difficulties. That lasted sometime before I moved to development. That’s another story, though.

In my early twenties, when I was told my handwriting was appalling by a lecturer, and was marked down because they couldn't read it. If I’m going to be completely honest, I can’t blame them.

To get around this, I promptly moved from writing cursive, to block capitals for everything. It worked. My writing was legible to everyone, but I was masking out of anxiety in the face of criticism. I hate the way I was now writing but felt I couldn't go back, so instead, turned to writing everything digitially. Fortunately, that helped in many ways, autocorrect, among other benefits.

Due to this change and focus on masking how I write and communicate, it often comes as a surprise when I explain to people that I am dyslexic and that I've just found ways to hide it, and shift focus. There are other tell-tale signs ofcourse, but only if I make people aware of them.

While writing this - it was originally a stream of concious while listening to Lifeforms by Future Sound of London - a thought popped into my mind; "is dyslexia a form of neurodivergence?" Well, it turns out that it is. I had never considered this before, and to be frank, it’s not a label that I identify with, nor will I choose to identify with having found this. I do want to go and learn more, so I may write more on what this dyslexia-neurodivergence pair up means.

Dyslexia itself was not something I have been ashamed of. I would always happily discuss it with people if it came up or there was a needed. My writing was though, and I’d suffered years of hiding it. But, as part of challenging myself last year I opened myself up to my natural handwriting, moving away from that particular struggle.

It has been liberating.