Dyslexia Part One

There are a number of jokes about dyslexia:

“The dyslexic “First Church of Dog” and other dog/god related ditties.

How does it change many dyslexics to take a light-bulb?

The dyslexic was thrown out of the restaurant for spitting in the tips jar

My favorite happens to be: “Did you hear about the paranoid dyslexic? He kept on having this eerie feeling that he was following someone”. I see myself in that joke, and am drawn to its existential undertones. “I am dyslexic. What if I have spent my entire life following the wrong people?”

With the help of spell check I now get to use words like weltenstaang and schadenfreude with impunity. I get to use the word impunity. Chances are I even have a vague sense of what these words mean. And, to my great credit, there are even occasions when I use these words in the proper context: “I get a most pleasant feeling of schadenfreude when I observe others falling into open manholes." One could say that schadenfreude is part of my weltanschauung.”

When I am away from my precious laptop and forced to soldier on with paper and pen or when my penchant for verbosity exceeds the capacity of Mircosoft Word’s spell check, my disability becomes far more evident and pronounced. I will change sentences to avoid using certain words. “He was in excruciating abdominal pain” becomes “his tummy hurt”. “He was overcome with a profound anxiety which bordered on a more global and undefined angst” becomes “He was really, really scared. I mean really scared”. This would not be a problem if I was writing children’s books or for the “New York Daily News”.