Discovering I Was Dyslexic at 26 Made Sense of My Entire Life

I had managed my dyslexia without knowing I had it from the beginning of school in Edinburgh through two degrees and into a professional life in which I had developed, through significant and largely unrecognised effort, a set of compensatory strategies that allowed me to function at a level my peers did not know had cost me three times what it cost them.

Reading took longer than it appeared to take. Written work required multiple passes that I did privately and efficiently enough that the difficulty was invisible to almost everyone I had worked alongside.

I had internalised the additional effort as a personal failing rather than as the entirely reasonable output of a brain that was doing the same work through a different and harder route.

The assessment at 26 was triggered by a new manager who had noticed something in how I processed written information that he had seen before and that he raised gently and accurately. I was defensive for a week and then I took the assessment.

The report that came back named something that I recognised in every specific detail as a description of my actual experience rather than a diagnosis of something foreign. Dyslexia, as described in that report, was exactly what my reading and writing life had always felt like from the inside.

What followed was a combination of accommodations, strategies, and tools that reduced the additional effort required to achieve the same output. The professional effect was significant. The personal effect was more significant.

I had been carrying, for twenty-six years, a quiet belief that the difficulty I experienced in specific domains was evidence that I was less capable than I appeared. The assessment did not make me more capable.

It revealed that I had always been more capable than the effort I had been expanding had allowed me to know.