I was never a strong student when I was in school. In fact,
when I just think about school it gives me heart palpitations. To this day, I
have a reoccurring dream that it's graduation day and I failed all my classes
and I don't how or why.
Over the course of
my adulthood, I've noticed some things about myself that I thought I needed to
get to the bottom of. Despite having a great career, I've noticed that
sometimes I have a hard time focusing. I seem to get distracted really easily.
Even as I write this, I have a hard time staying on task. It seems
like I always have a million thoughts running through my head at once.
A couple of years
ago, I was starting to feel down about myself and that I wasn't smart. I
looked at those around me and it seemed like everyone else was able to get
things done, but I struggled. I noticed that on the air, I had a hard time
multi-tasking. I would get sidetracked easily and often felt that I
wasn't accomplishing all that I could be doing. I still feel that way sometimes.
After doing a
little research and talking to my therapist, I got tested for A.D.D. Turns out
I indeed suffer from it. Having that answer helped shed some light on how I am
now with work and how I was in school.
Something else I
found out about myself is that I'm dyslexic. As I mentioned before, I was
a very average student at best. When it came to reading assignments, I
would rarely retain any info. So when it came to taking tests, I was
terrible. I skated by in my classes and thankfully the career path I
chose didn't require me to have an amazing GPA.
I often felt as if
I wasn't smart. My friends would talk about all these books they would
read, and I just thought how boring that sounded. People I know are so
good at math. I remember a time when someone was discussing a pre-calculus
problem and all I heard were numbers and letters and none of it made sense.
It wasn't until I
saw an interview with Jennifer Aniston talking about being diagnosed with
dyslexia as an adult that I knew I might be in the same boat as her. In
the interview she said she didn't like reading. That sounded like me. Then she
said that when she did read, that her eyes would jump 4 words ahead and then 2
words backwards. Sounds like me. Then, when she was asked about what she
read, she wasn't able to retain much of anything. Sounds like me again.
I knew I finally
had the answer to what had been bothering deep down all these years. All
these years I had been thinking I wasn't smart, but really I had a learning
disability that didn't get figured out till now. If only we had figured
out this when I was a kid, how might my life be different today?
After taking a
test with a specialist, he determined that I had a normal IQ and that I was
dyslexic. This made so much sense to me now. I thought back to how
I was in school and how I've been with my jobs. It shed so much light on how I
learned. When it comes to learning something in school or work, I need to be
shown, reading about it does nothing for me. It also shed light on my
performance at work. For instance, when I did mornings and put together the
entertainment report segment, I often would stumble over when I wrote. I
would then stumble over my words and sound like I didn't know what I was
talking about. When I would do TV and read from the teleprompter, I often would
read the script over and over ahead of time so that I wouldn't skip ahead while
reading aloud.
In my current job,
I noticed that when it comes to things I need to read on the air that I tend to
memorize everything and just go off memory when talking on the air. I'll
often close my eyes when I do a break live on the air because it helps me not
be distracted by other words I might see and lose my place in what I'm
saying.
There are so many
things about myself that now make sense because I finally know the answer. So
many of my habits or personality traits now make sense since discovering my dyslexia.
A thing like me always running late is a sign of dyslexia...who knew! Having
this knowledge about myself has helped me get a bit more confident when it
comes to my intelligence.
If you think you
might be dyslexic, I encourage you to check out this website and
look to see if you have any of these qualities.
https://www.dyslexia.com/about-dyslexia/signs-of-dyslexia/common-characteristics-of-adult-dyslexia/
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