Living with a DISABILITY

I don’t like to talk about this but it's time. I have a writing disability called dysgraphia. I struggle with putting thoughts on “paper” is the best way it can be described. When you see my sentences you have to understand that most of the time they are improv’d in the middle because I forgot the original sentence I was going to write. Basically how my disability works is I’ll think of a sentence and start typing or writing it out and half way through I’ll forget what my original sentence was so I have to either look back or just try and remember the gist and change my sentence. It’s like doing acrobats for every essay in some senses.  For most of my life I tried to hide that I had a disability because I just wanted to be like everyone else you know normal. Eventually you understand that's not how life works. You are given the hand you are given and you just have to deal with it. It’s a difficult thing to talk about because no one sees it out right. It’s also one of those things that because I want to be normal I want to hide it because it makes everyone around me think that I’m like them but in some sense I’m not. When I had an IEP growing up, I would leave class every day in elementary school for 30 minutes to learn how to grip a pencil, to learn how to slow down my writing and write legibly. I took a sentence writing class in high school because I struggled with changing tenses in essays. This was because I couldn’t remember the sentence I was writing, let alone the four sentences beforehand where I had already used past tense. I use a computer because it helps me significantly be able to remember more of the sentence to write down than writing. Usually when I’m writing I have to think of the sentence and then start the process of writing it down whereas with a computer it’s more fluid so less of my disability shows. I basically need my computer to be able to compete with others. If I didn’t have a computer it would probably be hard for me to express my emotions since most people do that through a diary but I can’t keep a diary. It physically hurts me when I write so I just avoid it. I guess I’m writing this now so that when people come across my blog and see my grammar mistakes or my weird sentences or wording you know why. I don’t want this to be like I’m blaming my disability, it's something I live with. I guess in some sense when I post this it’s going to be a small monkey off my back where I won’t try and hide it anymore. I guess this is my gentle reminder that if you see a spelling mistake or you see a grammar problem, maybe lay off that person, you don’t know what their life is. Lastly I want you to think about your writing, I want you to write half of a sentence down leave it and come back in 30 minutes and create a new ending to that sentence then I want you to do that 100 more times and you get a rough estimate of what it's like for me to write an essay.

Thanks,

Joe