So, here’s the long-overdue update on my being neurologically interesting. Essentially (and I found this out a while ago), it’s thought that I likely have NLD – non-verbal learning disorder. I have to go through some more testing to officially confirm this, but it’s thought to be fairly likely that I do have it. Oh yeah, and it’s also a possibility that I have sensory integration disorder as well.
Am I upset over this? No, not really.
I mean, it would be nice if certain things were easier for me. I’d really like to be able to write an essay test without wanting to cry by the end, for one. Also, being more at ease in social situations would be nice. But then again, I sometimes wish my nose was slightly smaller, and my eyes weren’t as close together. Despite my teenage low self-esteem moments, I have this (seemingly ridiculous at times) philosophy that all these things – the learning disability, the physical imperfections, and whatever else, are part of who I am.
Although my different learning style presents me with challenges, I believe I have many talents as well. My verbal skills are quite good – I could talk by about 10 months old, and read at the age of three. But even if I didn’t, to use a cliche: I am what I am. And my biggest issues have not come from my disability itself, but more how people react to someone like me. This is what the social model of disability is about: who I am isn’t the problem, it’s society’s treatment of people with disabilities.
So, no, I don’t want to be “cured”. I don’t think people like me need to be fixed; we’re not broken. We have a lot to offer the world.
I’m feeling rather like this song today:
Miss Nomered 
Unfortunately xenophobia is a much larger part of the human condition than most people would like to admit.
Always liked the song! Ta da! One of the things I LIKE about people is that we are are a little different. I guess one of the things I don’t like is that often we are made to feel if we aren’t the same, that’s not a great thing. Today someone talked to me about how thier headaches stop them from speaking and I asked if they had Dyslexia and they had; We both had the same level of dyslexia, only while I was suddenly “cured” by my brain deciding to seperate my speech and language centers (thus while post stroke I often still have problems talking but can write without the difficulty), she had connected her language center to her visual cortex, meaning, she has to create the words as a visual symbol before she can even talk. She is one of the smartest people I know with more accreditation and has a job that requires insane amounts of skill (seriously near insane, like what most people desire to get as accreditation as a FULL time job, like firefighter, and official juristiction morgue autopsy are both just PART of the accreditation she regularly takes for her job (which also requires I think 4 or 5 more types of similar accreditation).
I guess what I mean is that I like being around people who are different and know it, who have had to figure it out. Or rather, I can rarely be with someone who has an experience neurologically like me, but I can enjoy the similarity of being with people who “get” the different pathways different people have taken to live in ‘this’ world, to speak the ‘normal’ speak. As it were. I for one would be interested in hearing some of the sort of fun or odd side effects – for example, with me, when I watch a film I cannot “unprocess” the images meaning I am the main character in every film I watch (and often the subcharacters too) so for 10 minutes after a film (if it is a gangster film) I will be say, “Come on moll!” to Linda, “Let’s blow this town, I’s going leave this dump afore it falls down on me, ya gets me?” – because I can’t talk any other way until my cortex is done processing and then like 20-30 minutes later I talk like…well, me…again. Just saying, I don’t consider you broke, I just want to know more.
Yeah…I have some weird quirky things too. Apparently, when I had an IQ test when I was about 7 years old, I scored in the 99-99.9th percentile in verbal IQ, but only in the 69th percentile for non-verbal IQ. (I just found that out…does that even happen in “normal” human beings?) Even weirded, when tasks involving “visual-motor integration” were excluded, my non-verbal IQ went up to 95th percentile. Which is still a verbal-nonverbal discrepancy. Which would put my visual-motor score around….zero? Weirdness. I think that means the visual and motor centers of my brain are completely disconnected, meaning I can’t draw things from sight, at all (not even simple things like line graphs), and I have a hard time imitating movements I see. Interestingly enough, with verbal explanations, I do a lot better. My dance teacher this summer had a very verbal teaching style (as in, “Step, turn, kick”, you get the idea), so once I got an idea of what the basic steps were, I was fine. I also have a good auditory memory, and since it’s hard for me to write by hand, I tend to avoid taking notes in class, if possible. Mostly, my memory compensates for it.
Also, I could talk in three-word sentences by the time I turned one, and read by the age of three. But I couldn’t write by hand until I was almost seven.
I also tend to notice small things, since the sensory issues mean that my senses are more sensitive than other people’s. It kind of creeps people out, I think, when I notice little things they don’t, like subtle sounds. It also means I hate using felt-tip markers – I can’t stand the texture.
Yay for interesting folks!
rock on, miss nomered
*nudges*
When’s a new post coming? 🙂
– [pro-choice Julia]
where are you? come back to blog land!
Yeah man, I totally am down with that philosophy. I feel like where/ever we are, who/ever we are, everything that is ‘assigned’ to us, is ours. Unless we don’t want it, and then we can reject it. But I prefer to just accept and love that the world is this way. I mean, people find out I’m bi-polar and they’re like “that really fucking sucks” and then people find out I have PTSD and have a lot of problems having sex with people I actually love (like, I find it MUCH easier to fuck a stranger than someone I love. because I don’t turn into a disappearing, sobbing, maniac) and they’re like “dude, that fucking BLOWS” and yet all of this is what makes me, me. I do and don’t understand when people are upset about finding out more about who they are.