Long live dyslexia, it's the bedrock of creativity

Wow! ‘The Write Offs’ hosted by Sandi Toksvig was an emotional rollercoaster. Watching Craig do his speech at the end of the series was so inspiring.

It really hit home for me as I’m dyslexic, and so is my 12 year old daughter. Not to the same severity as the eight courageous people in this show, but enough to create an anxiety and fear of the written word at school and beyond.

I can still remember the fear of having to read out loud in class; thumping heart, sweaty palms, the please, please don’t choose me. When the inevitable happened, I would scan the page for the ‘unrecognisables’, the ‘unpronounceables’, living in fear of being exposed.

It happened, of course. My many reading clangers stick with me to this day and, to be fair, they still happen now! To name but a few, I pronounced fatigue as ‘fat-ee-goo’, the famous footballer Pele pronounced ‘peel’,Archimedes pronounced ‘archy-men-dees’, oh and ordering a pint of Bombardier, pronounced ‘bom-bar-dee-air’. The latter amused my Dad so much that he relayed the story during his speech at my wedding.

And then there’s the spelling, the lack of being able to see the mistakes. I wrote an RE essay at school once about leepers (lepers), the feedback from my teacher was ‘Did they like doing long jump too?’!

I was lucky that these many blips didn’t hold me back too much and my lovely family maintained a light-hearted joviality to my many faux pas that stopped it dragging me down.

Fast forward to my professional life and a whole new fear awaited. Fear of getting it wrong, being seen as uneducated, of being exposed as ‘just not good enough’. I once wrote a debrief for a make-up brand where I wrote massacre rather than mascara throughout the entire deck. Thankfully it was picked up before it went to the client!

How funny then that the written word is so integral to being a qualitative researcher, it’s the grand finale, the content can win or lose clients. In fact, over the years, I have learnt to adore words, to write, to express myself, to craft and communicate the insights that have emerged. It may take me longer to craft than the average person but I always get there in the end. I’ve also learnt to ask for help where it’s needed. I never send anything out without a full copy check and in most cases it will get a second and very detailed review from my dear friend and colleague Lyn Roseaman.

Most importantly, I have come to realise that dyslexia’s gift to me is a creative mind, a mind that thinks in vivid pictures. It feeds my curiosity, it inspires my thinking and has given me a determination to never let it hold me back.

Long live dyslexia it's the bedrock of creativity.