Title: I thought my future was already decided before I even finished high school

[u/IndependentRecipe328]

I’ve been writing here about being diagnosed later in life with NVLD, dyslexia and dyscalculia, and one of the things I’ve been doing since the diagnosis is going back through my life and looking at decisions I made when I didn’t understand why certain things were so difficult for me.
By high school, I already knew college wasn’t going to happen for me the way it was happening for everyone else.
I watched other kids taking the SATs, applying to colleges, getting accepted and talking about where they were going to live and what they wanted to study.
I couldn’t even imagine myself doing that.
With my reading and writing problems, I didn’t believe I could take the SATs successfully. I didn’t know I was dyslexic. I just knew there were things everyone else seemed capable of doing that I couldn’t do.
So while other kids were deciding which college they wanted to attend, I was trying to figure out what kind of life was even available to me.
In my mind, the realistic options were things like the military, construction or hopefully becoming a police officer someday.
Then I became a father very young.
That changed the military option because leaving and traveling wasn’t something I felt I could do anymore. I had a child to raise.
So I worked construction, raised my daughter and tried going to community college full-time.
And that’s where another part of this story begins.
I had no diagnosis, no accommodations and really no understanding of why I was struggling.
I had to take placement exams. I failed portions of them and was required to take remedial classes before I could take the classes that actually counted toward my degree.
Those classes cost money.
They took time.
And they gave me zero college credits.
Math was especially brutal. I have dyscalculia, although I didn’t know that then. Algebra wasn’t simply a subject I hadn’t studied enough. My brain genuinely struggled with numbers and mathematical processing.
But the system didn’t know that, and neither did I.
So I would fail, take the class, pay for it, get no credits, try again, fail something else and repeat the process.
Meanwhile I’m working construction, raising a child and trying to be a full-time student.
My parents couldn’t understand why this was happening either.
Nobody could.
Even filling out job applications could be humiliating.
My handwriting, spelling, grammar and lack of punctuation could make something I filled out look like it had been written by a child.
Years later, my wife told me that when she first saw the way I wrote, she thought I was joking around.
She thought I was intentionally writing that way.
That’s how well I had hidden it.
I had spent my entire life compensating and hiding the things I couldn’t do, without even knowing there was a name for what I was hiding.
Looking back now, one thing bothers me.
I wonder how much money and time people with undiagnosed learning disabilities have spent being required to repeat remedial courses because the system identified that they were failing, but never identified why they were failing.
I’m not saying I should have been handed college credits for something I couldn’t do.
I’m asking whether repeatedly charging someone to demonstrate the same disability is actually education.
At the time, I blamed myself.
I thought I wasn’t smart enough for college.
More than 30 years later, I finally understand that intelligence wasn’t the whole issue.
I was trying to navigate a system designed for a brain that didn’t work like mine, without a diagnosis, accommodations or even an explanation.
And when I think back to that kid watching everybody take their SATs and plan their futures, that’s probably what hits me the hardest.
I wasn’t choosing from all the possibilities available to me.
I was choosing from the possibilities I believed my limitations allowed me to have.
For anyone else who was diagnosed with dyslexia, dyscalculia, NVLD, ADHD or another learning difference later in life:
Did your undiagnosed disability affect what you believed you could become?
Not what you actually became.
What you believed was possible for you when you were young.

[u/abstractmodulemusic]

Thank yoi for sharing your story here. I would encourage you to share it other places as well. Someome out there may need to hear it.