I Dyslexify My Life (And You Should Too)

July 2022 Archive — Owning my dyslexia as a writer by making up words? Yup!

This post was first published on my previous WordPress blog of the same name on July 10, 2022.

I came up with so many potential blog titles in the early stages of creating this blog. One of my favorite contenders was simply “Dyslexify.” I almost went with it. I even started writing up an intro post explaining what the term meant and why I chose it to represent my blog. But I didn’t end up choosing it. I knew my blog would be about all my disabilities not just dyslexia, but more than that, titling your blog a made-up word without a unified spelling isn’t so great for SEO.

This actually isn’t the first time I’ve run into this problem, believe it or not. But that’s just the thing—anyone who knows me would believe it. I’m the kind of person who lives proudly and openly as dyslexic. I embrace the way it affects my life, I talk about it freely, I incorporate it into my work—in short, I dyslexify.

As a term, dyslexify is colloquially used to refer to making errors when writing, speaking, or reading due to dyslexia. You might be talking to a friend and say a few words out of order, laugh, and say, “ope, I dyslexified that.” You might be looking at your to-do list and see you’ve marked your doctor’s appointment down for 15/2 instead of 2/15—classic dyslexify. Some of my favorites come from misreading what other people have written; commenting on a TikTok “i totally dyslexified that and read it as pregnant instead of pageant omg” is bound to get you a lot of likes. It’s fun, it’s entertaining, it keeps things interesting.

I’ve always maintained that being dyslexic is to see the world from a unique vantage point. This is true of all neurodivergences, but I don’t think we think about dyslexia this was very often, or at least not in a positive light.

It’s not just funny moments like calling Shrek an orgy by innocent mistake and bursting into laughter with your friends. It’s also coming up with the wildest, most inventive spellings for words—comedian Liz Miele calls it creative spelling and she’s right that we should get more credit for it. Sometimes our spellings of words make more sense than whatever fresh hell English whipped up for us, or at least are most interesting. 

Being dyslexic can also mean becoming really good friends with the text-to-speech person inside your computer. In college, I read every single one of my assigned readings via text-to-speech. I heard Alex’s voice more than my own some days. And I got really good at it. Reading via listening is a skill. Have you ever heard a blind person use sonic speed voiceover on their phone? It’s impressive as all get out! I never got that good, but the satisfaction of moving that VLC speed slider up to x2 is really sweet. Not to mention how great I felt to talk about TTS features and have genuinely techy people have no idea what I was talking about. The number of people I’ve taught the “add to music as spoken track” trick to? I wear it as a badge of honor.

Especially because many of these folks were also dyslexic and searching for better, more efficient ways to not just work around dyslexia, but to embrace it.

“Working around dyslexia” is convincing yourself audiobooks aren’t real books and spelling mistakes don’t belong outside of elementary school classrooms, then remediating yourself to death to meet an impossible standard. I have nothing against early intervention or language therapy—I wouldn’t be here without it. But I also wouldn’t be here without realizing I am good and whole just by being fundamentally who I am. Yes, teach me basic phonics, reading techniques, and spelling pneumonic devices so I don’t get frustrated every time I try to do my two favorite things—write and read. But don’t tell me the way I do those things is wrong. Because it’s not and that is a lesson I’ve had to learn. 

To be frank, I’m still learning it. It takes a lot of work to undo and let go of the harmful messages we receive as dyslexic children about what we are capable of and what our goals should be.

I don’t want to do “anything that a non-dyslexic person can do.” I want to do everything that I, a dyslexic person, can do and I want to do it my way.

So, I dyslexify.

I read via audio and talk about it with everyone who will listen because I’m proud of it. 

Instead of stopping and correcting every time a squiggly red line pops up while I’m typing, I keep writing and don’t let those little red lines stop my flow. 

I don’t apologize for the errors that make it through spell check to the final draft because I know the only reason I feel bad about them is that I’ve been conditioned to see them as markers of how little I’m trying to fit into neurotypical society. 

I celebrated the joy of spelling a word right for the first time with my dyslexic friends because they’ve been there and with my non-dyslexic friends because I’ve taught them my dyslexia isn’t a taboo subject they aren’t allowed to think or talk about.

I also let myself feel accomplished when I spell a word so wrong that not even the best spell checks can figure it out—because no, not all spell checks are created equal and yes, I am very familiar with which ones are the best and the worst. (I let myself feel proud of that too.) 

And of course, I laugh at the funny situations my dyslexia creates, and connect with my community over our shared experiences, our tips and tricks, and our journeys towards radical self-acceptance.

And most of all—I label myself as a dyslexic writer without apology and cherish the ways it affects my writing. 

My writing is shaped by the fact I didn’t grow up reading books on my own and still to this day have trouble reading without drudging up past pains and internalized ableism. I spend more time watching TV than reading—there I said it. I’m still a little ashamed of it. I still want to repair my relationship with reading and do it more. But, it’s my truth and I like the ways my writing reflects my truth. My approach to story structure, character development, world-building, and even the role stories play in our society is shaped by my interactions with the TV and digital media landscape.

Being a writer who only reads via audio means I’m thinking about audio listeners when writing—“does this make sense if the quotation marks are the only thing indicating that we’re in an aside where I’m showing an example of this by getting very meta?” (The answer, probably not with just TTS, but a narrator would likely know how to correctly inflected things like quotation marks and italics and parentheses [look at me, double meta]).

I used to feel that in order to be a writer, I had to hang up my dyslexia. But I can’t be the writer I am without it. I can’t be the person I am without it.

So, I dyslexify my life because I am, myself, dyslexified and I always want to be.

And I want other dyslexics to feel the same sense of empowerment and liberation. You get to decide what dyslexifying your life looks like for you. But I hope I can be a part of what shows you how to do it and what it can look like.

And because I’m a writer, that’s how I want to do that. Blog posts like these, TikToks, novels, and even TV shows.

That other time I ran into an issue titling something because it wasn’t a real word? A television series I wrote in a college class over the summer of 2020. Since it was a class project, I went ahead and gave it my intentionally misspelled title—Spell Your Own Descison. The show follows a dyslexic middle school girl as she finishes up 8th grade at a learning disability school and is faced with the decision of whether to stay for high school, or mainstream like everyone thinks is best for her. She is also a writer, can’t spell “decision” for the life of her, and has a queerplatonic crush on the elusive guy in her English class. It’s a little inspired by my own experiences. Okay, a lot. But that’s the point. I’ve never seen a school like mine, a brain like mine, or a love like mine represented in the media. And I deserve that. We deserve that.

We deserve the dyslexification of our media and our passions, of our communities and our personhoods.

So, I may not have named this blog dyslexify, but trust me when I say I am doing it every day and its spirit is ripe in the title “Write It Disabled.” Because I don’t just dyslexify. I autismize. I painify. I FODMAPatize. I disable. Because I’m disabled. Why shouldn’t my life show it?