Dyslexia, visual stress and mental wellbeing while WFH

 She really said “visual stress - but make it sexy”

I repeatedly get asked about my glasses or I get comments when I mention them from people thinking I was hungover and wearing sunglasses in the office or something. I’m sorry to disappoint, I’m not that hardcore 😂. I have dyslexia and visual stress. 

Dyslexia isn’t as simple as someone who struggles to read or write. I don’t and can’t speak for every dyslexic, but it may be useful to explain how I personally struggle. I struggle more with poor memory, awful time awareness and time management, auditory processing difficulties (basically a lot of words sound the same to me as I struggle to differentiate certain phonetics - it’s almost like English is my second language a lot of the time), and I have quite a low registration sensory profile (I’m basically slow, hard to wake up, I need a lot of stimuli to engage my brain and get me up in the morning etc). 

I’m intelligent, I’m very self aware, I’m hugely emotionally mature (but simultaneously still somewhat naive on some things in life), I’m creative in my problem solving, but in a world that judges intelligence with exam results, ability to regurgitate facts, complete mental arithmetics, and all those typical academic factors... I look stupid. But I am not. My intelligence is hidden, my intelligence is buried deep, but in a world that judges us at surface level I can often find myself struggling to fit into a role that’s been created for someone “typical”. 

As part of or as a consequence of dyslexia I also struggle with visual stress, this is somethings some people with dyslexia also have, but it is not always a part of dyslexia (and some people with visual stress may not even have dyslexia). For me I always see a little yellow fuzz to everything, like I have eye proteins floating across my vision or a hundred fading sunspots. Not I’ve had this my whole life and although I see this interference all the time, it’s not a huge both most of the time, but when I start reading the contrast of black text on white background and this yellow blur to everything  the words start to disorientate on the page before me. I struggle to follow a line of text without the peripheral words starting to dance and melt on the page. My fancy blue glasses help reduce that effect. THere’s some fancier science behind how that I personally don’t feel educated enough to explain, but I just know it works for me. I remember having my test for the glasses, trying to read the same lines over and over with different colours trying to figure out what worked best for me, I was exhausted afterwards. The staff were amazing, and very understanding that going through all these tests was making my eyes go crossed, making my brain hurt and making me feel stressed. There was a purple hue that worked the best for reducing that ‘noise’ effect for me, but the purple colour felt too dark and then the next best colour that worked for me was my colour teal green blue. I call them blue, as most people call them blue but in fact there is a few green hues in there too (the frames are blue so it makes you think they’re just blue).

The thing is with visual stress is that prolonged time reading can give me headaches and LED screens are absolutely worse than text on a page. I used to be able to read books so fast in comparison to trying to keep up with a powerpoint presentation at college and university, I thought for years I needed glasses for long distance of something. I think I went for at least 5 eye test in my life, saying “I keep getting headaches when doing lots of reading or computer work or reading off a board”. No optometrist even suggested I could have visual stress, that was only picked up after my dyslexia diagnosis and I spoke with the disability support team after having a student from another class (who had colour tinted glasses) lend his glasses to me for a minute… and my brain was like “oh, now this makes more sense”. I genuinely saw the world through a new lens, it was purple tinted rather than rose, but it definitely made the world look better. So I asked about it, and I was able to get a mini test for visual stress and was given some aqua green acetate overlays to put over paper/books. Now, can you imagine me trying to write notes and read with that laid over the paper? I was constantly having to lift the overlay on and off. So when I was finally in my first professional job I went through Access to Work and finally got some glasses. Hooray.

 

I have other things to help with my dyslexia; to try to level the playfield. I have software on my work laptop that puts a filter over the screen and some brain storming software on my old laptop from uni. But a lot of what I need to ‘manage’ my dyslexia is very reliant on organisation skills and implementing unique techniques that help me. But even with my deeper understanding of my dyslexia and all my little methods, I am still quite a slow and chaotic worker. My biggest enemy is concentration, especially of late. 

I benefit greatly from a flexible but still somewhat predictable routine. I love being able to manage my diary in my way, as I know how long things will take me and I plan them in what is the most time effective way for me, because I know my unthinking brain has practically no concept of time. And so this point leads me on to the main point I wish to make with this post… Working from home. All the sighs. Working from home has been the hardest adaptation I’ve had to make, I feel like I’m back at uni but worse. At uni I had the option of dragging my overly distracted lazy arse to the library to change up the scenery and be in the right atmosphere (surrounded by hard workers)… Alas that is the part I am struggling with most over these last few covid months. 

The office environment was often annoying loud, I would have to put music in my ears, or hide round the corner or book a little side room for a little while (especially to make phone calls) but oh my gosh do I crave those distractions now. Thee social and morale support of being in an office environment wasn’t just great for my mental wellbeing as a human being but it was a great motivating factor for me as a neuro-divergent human being. 

Now everyone with dyslexia, or any other neuro-divergence for that matter, is different. I have a friend who is dyslexic but prefers to be in complete silence to work, and I have a couple other dyslexic friends who are more like me and find the distant tapping of other people’s keyboards keeps us aware of our own lack on concentration or helps snap us out of staring at the same screen for more than ten minutes doing nothing, just waiting for our brain to figure out what that second of the sentence was meant to be. 

There’s no poignant advice or conclusion to this post. I simple wanted to express how these WFH conditions that have been thrusted on a majority of us has been affecting me from a dyslexic point of view. 

But I also invite you to let me know how WFH is affecting you? I know of people who are amazingly dedicated, but the lack of office is frustrating them from a social aspect, I’ve heard of people who love it, I’ve spoken to many who are very mixed about it. But I wonder how many more neuro-divergent people, be it dyslexia, DCD, ADD/ADHD, autism, and so on…. how are you managing this? Are you loving it? Are you hating it? What’s the hardest part about WFH? And I will also happily take your tips and advice for how to manage these specific difficulties in the current climate…