The Freedom to Make Mistakes -Tales from the Dyslexic Side: Part 1
The Dyslexic Introduction
Over the years, I’ve worked, and been sacked as a copywriter, a graphic designer, an editor and even an English teacher. I’ve written for famous international brands and taught English in universities. The majority of these career experiences have either finished with me being sacked or simply told not to bother coming back next term. Yet despite this, I think I’ve been fairly successful, and as Douglas Adams said, “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be”.
In 2018, I was working as a copywriter for a digital marketing agency. As a copywriter, my role consisted of planning and writing blogs and websites for a variety of companies to improve their visibility in Google searches. One day, I was in the office happily working by myself, completely unaware that in about two weeks I was going to be sacked again. On that particular day, I was writing for a special-needs school website. It was interesting and it made a pleasant change from the monotony of churning out articles about identifying Japanese knotweed or minuscule differences in the technical features of machines designed to print food packaging labels. The day had begun with the banality of any other yet was destined to end with a life-altering revelation.
I was writing about the various activities offered at this school to children with special needs. As I continued my research, I started work on the pages concerning dyslexia. I read about the problems dyslexic children had, like learning to read, inconsistent spellings, confusing the order of letters and words, writing slowly, bad handwriting, poor organisation, trouble following instructions, taking notes — these were all things I had struggled with at school, at work and in life. The more I read, the further I stumbled down a rabbit hole of realisation; every sentence was like another piece of a long-obscured puzzle, toppling neatly into place and affirming an ominous suspicion that had been lurking around in my head for a long time.
That afternoon, as I sat at my desk, motionless, staring transfixed at my screen, the world around me seemed to drift into obscurity as I read with ever greater intensity. For the last thirty years, I had been erecting walls of denial to defend myself from this idea and in one afternoon they had been smashed down, leaving me to finally face the truth. Dyslexia hadn’t just been something at school that meant I’d had bad handwriting and been a slow reader; it had been there with me my entire life. From school to university, to every job I had ever had and been sacked from. It had been a part of me that I had tried to hide, and hide from — now finally, it was laid bare for me to see.
I left work that day feeling a heavy weight on my shoulders. But it wasn’t a new weight, I’d been carrying it for years, the difference now was that I knew what it was. While my discovery still weighed upon me, the fact that I had identified it made it easier to carry. I knew that I would be able to beat that dyslexia-shaped weight into something manageable. At this point in life, I had already lost my job multiple times due to poor spelling and proofreading skills. Being sacked is one of the most demeaning processes you can go through, it’s even worse when it happens because of factors outside of your control. Whenever it happened to me, I always bore some romantic hope that some of my colleagues would stand up in protest and declare that if he had to go, then so would they (of course, I never actually expected them to do so, but the dream was there). Being asked to leave because you are incapable of doing your job leads you to question your sense of worth. It happened to me so many times, I started to wonder just what it was I was doing with my life. Swinging from one short-lived employment vine to the next, I would cling on desperately trying to give myself some direction, a reason to carry on doing what I did. How I’ve managed to pull myself up and find another vine to swing as many times as I have, I really can’t say. My dyslexic discovery meant that I could now re-evaluate my self-doubts; it meant that I wasn’t stupid or lazy or even unlucky. All those “just one more” proofreads I’d convinced myself to do weren’t necessary; they had been futile and only ever served to increase my mistrust in my own abilities. There were mistakes I was just never going to see, I could never have seen — I could see that now.
That evening, at home, when everyone was in bed, I wrote an email to my mother, and I cried. I thanked her for the help she had given me at school, for being patient and helping me to learn to read and for not giving up on me when faced with a school system that wanted to classify me as stupid. I cried for all the times I had been sacked and for all the simple mistakes I had made, and all the times I thought I was stupid and that I just couldn’t do it. Like most times when we cry, our tears don’t represent just one emotion. These were tears of sadness but also tears of relief. Finally, I had an answer as to why I couldn’t see those errors, why it took me twice as long to finish reading something I understood only half as well. Finally, I could answer that little voice in my head which I had been trying to silence, the voice of the eight-year-old boy inside me trying to learn to read and to spell even though his parents and the school had been using the word ‘dyslexic’ around him recently. The little boy that voice belonged to, didn’t know what that word meant and he didn’t want to either. If he didn’t know about it, he could carry on learning and playing with everyone else; he didn’t want to be different, he wasn’t going to be different and would do anything, believe anything, if it just meant that he could be like everyone else.
The next day, my mum wrote back. Of course, she had helped me, she said, what else would she have done for her son? She also told me not to worry about it, to try and forget about it, that it was behind me now. That was the same thing, I had been telling myself since I was eleven years old. The funny thing was that for the first time ever, I wasn’t worried about it. I was never going to worry about being dyslexic again but the one thing I wasn’t going to do was try and forget about it. Soon, I would decide that being dyslexic was part of who I was and I would never hide from it or from telling people about it again, but before that, I needed to get sacked one more time.
That is just what happened a few days later: several clients (too many, it seems) had found spelling errors in the work I had done for them and had complained to the head of the agency. The sacking I received seemed merciless and I was pretty resentful about it at the time, but to be honest, it wasn’t my boss’ fault. She was doing her job and looking after her business and her clients; I had never mentioned being dyslexic, so all she saw was a person hired as a writer producing articles littered with spelling mistakes. Unfortunately, as this bombshell dropped, I was still reeling from the shock of my dyslexic discovery, so I kept it to myself and took this sacking the way I had taken the others that came before it. That’s not to say I took the untimely termination of my employment well. No matter how many times it happened, it never got easier. Every job I ever got was hard-won and every time they were taken away, it hurt.
Whenever I started working somewhere new, I would convince myself that this time would be different. This time I would proofread even harder than before, I would stay more focussed, and this time, I would remember whatever stupid mistake it was that had been the final straw in the last place and make sure it didn’t land me back in the dole queue again.
But sure enough, that’s exactly where I ended up again. Back to job hunting and scouring employment websites, desperate for anything I could find. I knew this boat, I’d been in it many times before, and I felt confident I would find something else soon, and my most recent placement would make its way on to my ever-lengthening CV, together with its own glib reason as to just why I had decided to leave that role after just a few months.
Something would be different this time around though, the next job I applied for, I would be doing so as a dyslexic and while that frightened me, it also gave me a sense of liberation. A dyslexic copywriter — even as I said it to myself, it seemed like I’d coined an oxymoron. Why would anyone with dyslexia attempt to work as a copywriter? On more than one occasion, during my repeated failures to hold a job, my girlfriend asked me whether I was sure I was in the right career. This was such a daunting question since it echoed something I’d been asking myself, and the answer I gave her was the same one I’d given myself, “maybe not, but this is the one I do best and the one I want to do”. Writing was what I did. What I still do and I still love it. I’m good at it too (I think). That is what made losing my job again and again, all the more frustrating.
When viewed as a disability, dyslexia will always be a disadvantage in life. There are very few (make that, no) jobs in modern society where reading slowly, misunderstanding and having bad handwriting are considered advantageous. It’s true that when the specific focus of your job is writing, problems with spelling might be more prominent, but those problems would come out in any job, sooner or later. The answer was never to change my career to suit my dyslexia, but to change my dyslexia, or rather my attitude to dyslexia, to fit my job. It could have been any job, it just happened to be one that involved communicating in written English.
After twenty years in the world of work, I had a lengthy CV and it’s a testament to my succinct writing abilities and pagination skills that it still fits on one sheet of A4. During this time, I had questioned my own career choice a lot and said to myself more than once, “maybe, they’re right, perhaps I’m just not cut out to be a copywriter”. But writing was what I did. What I’d always done and what I’d always wanted to do. Ever since my childhood dream of wanting to work in an unsuccessful bookshop (I watched the Neverending Story too many times), I’d always had a fascination with telling stories, communicating through words and being surrounded by letters. From school to college, to university, I had studied English and nurtured a passion for the written word; there was no way I was going to let something like bad spelling keep me from it.
I’m an inveterate try-againer: ‘obstacles are opportunities to me’ and all that, and I was determined nothing would prevent me from pursuing a career in copywriting. But my dyslexic epiphany was a double-edged sword: while in a way it gave me a sense of empowerment, it also made the notion of applying for copywriter jobs a little ridiculous. Around this time, a friend of mine was working at an employment agency, so I asked what he thought about the idea of a dyslexic copywriter. Despite my optimism, I was sure I knew what his answer would be, that if you try mixing writing and dyslexia, you’re only ever going to end up with disappointment. But he didn’t and the answer he gave was one of the things that turned me around. He said he’d have no problems putting someone dyslexic forward for copywriter roles, that creativity was more important than perfect presentation and most importantly that writing wasn’t spelling. He even knew a content manager who had the sign-off “Delightfully Dyslexic” proudly sitting in her email signature (something which I must admit to having pinched for my own).
Realising that my dyslexia wasn’t something to hide from people but rather something to embrace was tough at first. I still didn’t want to tell people as I thought they would see it as a negative, but at the same time, I knew that the only way for me to continue working was to be upfront and honest. As Tyrion says to Jon Snow in Game of Thrones, “Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armour, and it can never be used to hurt you.” This became my mantra as I came to terms with being dyslexic. It would never be something I hid from again, from now on I would tell everyone about it, often, whether they wanted to hear it or not.
While I was in a state of despair about being dyslexic and at having lost my job again, I started doing a lot of online research; I read stories of other people discovering their dyslexia late in life and how it had affected them negatively. But the thing that struck me in all this was how they had turned their apparent disability into a positive. There were people writing articles online about how their dyslexia made them who they were, and they cherished it.
My fear of being dyslexic and of being discovered had led me to become very secretive. I hid my mistakes from others fearing they would judge me, I lied to my friends and family about losing my job, (‘jobs’, would be more accurate). It was only when I discovered the online dyslexic community that I was able to change my attitude. As I delved further into online stories I saw there were people out there embracing their neurological differences and viewing their dyslexia as a superpower. I started participating and becoming part of this community and stopped seeing dyslexia as something which had got me the sack over and over again, and instead saw it as something I could be proud of.
It was important for me to be recognised as an intelligent, able writer behind the perceived flaws of dyslexia. Not long after losing my job for (hopefully) the last time, I spoke to a friend about it. I call him a friend now, he was actually one of my past managers who sacked me (under a fair amount of duress). The conversation we had stands out clearly in my mind. As soon as I told him I was dyslexic, he replied with “Of course you are”, in that instant, I heard the penny drop and that was all the validation I needed to stop doubting myself as a writer and feel confident in my ability. We had worked years before and in that time he’d always complimented my writing. But for some reason unknown at that time, I had been unable to work without leaving mistakes and in the end, he had been forced to sack me. A simple comment, more the intonation than anything else, was all it took for me to start seeing that I could carry on as a writer. I knew from that instant that dyslexia wouldn’t stop me doing what I wanted to do and that with the right attitude, I could develop the skills it gave me to do my job even better.
With new-found confidence, I embraced my dyslexia as a superpower and became the Dyslexic Writer. Fairly soon afterwards. Gibby runs a regular podcast series where she speaks to fellow dyslexics (or dyslexia as she refers to us). Talking to Gibby was the first opportunity I’d had to discuss how I was feeling with someone who could understand and relate. I was already coming round to seeing dyslexia as a potential positive in life, “Dyslexia is our Superpower’’ confirmed this for me and turned me into the Dyslexic Writer once and for all.
A little while later, I got an interview and a new job. Getting my first job as an honest dyslexic was a liberating experience, although I have to say answering yes to the “do you have any disabilities” question on the application form did take me back. I’d never clicked that box before but this was my first step into a larger world. Repeatedly losing my job over the years meant that interviews had become as much an exercise in covering my trail as proving I could do the job. For every job I’d lost, I’d had to invent evermore subtle embellishments to explain why the majority of places I had worked just hadn’t held my interest for more than a few months. This is where I honed my dyslexic deception, as I liked to call them. I developed a knack for glib explanations like “that was just a temporary contract”, or “no, I decided that role wasn’t right for me”, anything to avoid saying what had really happened.
One of the things I can honestly say being dyslexic has taught me, is how to do a good interview. I’ve sat in that hot seat so many times, I could probably get a job coaching interview skills.
Finding my next job as a copywriter was never a problem for me, I write well and can adapt my style quickly. The tricky part came later when I was supposed to keep it. I’ve started every role I’ve ever had with enthusiasm and highly-praised work. But after a while, like the first green shoots, perfidious typos and insidious spelling mistakes start to spring up. Isolated and well-spaced out initially, and only enough to merit a good-humoured “nice work but watch for your spelling”. After a few years, even those good-natured friendly comments were enough to unnerve me. For the person who turned up my mistake, it was an isolated spelling error made by a copywriter who was just getting settled in a new role but for me, it was the first crack appearing in the dam, and I knew only too well what happened once enough cracks appeared. So while I brushed off such errors with a nonchalant yawn and a “sorry, I’m still half asleep”, secretly they lit the fires of panic in me, that sooner rather than later it was going to happen again.
In any role, after a time my new-starter armour would start to wear off, any leniency I had been shown would be replaced with judgements and persistent errors would be met with more severe actions. This further weakening of the dam as the cracks spread would cause me to doubt myself even more. Every time another spelling error was uncovered, I would feel waves of guilt and a mountain of pressure piling up on me. My employers at the time were holding me up to the level of scrutiny expected from someone who isn’t dyslexic; they could hardly be blamed for this. I hadn’t told them. How could I have? I didn’t even really know myself. At this point, I would begin to live in fear at work. Everything I wrote would come with the sense of doubt that there was another spelling mistake lurking in there somewhere. As my paranoia grew, so did my fear of unseen mistakes, and I became reluctant to hand over any work I had done. I would sit on projects for as long as possible even after they were finished, checking them again and again for spelling errors, thinking that somehow I could trade up punctuality for performance. The result of this was that my work didn’t only contain errors, it was behind schedule as well. This vicious circle of anxiety and missed deadlines is the way many of my job placements came to an untimely end.
After enough errors had been found, managers would say something like they wanted to read all of my work before it went to print or clients. This always marked the beginning of the end and would lead me to start panic checking. Terrified of finalising any piece of work, I would hold on to everything, delaying workflows as I read and re-read, hope in vain that if I checked just one more time, I would find that final mistake. But, of course, when I found an error in one, it would just convince me that I hadn’t checked the other documents well enough yet and there might be errors lurking in there too.
These were not isolated situations and they all led invariably to a kind yet firm invitation to pack up and not let the door hit me on the way out. I got so used to this talk, that in the end, I could tell when it was coming just by the way my manager would ask for a chat. When you’re about to be sacked, no one ever asks if you want to get a coffee first, no one wants the awkwardness of waiting for you to drink up and leave. The best you’re likely to get is a glass of water. Then they lead you off to a room where no one ever goes, so you can’t be seen by your colleagues. Often, there’s someone from HR in there as well, just to be sure that the kick in the nuts you’re about to receive is done by the book.
Not being honest about my dyslexia hurt more than just my ability to work, it also affected relationships with colleagues. Managers and clients weren’t the only people to notice mistakes in my work, colleagues did as well, and there were those who, rightly or wrongly, assumed a copywriter should have flawless English and impeccable spelling. Sometimes they would helpfully point out errors to me, so I could correct them, but there were other times when these corrections would come as criticisms of me and my abilities, heaping further pressure on my existing insecurities.
Spelling mistakes were an unfathomable mystery to me, despite pouring over my work, I was unable to see them. So when certain colleagues did, I was left feeling angry at having betrayed myself. I resented myself for my failure to spot it and took their being brought to light as a personal insult, often turning the anger I felt against my unfortunate eagle-eye colleague. Rather than admit my mistake and accept their help, I would see it as them placing another straw on the camel’s back which would inevitably break again under the weight of my innumerable spelling mistakes. In retaliation, I would find ways to undermine these people at work, to criticise them and highlight ways they didn’t work properly. By doing this, I hoped to undermine their credibility to criticise me. It didn’t work. This form of attack only ever served to show me up as unprofessional. No one likes a workplace critic, just as no one likes a copywriter who makes spelling mistakes.
As a copywriter, I’ve been sacked far more times than I’ve managed to hold on to a job and this led me to seriously evaluate my career choice more than once. Why would anyone who has trouble with reading and writing and spelling want to do a job in which those things are fundamental qualities? Everyone likes a challenge in life but surely there are limits. Couldn’t I have found something else to do? What was it about writing that drew me like an orthographically-challenged moth? Was it communication? The transferral of ideas? The blending together of words to form enticing messages which would attract attention and provoke action? Was it the forging of sentences that would lead customers down the colourful path of desire, beckoning them ever onward with sweet rewards and cast-iron offers until they jump willingly into the sea of consumption? At the risk of sounding a little Machiavellian, that’s probably what it was. It’s the freedom and creativity of the salesman liberated from the constraints of time. I’ve never been quick at thinking on my feet, I always come up with what I need to say after the moment has passed. Writing freezes the clock and lets creativity flourish in a timeless world.
While copywriting does require creativity, it is not fiction writing, and a copywriter is not an author. What comes from the desk of a marketeer is not award-winning fiction. The aim is to temper creativity with simplicity. Well written copy should all but go unnoticed while its message remains fixed in the reader’s mind. A complex marketing message must become so benign and simple that it is understood at a glance. Words and sentences need to be pruned away to leave a message which, while as concise as possible, is also inescapably alluring.
But the essence of crafting effective marketing writing is not just in the trimming and pruning, it is in the streamlining of the message; stripping away anything which could distract a customer before they arrive at the point you want them to arrive at. In the always-on, instant gratification world we occupy today, this can be difficult and I think it is largely an element of my dyslexia that helps me accomplish this simplicity of communication.
Next: The Dyslexic Simplifier …
Read the full story of the Dyslexic Writer here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Freedom-Make-Mistakes-Tales-Dyslexic/dp/B09DT62VTJ
Originally published at https://vocal.media.
