I knew I wasn't Normal

Between my conglomerate of odd health problems, my unique visual-related learning problems, and my quirky personality, I've always known that I'm not normal. In fact, I rather take pride in it. After all, God calls us to be peculiar people, right?

When I was about 13, I went through an extensive three-year vision therapy program that resulted in me being able to write, strengthened my reading, and let me get at least a little closer to where I should be in spelling. My current problems with sign language, especially fingerspelling, seemed to be resulting from the same visual issues (basically my eyes and brain don't work together so well), so I went back for more vision perception tests.

I got the test results back today. I'm low in several things, including visual discrimination. But the most notable "significant deficit" is in the test of visual sequential memory. I was in the 0.1 percentile.

In other words, there's pretty much no one else quite as bad at it as I am. :-p

This means when I see a word fingerspelled, even if I do manage to differentiate the similar handshapes, I'm likely to not have the faintest memory of what they were by the time we get to the end of the word. The eye doctor told me that picking the profession I did means I must be a "glutton for punishment". All I say is it's a good thing I didn't pick interpreting or I woulda quit a long time ago.

So what's this mean? Leaning on God and a whole lotta hard work. It worked 13 years ago for my reading and writing (and look where I am now!). I have faith it'll work this time. And if it doesn't, then I know God'll have something even better planned.


BTW, I got interviewed by Lynda Schab with FaithReaders (sister site of FaithWriters) and the interview was posted yesterday. You can read it here, if you'd like: http://www.faithreaders.com/featured-author.php

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