I worked at a Boy scout summer camp, which was underfunded and run by 14-20 year old boys. We had to spend almost a week setting up camp. Big old army tents made of canvas, took at least 4 people to set one up. They requires these big nails, maybe 10 inches in length, as stakes. Apparently they must have been very expensive because we never had enough.

Enter “Jamie”. Jamie was most definitely on the spectrum. Cool enough kid, but always had a slushie ring around his lips and a messy uniform. Kind of a disaster if you got paired with them, because just could not stay focused long enough to do anything.

Well I got tasked with leading a team of around 20 on the task of setting up a section of the camp. Good team, but within an hour we were out of nails. No nails, no tents getting set up no 😞😭. Enter Jamie. He kept getting passed around from group to group because he couldn’t handle the individual tasks. However, it turns out Jamie was an absolute bloodhound for finding stakes that had been forgotten or abandoned from the previous years shutting down of the campsites. Through Jamie, we found out there were thousands of these nails scattered throughout the woods. I gave him two helpers and asked him to stay ahead of our team and keep us fed with stakes so we could keep working. The helpers looked but also kept an eye on Jamie from going too far from the group. Within a couple minutes Jamie had enough stakes for the rest of the group and we kept going. Worked like a charm.

My wife takes the piss out of me for turning every task into a spreadsheet, but who ate a perfectly cooked, stress-free Christmas dinner exactly when it was supposed to be ready? We all fucking did, that’s who.

My wife’s family made fun of me the first couple times we met because I never go anywhere without my Leatherman and a pouch with my daily survival gear on my belt. I told them I like to be prepared. I took a few months of ribbing about my “murse”. But then we went her niece’s kid’s birthday party at a park. Kid got a remote control car, but the battery compartment was screwed shut. Guess who has a screwdriver? 20 minutes later her niece got stung by a wasp. I provide a little dauber of Sting-eze and some antihistamine. Now anytime someone needs a tool, first aid, or whatever, they come looking for me. I’ve removed splinters, opened cans and bottles, pulled out staples, sewed a broken bra strap - and nobody pokes fun about the stuff on my belt.

“Deviation from the norm will be punished unless it is exploitable.” 

So did you you guys at least dip a cold chocolate bar in it? Was it good lol?

I’d imagine at least a few rock stars were made fun of for being in band or chorus. Can’t speak to it personally though

Myself, though it was only recently that I realized it.

Two of my family members have significant enough dyslexia that it interfered with their schooling and while I learned to read very young I tended to only find reading easy if it was based on learned word shapes.

Letter by letter was always very difficult, I did terribly in my required foreign language classes, I’d routinely get math questions wrong not because I made a mistake in calculation but because I copied the numbers from the board in the wrong order. And even today I will regularly mispronounce words I learned from reading, consistently switching around similarly sized letters in the middle even when I’ve read it thousands of times. And thank goodness for spell check.

So every so often people that know I can read and write in English well would make fun of the mispronouncing or my sucking at different languages not knowing I have a family history of dyslexia and likely have a biological basis for my difficulty.

But then last year I saw a paper about the possible benefits of this neurodivergence:

Areas of enhanced ability that are consistently reported as being typical of people with DD include seeing the big picture, both literally and figuratively (e.g., von Károlyi, 2001; Schneps et al., 2012; Schneps, 2014), which involves a greater ability to reason in multiple dimensions (e.g., West, 1997; Eide and Eide, 2011). Eide and Eide (2011) have highlighted additional strengths related to seeing the bigger picture, such as the ability to detect and reason about complex systems, and to see connections between different perspectives and fields of knowledge, including the identification of patterns and analogies. They also observed that individuals with DD appear to have a heightened ability to simulate and make predictions about the future or about the unwitnessed past (Eide and Eide, 2011).

• Developmental Dyslexia: Disorder or Specialization in Exploration?

I had a very successful career for some of the largest companies in the world focused on an interdisciplinary research based approach looking for patterns and trends in what was going to happen next in a particular subject domain.

It was honestly kind of crazy seeing the things I for decades considered my personal superpower helping me at what I applied myself to simply being the other side of the coin of the somewhat embarrassing difficulty I had with various aspects of language.

I was Rudolph after all.

In fact over the pandemic I got really into ancient history, which was always a field I enjoyed but had no interest in pursuing seriously academically given the language requirements, and it was wild reading research that regularly seemed to miss key details in reasoning and patterns. It made me realize that there’s a handful of subjects that are extremely inaccessible to dyslexics and that as a result these fields likely have a net deficit in the positive factors associated with that divergence in turn.

Everyone made fun of me for bringing a bunch of handheld radios to my sister’s campsite wedding (except my sister, actually, who loved the idea). Well it turns out the lot we were going to park everyone at was a tow away lot, so we needed to valet cars. My radios came in clutch for coordinating that.

This story always comes to mind.

This one guy I worked with might have been homeless. The dude smelled like feet, old people and idk, ranch dressing? He claimed he had a medical reason that he smelled so bad, but idk. The dude always looked greasy as fuck like he hadn’t showered in 2 or 3 weeks. He was also notoriously slow at his job. The guy was a bagger at a grocery store, and only worked closing shifts. Other departments that were short handed would always steal the baggers when they had people call out sick. One night our department gets a call saying was the seafood department was asking for help.

Well, guess who I sent over there? Honestly, I just wanted to get him out of the department because he literally made the whole department reek. Turns out when you are surrounded by raw seafood, it’s harder to notice the guy smells so bad. He eventually would go on to work there and meat department, and I heard after I left, the management actually gave him the team member of the year award. I would have never in a hundred years guessed he’d have gotten that, but I was glad it worked out for him.

I’ve had several. It’s a big part of my personality to take discouraging remarks as a sign that there’s an opportunity for improvement.