Case 1: Eser

Personal data

Name: Eser

Age:   20 years

Situation at home

My father works in his own administrative office; he does the book-keeping for different small companies.

My mother is working part-time as a qualified nurse in a regional hospital. My older sister studies pharmacy and my brother (he is the oldest one) is a graduated mechanical engineer. Both of them live on their own. I still live at home with my parents.

History

My dyslexia hasn’t been discovered until the 4^th year of my preliminary training. I myself prefer to say: it hasn’t been recognised until than, for before that time I always had to struggle learning at school. There was hardly understanding for the fact that I couldn’t keep up with the others very well. It always was said that I shouldn’t have started with this preliminary really. And my parents did see me as the little one, the inferior.

My brother and sister had had an easy time at school; both of them were able to learn very easily. They always said that I was bone idle though I worked much harder than they had done.

After the recognition of my problem it was going much better immediately. Not because I started to learn more easily but because there was more understanding and they offered me extra facilities. So I did obtain my certificate though it cost me one extra year of study.

My father stimulated me to start the study business economics. My brother studied mechanical engineering already and my father hoped that I would succeed him in his company. The study business economics did link up with my preliminary very well and I thought language wouldn’t play an important part of the study. This was disappointing. I got much reading work to do, reports to write and facts to learn by heart. Besides I still had to learn a modern language (I chose the German language).

In calculating things I also made many mistakes, so the whole study cost me a lot of extra time.

Complaints / restrictions

Especially I have got problems processing letters and sounds, particularly at spoken information transfer. For me attending lectures is difficult because I hardly can combine listening and taking notes at the same time. Besides I have difficulty with learning facts by heart. In general for me it takes twice or three times as much time to read, learn and write down information as for others. Another cause of this is that I have difficulty with seeing through structures, putting things together and distinguishing essentials and inessentials. Because of all this I have to plan my study very carefully. So I try to do this but I don’t succeed very well always. Than I feel pressure of time and subsequently stress. As a result I get concentration problems and even fear of failure. If I have to prepare myself for an exam under pressure of time, I mostly fail.

Another problem for me is participating in group discussions. If I have to answer or react quickly I mostly dwell on too detailed. In such cases I want to get to the root of the matter. This often leads to misunderstandings and irritation at other people.

All these problems don’t always occur in the same extent. In fact you can say it changes every day.

Daily life

Everybody who has got dyslexia thinks in images. But not everybody who thinks in images has got dyslexia. You can think about 32 images per second. At everything I think images appear. I have to transform these images into language all the time. That costs time because my linking of images to language isn’t automated in a normal way. For example if I hear the word elephant, I must look at the beast from several sides, from before, from aside and from behind. I see as it were a complete image where non dyslexic people see only one side.

In my daily life I always am inclined to complete what I do and what I tell and I want to know everything about everything around me. If somebody suddenly asks me a question, I always firstly have to look for the right images in my mind to give the right answer. In such cases many people think that I am slow but in fact usually I am thinking very hard. And while this costs me too much time I am going to make new images again. In this way much of the chronological sequence of an event, story or process gets lost.

Perspective

The reading and spelling problems caused by dyslexia can be treated. So by far the most dyslexic people can reach an acceptable level of being lettered, a level on which they can stand their ground in our community. Knowing this keeps me on my feet, though I still don’t know my exact level of being lettered and my strongest sides.

Dyslexic people are told to:

-         use the brainpower to change and to create observations

-         be creative, expressive and logic thinkers

-         be aware of their environment very well

-         be more curious than the average people

-         be extremely intuitive and very sensitive

-         experience thoughts as reality

-         think and observe multidimensional (they use all their senses).

I should be able to take advantage with all these qualities! Besides I always have liked to work with computers and happily they usually immediately solve a part of my spelling problems.