Plaidophile

A few days ago, my mom emailed me out of the blue asking if that describes me, or if it was just another label.

A lot of the common symptoms in hyperlexia do describe me pretty well. I was reading before I could walk or talk (and my mom often tells me that I just spontaneously started walking one time when she got tired of carrying me around). I've often had trouble comprehending spoken language or recalling/synthesizing information from tracts of text (and I can only seem to absorb the workings of an algorithm or whatever by either figuring it out myself or by having someone explain it with visual aids).

Nonsense words or nonsense-sounding words have always been particularly troublesome for me; my mom and sister both still make fun of me for thinking that when the Men On Books/Film/etc. (on the old Fox show "In Living Color") said "Hated it!" with their stereotypical-gay accent, I thought (for the longest time) they were saying, "Hey-di-li-date," some sort of random nonsense phrase which was just supposed to be contextually funny.

And my social skills have always been, well, shit, but I think that has more to do with me being paranoid of others and afraid of seeming foolish than any sort of mental dysfunction. But then again, where would the paranoia and fear come from?

At the same time, it doesn't seem to describe me at all. I've never had trouble with sentence structure, though sometimes the words get jumbled when they come out. Although my mom insists that I have "trouble with change," I don't. At least, not nearly as badly as she claims. (Though admittedly, I do remember that when I was very young I hated changing from long-sleeve to short-sleeve shirts for some reason.)

The three core symptoms do definitely apply. The secondary symptoms seem hit-or-miss. But when I read the obligatory "This is how it was for me" texts, I find myself vacilating between, "Hey, that sort of sounds like me" and "That doesn't sound like me at all." Like, I'm not totally bound to a ritual (at least, not beyond the normal things that everyone does, like "Get up, take a shower, read the news and comics, then get on with my day").

I do have an exceptional memory for things I directly experienced. I can still remember little details of things back when I was 3 years old, like Mrs. Skaardsgard, the music teacher at my preschool, and the games we'd play, and how when I was 7 years old, one time I dawdled while using the hall pass to return from the bathroom and looked at one of the other classes' hallway displays where they talked about weather phenomena, and one of the kids wrote in fine-tipped purple magic marker about how tornadoes form, and I can still remember the overall writing layout and some of the phrases. "When hot air and cold air mix together they make a funnel," it said. And I can still remember the sound of every piano I've ever played. Yet my own voice always sounds foreign to me.

And I have always gotten into ranty moods, where I get fed up with things being outside of my control and not working the way I should, and just get pissy. And sometimes I do get into states with an increased level of aural, visual, and tactile sensitivity, where even the slightest breeze against my leg hairs drives me crazy, and where I can't filter out the gentle tapping sound of the keys on my keyboard or my computer's fan, or even the feeling of my fingertips touching the smooth, polished plastic. I can't even stand to listen to music, unless it's something ambient and regular, something I can get totally lost in.

It's at times like these when my gender dysphoria is the strongest.

But "hyperlexia" doesn't describe me. It says nothing about my passion for the things I love and excel at, and it says nothing about my strengths, or my compassion, or kindness, or love for animals (except dogs and cockroaches and most spiders). It's just a label. It isn't who I am, it isn't what I am. It's just a label which describes a symptom complex which has some almost-superficial similarity with my psychosocial makeup.

And at the end of the day, does it really make a difference?