Thursday, August 1, 2024

My ADHD is a constant battle when it comes to reading

This is a vibes based post, if it doesn't make perfect sense. I'm fairly sure you will get my gist.

First, I'm going to start with background. I've had ADHD all my life and dyslexia neither was diagnosed until my mid 30s. I read books all the time from the library and stopped doing that when I got too busy to go and at that point digital was an option but I couldn't read for longer than about 5 minutes without getting confused. Growing up and into adulthood,I thought I read the same as everyone else and let me tell you figuring out that I was different was a struggle. I fought the diagnosis and tried to push through my problems by doing all the same things that didn't work before. Yes, somehow everything will be different. 

So, when that didn't work I avoided reading, but kept purchasing things that I know I couldn't use like digital ebooks. I figured I would just print them all out and read them that way. For context, I hated reading on my phone, tablets, and my PC. 

Cut to a couple months ago when my wife and I decided to do a wife and also wife bookclub and started to read a Christopher Pike book together. That went great because it was a physical book I could hold but I knew I owned a lot of digital books. So we decided to start reading those. I struggled at first, but I knew my wife had figured out a way to read that worked with her ADHD, so it could be possible for me. I downloaded a bunch of different book reader apps and got out my Kindle and the library that went with it. At first, the same issues cropped up, but I persisted and looked up helpful ways to adapt what I was reading to my dyslexia and downloaded some fonts for dyslexia which did help but I needed more. I did more research and started to try to adjust backgrounds which I didn't like but then something I did actually helped. The font size. It was too small and the paragraphs squeeze together. So I kept adjusting it bigger and bigger and now I've got the sweet spot and I can read again. Which has, oddly, helped me start writing again. Reading some, I will say, lower quality work showed me that I could write work that I could be proud of. So now I'm writing every idea I have or had back in the day and finishing them too.

I just wanted to finish off with a positive note. Don't try to force things, maybe there's a better way that you haven't thought of. The Internet is a friend.

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