Learning difficulties
I thought it might benefit others to know how it feels to have a learning difficulty.
Too many people assume i'm being stupid deliberately or trying to piss them off by failing to understand something.
This post is my personal experience, others might have a different experience to me and i understand that.
It's frustrating because i often have to ask people to repeat what they said so i can hopefully understand second time round.
Due to my problems, I can either fail to understand what someone said at all, or I can read too much into what the other person said. For example, if someone said to me "pink elephant" and my brain is adding stuff in, I can end up turning it into "flying pink elephants wearing a purple tutu" (i think you get the idea about adding stuff in with that example)
I tend not to trust my own understanding of something either, cause too many times i have been told what i think is not important or is wrong.
At school, I was okay with reading but always struggled with maths pretty bad and even though i asked for help i was always told "you got to do it yourself" even by the teachers at school, even when i told them i dont understand the maths they was trying to explain to me.
Its not a fun thing to have to deal with and i am not "putting it on" as a get-out-of-trouble-free card :(
The few times i saw my dad, he did not help either he always treated me as though i was thick and nothing i did was good enough for him. Get a new job? He would find something negative to say. The time I moved back to my mum to help with younger sibling? My dad decided I was being very selfish even though it was for Mum that I moved out from my grandma's house to move back in with Mum.
No matter what I do, it is never good enough for him.
Learning difficulties are not something anyone chooses to have. Too many people assume those of us with learning difficulties are "retards" (i do not like that word). We are trying to make ourselfs understood and understand other people but it is never easy :(
It depends, for me, on the way the other person words what they are trying to say, it is the "luck of the draw" as to whether I can understand first time what the other person is saying. All I ask is that if I don't get something first time (or anyone else with a learning difficulty does not "get it") first time, that people are patient and stop assuming i doing it to be difficult when i honestly am not :(
Thanks for reading this if anyone did read it
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Beauty (12th August 2007 - 3rd November 2008 )
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