Neurological Disorders: Differing Abilities... and Gifts

Disability may mask ability -- the reverse is also true. A mirror writer can write in a backwards 'mirror image' style. Sometimes mirror writing occurs as an isolated anomaly in an otherwise normal person. Other times it occurs with potentially disabling neurological disorder. The ability to write in either direction... well that seems like a sign of a spatially gifted person, huh? Not necessarily. The writer of Mystify Your Mind With Mirror Writing
reports that she has unusually poor spatial skills and can't make sense of a map unless she turns it around. Ah, me too, I can read the words on a map upside down or sideways, but I can't make any sense of it direction-wise, unless it's pointing the same way I am.

That article intrigued me. I write right right with my right hand and left with my left. (It's the cooperative work of both hands that you see there in the picture.) It may seem like quite a talent, yet my spatial skills are very poor. At the time I started college, I had trouble walking even a couple blocks and reversing my path to come back the other way.

The spatial disabilities have often been masked by what appears to be unusual ability. At age seven, I could already read upside down or right side up. I did struggle with reversals briefly in first grade reading, but not in writing. My right hand consistently wrote right, yet, directionality confusion would manifest in other activities. There was a point when I was growing up where I wondered why it was that I would mean to turn toward a person, but turn away instead. I knew the difference between forward and away, but that didn't mean my body could distinguish between the two in a split second's time.

I never wore the label "autistic" -- in fact it was never considered -- but I surely do feel that we attach such labels (and the accompanying explanations) without really understanding how a person perceives the world. For me, "anxiety" has usually been the explanation given for various oddities, often erroneously. What we attribute to inhibition, anxiety, or shyness can have very different explanations. I don't drive, and people have always chalked the issue up to simple fear. I am only now finding the words to explain otherwise. (I wonder if the left/ right thing plays some part in my tendency to swerve or lurch a little sometimes when walking on the sidewalk...)