by Rose Calder

Created on: May 27, 2009   Last Updated: May 31, 2009

The best way I have found to describe exactly what it feels like to live with a learning disability to someone who isn't affected by one is to say that it's a lot like trying to walk across a minefield. Sure, it looks just like your average field, all harmless and grassy, but you know that there are explosives waiting out there, ready to take a limb off if you don't watch your step, and you have to walk across it. To make matters worse, you have to walk across it with a bunch of people who seem to inherently know where all the mines are. So while you're standing at the edge of the field, unsure of where to start, your peers have already made it safely across, where they stand and yell for you to get a move on already. Taking a deep breath, you take your first step. Then another, and another. And just when you think you might have finally gotten the hang of it, that maybe this time it's easier than you thought, BOOM!

To make matters worse, you have to do this every day for the rest of your life. Because of that minefield? That's every day, and the mines are whatever it is that trips you up along the way through, be it reading, writing or - in my case - arithmetic. I have dyscalculia, and the mines designed to screw me up come in the shape of numbers.

Much like its more famous cousin, dyslexia, dyscalculia basically means that I have trouble understanding numbers and their various formulas and equations. However, due to the fact that dyscalculia is far less common (only 5% of people have it), most people aren't aware that it even exists, which just makes life even more of a barrel of monkeys. In my experience, it seems like people are more sensitive to the possibility that someone might not be able to read, but are completely flabbergasted at the concept that someone can't do simple addition in their head. And just like reading, the need to be able to properly execute mathematical equations is something you really can't do without.

Math is all around us. It's in obvious places, like trying to figure out how many apples you need to buy to make a pie and how much they're going to cost. But it's in lots of little places as well, where most people take it for granted.

It's in being able to look at an analog clock and being able to tell the time correctly on the first try.

It's in being able to do something as complicated as reading sheet music, or something as simple as being able to march in time.

It's in being able to understand what someone

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