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 means when they throw out a number like "thirty-six hundred". Do they mean 360, 3,600 or 36,000?
It's in being able to keep score.
It's in being able to look at a map and mentally turn it in the direction you need.
It's in being able to adequately judge the passing of time, and being able to schedule accordingly.
It's in being able to know how to set up a budget, let alone being able to crunch the numbers to make sure it's balanced.
It's in being able to read aloud a double-digit number without getting them reversed somewhere between seeing them with your eyes and saying them with your mouth.
See what I mean?
Harder still, there are people out there who really don't understand what it is to have dyscalculia. They think that the problem is that you just weren't taught properly how to do math, and nine times out of ten they're certain they know the way to teach you, that you'll suddenly get it and all will be beer and skittles from that moment on. Even worse, some of these people will claim that they too had a learning disability, but were able to cure it through either religion (thanks, Tom Cruise,) or some good old-fashioned hard work and pulling themselves up by their boot straps.
What they don't understand (or, in the case of Mr. Cruise, have deluded themselves into thinking) is that a learning disability is a lifelong disability; there is no "getting better", no "cure". There are ways to get around it, such as making certain that you have a calculator on hand at all times or using Schoolhouse Rock songs to remember certain numerical sequences ("Three Is A Magic Number" is solely responsible for my memorization of my threes multiplication tables.) But at the end of the day, the disability is still there, and it's not going anywhere. The best you can do is learn to cope with it.
Or, if you're like me, get a cell phone that comes with a regular calculator, a tip calculator and a unit converter. It might cost a pretty penny, but it's the closest I've got to a cheat sheet when it comes to making my way across the daily minefield.