by Stanley W. Shura

Created on: June 14, 2009   Last Updated: October 18, 2009

Don't You Call ME a fake!

I am hurting. Throughout my life, I have had to deal with obstacles others have not. I have had to negotiate a rather foreign world filled with people who speak the visual language with such ease and entitlement that I have often felt like the loneliest person IN that world. They handle the vagueness and ambiguity of everyday living with such nonchalance and self-assuredness that I can only force myself to go out there and hope that I don't embarrass myself too badly.

The thing of it is, when you have a non-verbal learning disabiltiy, you are faced with two daunting obstacles right off the top, and this is AFTER the "aha!" moment that is THE pre-requisite to dealing with the problem that all your life was unnamed, obscure, ambiguous, and endlessly frustrating. First is the name. A lot of people mistake this name to refer to the condition or state of being non-verbal. That is the first AWFUL mistake and misconception that must be overcome by we who are not non-verbal, but who indeed DEPEND on our verbal facility to compensate for a lack, often severe or even profound, of the ability to process the visual and non-verbal world.

The second obstacle is a very bitter pill indeed. It is our own potential. What so tragically gets in our way so often is our *apparent* normalcy of cognitive functioning and even superior formal skills that subvert the credibility and intensity and devastation of a very painfully real dis-ease of pragmatic and "everyday" functioning!

No, I am surely not so awash with grief and/or self-pity (a term I throw in there only to sarcastically placate the cynics and mockers out there who would gleefully bring me down, and whom I will describe in detail below) that I would claim to have it the worst of all the troubled and hurting out there in the world. I would never dismiss them like that. For, I am among them.

Nor am I suggesting that everyday is a trek through a miserable and deadly minefield that is just waiting to blast me into a shatterful of broken dreams and ended potential. Every day is a challenge. Every single one. But some days are more trying than others. And every once in awhile, there comes a day that knocks me down so hard I either cannot get back up, or do not want even to get back up at all.

Ever.

These are the days when nobody believes in you. These are the days when he who was encouraging you the day before, is telling you that you are "not trying" today. These are the days when the ambiguous world leaves

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