My next guest blogger has NLD like me, but is able to provide a prospective on the disability which I can’t yet: what it’s like to have NLD as an adult. The post is a bit long, but I encourage everyone to read it because it’s an amazing snapshot of NLD!
Despite my difficulty with writing (you wouldn’t know it from the end product, but there’s the crux of the issue), I’ve decided to give it a go and write a bit about my experience with NLD. Background: I was diagnosed at 17, towards the end of 11th grade. I spent my college years (6.5) figuring out how to work around my areas of difficulty in regards to academic life. I could spend a lot of time explaining all the useful things I figured out and the many ways I learned how to cope, but I’ll save that for another day. At this point, I’m 26, I’ve graduated college with my B.A. in psychology, I’m working full-time plus an added part time job, and learning how to live as a “real” adult. All of that sounds pretty darn good.
And that’s the really difficult thing about NLD. It’s deceiving to those who don’t know about it or understand it. It’s a “hidden” disability in many ways. It is a low-incidence disability; NLD makes up only 1-10% of all learning disabilities, which means it occurs in only 0.1-1% of the general population. To complicate things in my personal life, I find that I am often complicit in keeping it hidden. It’s not that I’m ashamed of my NLD or anything. What happens is that in learning to modify my life and cope with day-to-day I’ve found ways to do a good enough job that unless someone knows me quite well or is paying close attention, they don’t notice the high level of effort and behind the scenes work I do to accomplish everything. The finished product is rarely reflective of true capability or commensurate with time and effort devoted to it.
NLD creates a big gap between what I know I have the potential and capability to do and what I can actually get done in a given circumstance. It’s like having the hard drive and components of a cutting edge computer, with a crappy early 90’s monitor and not enough RAM to run all the programs you need to at once. I feel as though I’m constantly fighting against myself. And the term non-verbal learning disorder (or disability) is in many ways a misleading description. NLD doesn’t just affect learning; it isn’t restricted to educational/academic situations. In fact, I find the educational aspects of my difficulties to be the easiest parts to cope with. It’s in the rest of my life that NLD poses the most troubling problems. NLD is a pervasive functional disorder.
One Foot on the Spectrum: An NLD Blog 