Friday 15 August 2014

Living with Irlen pt.2

I went for the first bike ride since I was about 12 yesterday (Something about summer and being healthy... apparently). It's moments like this that I get frustrated. It was about 6 pm, the sun was just under the tree tops, I was riding up and down hills through the back streets of my village, dodging dog walkers and pot holes down country lanes. It was gorgeous; or at least the bits I could see were gorgeous. With the sun pocking it's head out of every other tree I was caught in moments of blindness or a horrendous shooting pain in my eyes.
   The debate in my head was do I close my eyes, loose my balance (I'm an awful rider) and go straight into a car OR put up with it until I get home and sit in the dark for an hour? I carried on. Mainly because I'm stubborn and partly because I didn't want to get run over on a country lane. It really is times like these that I realise how little we know about the brain. When we say Irlen people automatically assume reading, it's coupled with dyslexia, it effects our learning. It effects my life.
      The world changes colour when this happens by the way. Grey gravel turns to pitch black, green trees turn bright yellow, even the sky, famously blue can change from a deep purple to a crimson. The eternal debate about how we each see colours is answered by the way! We don't. My theory is that we give names to shades and on the whole we agree. I went to see Guardians of the Galaxy *VERY funny... a little sexist* and I'm still adamant that Bautista's character Drax is BLUE with red scarification... my boyfriend and the friends we went with tell me he's grey. How crazy is this world? In the most wonderful way.

    This is my life and I shouldn't need to put a paragraph here to justify my descriptions of it but I will. There is so little out there about Irlen from a person perspective that something like this feels necessary.

Oh! I also found a video about how Irlen looks on paper. It's very interesting and helped my family understand when I was first diagnosed. Plus grand music!

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