People beg for help with nonverbal learning disorder (NLD.) It can be overwhelming even when relatively mild and incapacitating when severe.
Many people with NLD can’t find and/or hold jobs. Many can’t count change, understand money, tell time or understand the concept of time passing. Many people with NLD while able to read out loud perfectly can’t comprehend the words. If they do they take the words literally and are unable to appreciate the beauty and wisdom (sometimes) in metaphors.
Many people with NLD not only can’t read maps but can’t follow directions from and to specific places. Others can’t follow directions for anything the least bit mechanical. I spent all weekend obsessing over a juicer. I knew I wouldn’t be able to take it apart and put it back together again. Every failure in my life came rushing back.
Many people with NLD have to be told specifically how to budget money. This much must be set aside for rent; that much for gas and electric, and so on.
That doesn’t mean they’re not capable of learning and/or working, but things must be explained and re-explained in a manner that fits their learning style. There’s no one learning style for people with NLD; there are no two people who have exactly the same symptoms.
I assumed that most people with NLD found school easier the higher up the educational chain they went. I was in a grad program my last two years of undergrad school and found it wonderful. I found grad school to be disappointingly simplistic. But that is me, and I’m just one person with NLD.
I have been talking about NLD from my perspective as it was the only perspective that I knew. But I have spent the past two years immersed in NLD groups trying to understand it from every angle.
It hasn’t been easy for me to understand it and I have NLD. I don’t know of any grad schools that offer classes on NLD. Yet more and more people are being diagnosed with it.
Essentially we’re being told: “Here’s your diagnosis; now go screw up your life.”
So when autism awareness month rolls around, I can only think: “but what about us?” We deserve recognition. We deserve therapists we don’t have to educate in NLD. We deserve to have job training that suits our disparate needs.
It’s easy to become bitter and I understand why people are bitter. But then they’re told: “Bitterness isn’t attractive; change your attitude immediately.”
I used to have a popular personal blog, Courting Destiny. It and I were a cover story in a large national weekly, the center of a group interview in a daily and much more. But once I found out about NLD and began begging for help the only way I knew how—in my blog—readers began deserting me.
I felt as if I had a communicable disease. And yes I became bitter and angry. For if I were in the autism spectrum (I don’t think NLD is in the spectrum) or were bi-polar, bloggers would have rushed in to support me.
I understand that they know about autism and bi-polars and don’t know or understand NLD, but awareness has to begin somewhere.
I found incredible people with NLD on Facebook. Facebook and other social media platforms are the future and the present. Facebook just might have saved my life as I met so many people with similar problems to mine.
I’m very glad there’s autism awareness month. I hope the DSM 5 will break down autism and continue to include NOS/PDD (not otherwise specified; pervasive development disorder) so there can be categories that NLD somewhat logically fits in. More than that I wish that NLD is its own category.
I hope I live long enough to see NLD recognized and embraced, by celebrities, the media and more.
This content was originally published here.