This is not me, dyslexia is in my family, hyperlexia is the opposite. Both of these exist outside of autism, but both are more common among autistic people. Hyperlexia is identified, usually in childhood, in someone with a reading ability which is well advanced for their age and a fascination with numbers or letters. It has only recently been identified, unlike dyslexia which has had diagnostic criteria since the 1990s and has been spoken about for a few decades before that. That is understandable, why have the name for something that people are good at?

Just a side note, this post is disjointed. my functioning has been poor and my ability to write coherently has been impaired over the last few days: this will pass. This is why we do not like functioning labels. I am not always as high-functioning all the time, and people labelled as low-functioning can often communicate in some way, even if it is not the way you like to receive communication. Anyway, no pictures this tine, I don’t have the energy. So back to what I wanted to talk about.

That is because there is a downside to hyperlexia, one site says, “individuals with Hyperlexia will have difficulties in their understanding of spoken language.” But they would, they are trying to sell therapy. I learned about hyperlexia from a video made by an autistic person who seemingly has no problem with talking to camera. His channel is here. But that has been around as long as we have known about autism, therapists who look only on the bad side of autism and miss all the positives, there was even a report recently that showed that autistic people tend to be more honest than the average person,and it was reported as if it were a bad thing. Or that we tend to be more logical than others which is also often put forward as a bad thing.

Hyperlexia is one of the hypers of autism, like hyperfocus and hypersensitivity. I know about hypersensitivity, being sensitive to light. But even things common have an opposite. Hypersensitivity and hyposensitivity, are common opposites, part of the spiky skill sets that are found in autistic people. Some have strengths where others have weaknesses. It is why autism is called a spectrum. But a tendency in autism is that we can be very good at what we are good at.

So autistic people are different from the general population, but we are often just as different as that from each other, the characteristics are often sensing differences, hyper- and hypo- sensitivity, and communication differences, often put down as communication problems when our communication is different. Most of our problems actually stem from coping with a world where things have been designed without autistic sensibilities in mind or when we are expected to behave like everybody else and not be ourselves.

Life with autism can be great, and often is great when we are allowed to be ourselves, making anagrams from the number plates of passing cars is normal to me, as is wondering why we call them number plates when they have more letters than numbers.

I have only just learnt about hyperlexia. This post was me using text editing to sort out what I think.