The outlandish to the dark horse

To want

Do you want something? Do you want to change? Do you want to achieve something? There is a difference between wanting change and truly wanting to change. There is a difference between wanting something and truly wanting something. Only those that make a wholehearted effort to change will change. Only those that make a wholehearted effort to get will get. To bring about change there must be an absolute wish for it. We will assume that the change is for the better according to the one with the problem. Spelling out the steps is one thing. Getting on with it is something else entirely. Someone that wants something puts themselves through any reasonable measure to achieve it. They will confront and deal with each hurdle they face. Once the serious declaration of wanting to do something about the problem has been made, the battle begins. With the help of people with the relevant expertise, progress will be made. Nobody can wave a magic wand, and all comes right. The desire to change is the most important thing. With that in place you will on your way. The desire to change leads to change.

All of us will experience issues to some degree and it is a mistake to consider any disorder to be something you either have or you don’t. There are variations in the presumed severity. Inconsistent decrees are made as to whether it even matters or not. Many will not regard it as a problem, whereas others will see it as the be all and end all. We will each handle things very differently. How do you decide when a threshold is exceeded, exceeded enough to warrant a label. It can be contentious. If you are on the cusp, you might never get a diagnosis and could quite easily consider it normal, something that we live with. You may need to talk to a lot of different people to compare your sensations, urges or feelings to see what is common and what is less so. You cannot test and compare it in the same way as you can measure your running speed or vision. There are no precise markers. No amount of study can put you in someone else's shoes, inside their mind and body. Who can truly grasp someone else’s perspective and make an accurate comparison with their own. Our perception of ourselves is so different to what we imagine it to be. People don’t see us the way we see ourselves.

We gain new insights as time passes. What we took as normal before, seem bizarre now. Quite often there is a magical upside to being what we might call, abnormal. We may have a special capability not necessarily a prosaic ability to recall a sequence of playing cards or memorise innumerable facts and figures, something else instead. Many people regarded as geniuses have significant character flaws. They act oddly with eccentricity running in parallel to their brilliance.

Learning the skills to operate in a demanding, complex world is hard work. Rather than putting in that hard work we find an excuse to hide our laziness. The excuse is a label. A supposed clinical reason to get a free pass and avoid being on a level playing field with the rest. People learn to read at different rates. Those that struggle may not have a disability. They simply lack the reading practice. The more practice they get, the less they mix letters and words up.