~ Living my life with COLOUR ~

I always knew there was something not quite right with me and this gave me a lot of doubt in myself but I could never pin point what the real problem was. From a young age I have struggled with reading difficulty’s and I hated leaning. When I was 15, I was asked if I had heard of Irlen Syndrome, which I hadn’t but this made me curious and I did a lot of research into it. Later on, that month I went to get tested and I was diagnosed with Irlen Syndrome. Irlen Syndrome is a visual processing problem which appears to be caused by a defect in one of the visual pathways that carries messages from the eye to the brain. I went through colour testing to find out which colour made my eyes happier, at first my colour was green but 12 months later my colour changed to dark brown and that is still my current colour.

Before I was diagnosed, School was near impossible. After 15 minutes of reading I would get headaches, sore eyes and show ADHA like symptoms. I couldn’t sit still, my mind felt like it was going to explode because it was working much harder then what the average persons mind would be. The best I can explain the experience is imagine you were flying a plane, and all of a sudden, your engines die, they catch on fire and your about to crash into a wall. In the 10 seconds that feels like an eternity, you are panicking like any sane person would be. You can’t think straight, a million things running through your mind yet your mind is totally blank…. But in reality, to the average person without Irlen’s is simply manufacturing a paper plane to stay in the air for as long as possible. Bad choice of words but you get the idea, the amount of activity going on in my brain was constantly giving me panic attacks.

Now I have tinted glasses, their job is to block light out of my eyes so that it calms my eyes and brain. With them they make white paper darker so that I can read the words without the brightness of the paper distracting my eyes. I now have more confidence in myself, I don’t have nearly as many ‘Meltdowns’ as I use to, I love studying and learning about new things. However, when I was diagnosed with Irlen Syndrome I was put on the more severe end of the scale. When I read, I can only see five letters at a time which makes it so easy to lose my place and makes me slow at reading.

But glasses don’t fix it all for me, I would say with my glasses now it improves my disability about 70-80% and if I take my glasses off when I am in a bright area, I almost immediately feel like vomiting. I could not live without my glasses, they are my best friend, they make me happier, they make more capable of leaning and they give my life COLOUR!