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My name is Sydney and I am 23 years old. I am from a small town in Alabama and was diagnosed with NVLD when I was in the 5th grade. While the diagnoses answered a bunch of questions, it opened its own can of problems. My parents immediately put an IEP in place for me at school to receive certain accommodations, hardly any of which were met throughout the rest of my schooling, reasoning being my grades were “good enough” and I didn’t really need assistance. I was an all A and occasional B student. Friends were few and far between but I clung to the ones I did have. Marching band was a safe haven for me and was the only place in which I felt I was good at something. Read More

I don’t even know where to begin. I had a learning disability for a long time. Academically I did ok except for math and taking notes.  I was unable to make friends, was clumsy, and not included in social groups. In elementary school I was in a special gym class. I hated it. My mother constantly had me evaluated and tested. I wanted to be a normal kid. As I got older the constant special help led to anger behavioral problems which led to more exclusion and then removal from the family and dcf involvement. My life has been hard.  The hardest part is not being able to relate and connect to others through friendships and relationships. I feel so alone in this world and feel misunderstood. Read More

Have you ever made what you would consider a careless mistake? Or made so many mistakes at work that you get fired or lose count? I have done all of those because of the NLD. I have made many mistakes in my life and at work, big and small ones. I’ll give you a few examples. Read More

My story is so long and I’ve explained it too many times to have the energy to retell it.

Believe it or not, I am a successful visual artist. Searching to advance in my painting practice, I’ve found a couple of fun and challenging activities that work well. It is not a cure, but daily practice of these activities does lead to gains. I have been helped a lot by playing Quizbit, alone. This helps with mental rotation, visual-spatial reasoning, and fine motor skills. Read More

For the longest time, I didn’t realize anything was wrong with me. I was doing good in school with straight A’s, but I had no friends, and couldn’t seem to make any. No one wanted to play with me or invite me over, and I didn’t know why. Flash forward 8 years and I’m thinking I might have autism, based on the things I had seen online and the people I talked to. It took about a year to get the diagnosis of NVLD, and I didn’t understand it. I still don’t a year later. Read More

When I was younger I always viewed or defined myself as cool or relatable. As I progressed through life, this perspective eventually melted away. It did not help that I would move around a lot throughout my childhood and thus I was the perpetual new kid. On top of that unfortunate title, I was also a little off and I was not sure why. I would not know what I would do or say but just by simply trying to interact with peers I would be met with laughter. Even though many of these elements have been discussed in prior blogs, I will dive into an aspect that I have not fully embraced in past articles, this aspect is perspective. As mentioned earlier, I would think that interacting with others was fine and without a challenge. What I did not know was that the way that I perceived my self and my actions was far different then how my peers viewed me. Read More

You may not believe this, but at 57, just last night, I was able to see how socially different I have been throughout my life than all those around me.  How awkward, of course, but far different than that; the only way I can explain it is to say that it felt like I have lived inside an invisible can throughout my life, and its walls separate me from everyone else. There was no way to bridge that gap. The first day of kindergarten I just stood and wailed, alone, as the rest of the class walked single-file to a room down a long hall. At the start of 2nd grade we moved. I would stand alone in the school yard, trying to disappear, and became non-caring inside my can. I cared for others, and wanted to connect, and felt awkward interiorally, but another part of me let go of the thought of being an outsider and caring what others thought, and just sank deeper down inside my aloneness, within my own world. It was as though my interior world became more far more real than the outside world. Years later my mother would say that I “lived on Saturn.” Read More

You may have seen the Oscars and the assault on Chris Rock and wondered, “What was that?! Why didn’t Chris step away? Couldn’t he see he was being aggressed upon?” Well, maybe not.

While most people can discern others’ nonverbal cues to assess their emotional state, Chris could not accurately perceive the anger on Will Smith’s face and the visible aggression in his gait. Chris’ difficulty in perceiving Will’s anger, shown nonverbally, likely stemmed from Chris’ Non-Verbal Learning Disorder (NVLD). NVLD is a learning disorder that affects a person’s ability to read social situations as well as analyze and synthesize different channels of incoming information. Like many people with NVLD, Chris Rock struggles to understand social cues and manage social interactions. Read More