Edition 378 | The Dyslexic AI Newsletter by LM Lab AI

Reading Time: 6 minutes | Listening Time: 8 minutes

🧠 A few weeks ago I finally admitted I needed reading glasses.

Not because I woke up one day and couldn't see.

Because I'd been not seeing for months, and I'd gotten so good at working around it that I didn't notice.

Here's what that actually looked like.

Text on my phone. Text on my computer. I'd look at it, and something in my brain would fill in the gaps instead of actually resolving the words.

I wasn't reading. I was glossing.

And I didn't clock it as a problem, because glossing still mostly worked. I could get the gist. I could keep moving. The cost was invisible, so I never added it up.

It took someone else noticing me squinting, holding my phone at arm's length, to make me stop and ask what was actually going on.

The second I put on a pair of reading glasses, the difference wasn't subtle.

Text I'd been half-reading for months came into full focus. Sharp edges on letters I didn't know had gone soft. Whole words snapping into place instead of getting approximated.

And the thing that hit me hardest wasn't the clarity.

It was realizing how long I'd been operating at a deficit without knowing it.

I've spent years writing about masking in the context of dyslexia. Building workarounds so smooth that even you forget you're compensating.

I never expected to live it out with my own eyesight.

But that's exactly what it was. I built an unconscious workaround for text I couldn't fully resolve, and the workaround was good enough that I stopped noticing there was a gap to close.

That's the part that scares me a little, if I'm honest.

If I can mask a physical, measurable thing like eyesight for months, how much longer can any of us mask something less obvious? A learning difference. A processing difference. A sensory difference that never gets named because the workaround never fails hard enough to force the question.

This is the part I think matters most.

The glasses didn't just make reading easier. They showed me how much I'd been missing. I didn't know the size of the gap until something closed it.

That's the same argument I've been making about AI for dyslexic and neurodivergent thinkers, and living it out with my own eyes made it land differently.

A tool that meets you where you actually are doesn't just accommodate a weakness. It can show you the weakness you'd stopped seeing, because you'd built your whole system around working past it instead of naming it.

This has been a season of noticing gaps I'd stopped seeing, on more than one front.

We're in the middle of moving my daughter to independent study. She'd been back in a school building after homeschooling since seventh grade, and we're now doing something we've never officially done before. It's been a learning curve for me as a parent, processing what she needs and what actually works for her, in real time.

Different situation, same underlying question I keep running into everywhere lately: what do we stop seeing because we've gotten good at working around it, and what happens once someone names it and hands us the right tool?

My son's been home this week too, on fall break from his year-round school schedule. Good timing to be thinking about this stuff with both kids around.

Pay attention to what you've quietly stopped noticing because you've gotten good at working around it.

Not the big obvious struggles. The small ones you've built such a smooth workaround for that you forgot to ask if the workaround was even necessary anymore.

Ask yourself, or ask someone close to you: where am I glossing instead of actually seeing?

"Where in my life have I built a workaround so smooth I stopped noticing there was a problem underneath it? Ask me questions until we find it."

Matt "Coach" Ivey

Founder, LM Lab AI | Creator, The Dyslexic AI Newsletter

Dictated, not typed. Obviously.