Just a couple of weeks ago, a large amount of us might have happened across press coverage surrounding global pop superstar Robbie Williams and his daughter Teddy. In a narrative that a distressing amount of us might find not wholly unfamiliar, Robbie spoke openly about his own and his daughter’s dyslexia and how when she was diagnosed, she lost a friend because of her newly-identified neurodiversity – and it might have gotten a few of us thinking about our own experiences too.

Dyslexia commonly has an impact on how we read, sometimes on how we write, and can alter the ways in which we take in information and how we respond to our surrounding stimuli. But we don’t talk enough about how it can have an effect on us socially too. So many neurodivergent people feel isolated and shut out from so many social sites and events in their lives and we need to actually begin to recognise and talk about these problems as we go forwards into 2023. It’s not just about how dyslexia changes some of the ‘standard’ or ‘expected’ ways in which an individual works and learns – we need to start looking at things holistically and re-centre our understanding of it in terms of the whole life when it comes to advocating for change.

Dyslexic Friendship: How Can Dyslexia Change the Way We Socialise?

• Sometimes when we’ve got dyslexia we can feel left out of activity planning within our social groups. If somebody decides to set up a book club, for example, even though we get invited we might feel like there’s a wall between us and everything we have to do to participate fully in the activity – a book that takes our peer group a week to read might take us a couple, and analysing passages of text in front of our friends might make us feel put ‘on the spot’ and even humiliated.

• It can also make us feel like we’re not able to engage with things on the level that other people in our friendship group might. A trip to a museum might be a fun and fulfilling thing for a lot of people, but depending on the museum chosen, your own experience of dyslexia and the availability of audio tours, you might find it a little tricky to access the information on the same level as your peers as you find you’re skipping half of the information signs as they get ready to move on to the next items.

• It’s fun to head out for a drink after work sometimes: the people you spend your 9-5 with are usually a different crowd than your main friendship group, and it’s nice to be able to socialise with them after work and get to know them on another level. However some folks with dyslexia or other neurodiverse differences find work to be utterly exhausting – between masking, working and the sheer effort that they have to put in to engage with the reading their job entails, adding extra hours onto the work day at 5pm- even if they’re being spent having fun in a club or bar- seems unthinkable.

• Burnout is pretty common amongst working neurodivergent people. It takes a lot of consistent effort to show up every day and do what you need to do to get your job done, especially if it’s not particularly tailored to the ways that your brain finds it easiest to work. This means that burnout is a very real possibility – which in turn means that sometimes you’ll find yourself taking a step back from things like seeing friends, going out and meeting with people due simply to your own emotions and the amount of effort that these things will entail. It’s a distressing truth that work-related burnout doesn’t only impact on our work lives: it takes energy away from every other aspect of them too.

• As a society, we perhaps don’t realise just how much of our socialisation still happens in a text format – but somebody with dyslexia is likely to have done. That group chat you’re constantly dropping memes, hot takes and weekend plans into might be a fab way to stay in touch for most of your friends, but if somebody has dyslexia and they haven’t yet set up or don’t find a benefit to using their phone with a screen reader app, there’s a good chance they just like react and move on without taking anything in. Online conversations move fast, especially if there are a lot of participants… and keeping up is a lot of effort.

• Dyslexia isn’t easy to get your head around especially if you haven’t heard about it before, and sadly some younger children might pull away from their dyslexic classmates over unfounded fears and a lack of understanding. It can be incredibly distressing for children and their parents alike. It has the power to have a huge impact on an individual’s self-esteem and relationship with their peers, soe need to combat this early and make sure that learners are developing a concept of neurodiversity early on. This and encompassing neuroinclusivity into wider understandings of equality and access for even the youngest minds- both in school and at home.

• Dyslexia can also have a noticeable effect on social skills, especially in children. It might mean that somebody has trouble finding the right words, remembers things wrong, or generally just needs a little longer to process things conversationally. All of this can lead to children developing a hesitant manner of communication that can make it a little harder to gel with their classmates and people their own age.

• This in turn can also lead to children (and adults) feeling anxious about communication in general, and pulling away from their peers in a bid to reduce the sites of anxiety in their day-to-day lives. When it’s exhausting to communicate via messaging and you find conversations to be awkward and tricky to process, it can sometimes feel like it’s easier just not to bother and preserve your wellbeing, rather than enter into long-winded or uncomfortable dialogues.

• Understood.org also suggests that as many dyslexic learners require extra tutoring or private reading instruction, this actively cuts into time spent that’s earmarked in other children’s lives for socialising. This means that dyslexic learners might have to give up on sports clubs, youth groups and just hanging out with their peers in order to make room in their day-to-day for additional education – whilst their classmates are out playing football or gaming together online, somebody receiving extra reading instruction is usually sat in isolation as they build their skills in a one-on-one learning environment.

• And finally, we need to talk about cultural isolation – having dyslexia means that the ways in which we engage with media might be changed or take more time than usual. This means that some of the time, somebody asking if we’ve read, played or watched something might be met with a ‘no’ or a ‘not yet’. In effect, what’s essentially happening is that we are robbed of this opportunity to engage with somebody on this personal level. It happens to everybody sometimes, but someone with dyslexia (or even audio processing issues, or ADHD/ADD-) might find that they’re often weeks or months behind with media, meaning that they’re missing out on opportunities to connect.

Dyslexia is lonely sometimes– it’s not just struggling with the latest bestsellers if you can’t find a High/Low copy or an audiobook version, it’s not just taking a little longer to read through your daily emails.

Sometimes it goes deeper than working and learning and it can be difficult to initially discuss or vocalise because it’s simply not something we talk about much… if at all. In 2023 it’d be amazing to see a much more holistic understanding and conversation happening in the global community about dyslexia, neurodivergence and the ways in which it’s not something that we can leave at the office or the classroom door – and only then can we start changing, building and growing to foster equality across the board, especially in the ways that we connect with others.