Alternative paths
My brain has been building workarounds since childhood.
It had to.
I had dyslexia, though it was only diagnosed in 2024! As a dyslexic, I couldn’t access the typical linear, language-based pathways most people use. So, my brain developed non-standard routes for processing information.
Then, when I was a teenager, I was involved in a near-fatal incident, which resulted in my skull being fractured in multiple places. This year, well over 40-years later, I discovered that some damage had been caused to my brain, which caused my brain to start rewiring itself (something known as compensatory rewiring).
Unknown to me, whilst still a child I was combining dyslexia with whatever ‘compensatory rewiring’ the trauma to my brain created. At the time, I had no idea what was happening. Over the coming months and years, I saw myself develop into a different person. I went from being very average at school, to working as a manual labourer aged 17, to becoming a very highly-paid marketing director, to owning a successful business in my twenties, which I still own today.
A neuropsychologist told me the best way to explain it is like this: where most people’s brains follow natural, neural highways, mine has access to connections and shortcuts that don’t usually exist.
The changes following the damage to my brain created additional strengths. I didn’t suddenly become a genius, like some who experienced brain damage. But I did gain the ability to think in a very different, more effective way.
Some examples.
- I find it very easy to come up with a solution to pressing problems and challenges, sometimes it happens almost instantly or in a matter of minutes.
- I’m able to create a 3 dimensional shape in my mind and look at the shape from different angles, and it’s so ‘real’ that I can run my finger along the edges or around the shape, and ‘feel’ it as if it was in front of me. Commercially, this rewiring allows me to quickly identify problems in a project, system or organisation.
- My high level of non-linear reasoning means I thrive in certain areas, including creativity, strategy, invention, design and ideation.
- I’m able to quickly get answers, by making leaps between apparently unrelated ideas.
- I’m passionately interested in people and can ‘read’ people very quickly. This helps enormously when I work with the homeless. I can meet them where they are.
- And unusually for a dyslexic, I am a prolific reader. I read for hours, daily.
The downside. I’m terrible with numbers and only a little better at spelling. I can’t follow verbal directions, from the 3rd instruction (which was terrible before sat-nav). And I have to take lots of notes. There are some other challenges, but thankfully, technology either mitigates or eliminates them.
So at last, I finally understand my weirdness. And I can explain it to others.
Jim Connolly – October 2025