I'M GOING TO tell you a secret. It's something almost no one in my professional life knows
. I'm dyslexic. Given that knowledge, my chosen career—writer—might seem odd. But while I
was cursed with poor spelling skills, I’ve always been drawn to storytelling. The career-p
lanning report that accompanied the aptitude test I took at 13 even tried to dissuade me f
rom a “literary” career, but even back then I had enough bravado to overrule that piece of
computer-generated advice.Dyslexia, my constant companion, occupies a taboo place in my p
ersonal narrative. Like my breath, I often forget it’s there. Sometimes I delude myself in
to thinking I’ve outgrown it. When I told friends that I was writing this article, several
advised me to back out of the contract. One didn’t even believe me when I told her I was
dyslexic. How could I be a writer? They were concerned this assignment might be my last.Bu
t I’ve never thought of myself as having a disability. Instead, I see it as a glitch, and
one I've gotten good at masking. I've been able to hide my dyslexia for decades simply bec
ause I live in an age of technological wonders. Microsoft Word spell-checks most every syl
lable I write. When my dyslexic mind mangles a word so much that it's rendered un-spell-ch
eckable, I'll deploy an arsenal of workarounds. I might reverse-engineer a word by typing
an easy synonym into the thesaurus, or I might paste my best attempt into my browser bar a
nd let the search engine offer the correct spelling as a suggested query.These "cheats" ar
e ingrained in my writing process; I hardly notice doing them anymore. But something happe
ned a few months ago to break me out of my familiar routines. I began writing with the hel
p of an AI-powered browser plug-in so adept at correcting my linguistic missteps, it ended
up sending me on a quest to discover what life might be like in a technologically enabled
post-dyslexic world.WHEN I WAS really little, I tried to see words—the actual orthography
—as pictures. For the word “dog,” I would think: There’s a circle then a line, then a circ
le, then a circle with a hook. Knowing the specific letters and decoding them wasn’t part
of my process. Thinking in pictures was how reading worked, I thought.My dyslexia was disc
overed in grade school, where I had the benefit and luck of attending a well-funded instit
ution equipped to respond to my obvious signs of trouble. By the end of second grade, I wa
s enrolled in an intensive summer school program for dyslexics. My class used a slide proj
ector-like device known as a Controlled Reader. Even back then, it was a relic; when the t
eacher flipped it on, the stuffy room filled with the aroma of an electrical fire.The Cont
rolled Reader projected text onto a screen at the front of the class just like a regular s
lide projector, but with one difference. Light would shine only through a narrow horizonta
l slit, allowing only a single line of text to be illuminated at any one time. Each line o
f text would flip into view for a second or two, then get replaced with the next one. The
teacher could crank up the speed of the machine using a dial, forcing the class to read at
speeds up to 130 words per minute.After each reel, we were given a test, and over the wee
ks, the speed would be increased. While I was missing out on normal kid stuff—my morning s
wim time, horseback riding at summer camp—something happened to me in that overheated clas
sroom. Reading began to click. I eventually found myself in honors classes, though I did h
ave to advocate for my placement when teachers assumed my difficulty reading meant I shoul
d be kept apart from the smart kids.I later attended NYU’s film school and set out to make
a documentary about my dyslexia. My seventh-grade English teacher even gave me his old Co
ntrolled Reader machine so I could use it in the film, but I lost my nerve and never finis
hed the movie. I feared I wasn’t established or successful enough, and I believed in the t
rope that a personal story about overcoming a reading disability needed to accompany an ou
tsized achievement. Like my dyslexia, I keep that speed-reading machine, an artifact from
childhood, hidden away in the back of a closet.At this point in my professional life, I’m
only outed when writing by hand in a public setting, which was the case when I went on a b
ook tour to promote my memoir about new motherhood and wrote my inscriptions with an unfor
giving black Sharpie. I'd keep post-it notes and a pen by my side. “Could you put down wha
t you want me to write? And if you have a fancy name like Margaux, well, jot that down too
.”WHILE IT IS agreed that dyslexia is a language-based learning disability, there is no un
iversally accepted definition of the phenomenon, nor is there a complete understanding of
its cause. But with the arrival of functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain
activity, scientists in the last few decades have been able to study the brain activity of
dyslexics. What's striking is how the dyslexic brain does not utilize areas usually engag
ed in reading. In addition, the brain can be seen jury-rigging other areas to form words i
n the same way a stroke victim might during recovery, harnessing plasticity—the brain’s ab
ility to rewire itself.A hallmark of dyslexia is the inability to discern phonemes, distin
ct sounds represented by specific letters. I struggle with this. I can hear the sounds, bu
t I sometimes can’t translate them to letters on the page. The other day, I wanted to writ
e the word "agitated." This is a word I know. I’ve said it aloud countless times without m
ispronouncing it, and I’ve read it often as well. And yet, when typing it, even sounding i
t out as I go, I hear a “d” and a “j” in it. So fishing around in my brain’s Bermuda Trian
gle, I typed out the word adjetated. I can remember short words—most of the shopworn workh
orses come easy—and a bunch of longer ones too. But there remains a large subgroup of word
s I cannot phonetically master or remember.Then, a few months ago, I discovered Grammarly,
a free cloud-based software extension that you add onto a web browser. The plug-in is bil
led as a "writing assistant," but I mostly used it as a spell-checker, a task at which it
proved nearly omniscient. Grammarly could help me spell even the words that regularly flum
moxed MS Word and Google.Those first few weeks with Grammarly, it felt like I was like fal
ling for a crush. In the browser, it works like any other spellchecker. An elegant light g
reen box (Pantone 2240 U) appears when the cursor hovers over a red underlined word. But m
y infatuation quickly grew. Even the name, "Grammarly," sounds like the benevolent hero in
a Jane Austen novel: Good Mr. Grammarly! The software seemed to get me—and my scrambled m
isspellings—in ways that no other had before. Grammarly always knew the right word. It eve
n seemed to understand the way my dyslexic brain thinks—a maze of patched and redirected c
onnections zig-zagging around my gray matter—and could come up with exactly what I was try
ing to say, even though I couldn't fully spell it. It was only then, using something so se
amless, that I wondered if technology could soon bring an end to my dyslexia as I knew it.