New Year; Old Dyslexic

I'm having trouble getting excited about the new year.  I keep trying to talk myself into being upbeat about a clean slate, a brand new year, the projects that are in the near future, and the promise of warm weather (we hit a low of -13 a couple of weeks ago.  That was without wind chill.  We really haven't made it much past freezing until today).

My stumbling block is the unwanted realization that as I've gotten older, I've noticed more pronounced issues with my dyslexia.  I know that I'm fast reaching the whole "senior citizen" thing and that I should expect changes in mental efficiency.  But add normal aging issues to dyslexic issues, and I'm suddenly watching all the hard work and effort I've made over the years unravel in a mental tangle of confused synapses.

I had to sub for my husband last night at Sunday evening Mass, which meant trying to learn Mass parts and hymns in an afternoon.  Which meant sight-reading.  Great.  But hey, I'm a professional pianist, regularly perform (by memory) works like Scherzi and Ballades, and am working up a full-length recital.  Surely, I could make my way through some not-very-hard hymns and Mass parts. And to make things even easier (?), the hymns were predominantly Christmas songs.

By now I know that trying to read even simple scores at tempo presents problems, so I practiced playing 1st and 3rd beats only, hoping that my tunnel vision would open up and that I would be able to "see" more notes despite the time crunch.  "We Three Kings", "What Child Is This", and "Joy to the World" were (mostly) recognizable, even if mostly melody.  The piece that went the best was the one that I gave up trying to read and improvised using melody and guitar chords.

So, you may wonder, why didn't I use guitar chords and melody line for all of the music?

I tried.  For some reason (could've been panic, my old sight-reading companion), I was not recognizing the chord symbols fast enough.  I've never experienced what I term "dyslexic blocking" with guitar chords.  So I had to rely on ear and feel around for familiar progressions I knew from listening to Christmas songs for the better half of a century.  Letters like D, G, A, em, just were not looking familiar.  So while I've memorized and played a Gershwin Prelude in an afternoon, I could not get those same gray cells to read and play simple tunes or guitar chord progressions yesterday afternoon.

It's taken me 24 hours to realize that things were not quite so abysmal as I initially thought.  My chord progressions were with (and mostly the same as) the electric bass player, and I kept some form of rhythmic support going with the guitars.  My ear guided me more than my eyes did, and after Mass the leader complimented my ability to easily fall in sync with them whenever I sub for my husband.

Dyslexia alone is bad enough.  The holes it can punch into one's self-confidence are a killer.  Even after years and years of knowing I'm dyslexic, I still have trouble accepting its invisibility.  I still fall into the idea that if it's not visible, it doesn't exist.  And where dyslexia is concerned, I'm definitely the "glass-is-half-empty" type of person.

So maybe this year I should embrace the difficulties dyslexia presents.  After all, I have to keep thinking outside the box to work around my dyslexic issues, which keeps me thinking, which (hopefully) will generate more gray cells, which (again, hopefully) will keep that aging white matter at bay.

Talk about depressing.