Courage, Weakness, and Pundit Professionals

Lately, my husband has been on my case to write (and publish) a book about dyslexia in the music field.  I've given presentations locally, regionally, and nationally, have had an article published in Claiver Companion, and have had several fellow piano/music teachers ask my advice on working with students who exhibit issues with reading music.  I've got outlines, pages (and pages) of notes, resources, and a college-aged daughter to help me with modern footnote notation.  The book is basically written.

So, why haven't I fleshed out my notes and resource material and actually written the damned thing?

How many of you have taken your single greatest intellectual weakness and bared it for all the world to see?

I'm still recognizing where my dyslexia, as mild as it is, has totally screwed up my ability to comprehend and successfully play the piano repertoire I've learned over the years.  And when I run into these intellectual walls I have no guidelines, no chart or resource book, to tell me that not all pianists have similar issues.  So I start thinking that my problems are not so much from dyslexia as lack of talent.

Take Liszt's Un Sospiro.  I performed this work on my sophomore recital at OU.  I remember having real issues with trying to think as fast as the piece required, telling which hand was which and which hand should be playing which register on the piano.  Going left-over-right never presented a problem (I'm naturally left-handed, which Joe swears is a major advantage), but I "lost" my right hand whenever I had to cross right-over-left.  My brain failed to see what my right hand was supposed to do.  Not only that, but I could never "think" my right hand fast enough to feel comfortable with all those lickety-split arpeggios.  Now, in that department technique presented a major problem, but add visual confusion, and my brain just didn't get everything that my hands were supposed to be doing.

I picked the piece up a couple of years ago and performed it during an American Music Society recital.  It felt light-years more comfortable, as my technique has improved over the decades.  But there were certain sections that my brain still refused to "see", and those places, though radically less than before, still ate my lunch.

I'm working up the piece again to put on a solo program.  And now, third time and thirty years later, my brain understands those right-over-left places, and there is no problem.  At all.  So now I'm feeling more than a little stupid that it took this long for my mental neurons to figure out some pretty simple hand-switching.

There is less than no research or resources concerning the effects of dyslexia in musicians.  I have met several professional musician who, like myself, cannot explain why the written page does not make sense.  Like me, they have come up with solutions to get around the problem, mainly aural memorization and visual memorization of keyboard patterns.  I know it would benefit a lot of students and possibly "closet music dyslexics", but I'm having trouble drumming up the courage to expose my greatest weakness, especially when so many professional musicians out there opine that music reading is a basic skill and weakness in the area indicates one should pursue some other endeavor.