Published - Thursday, March 25, 2004

Discovering Life Halfway Through It

By Matt James | La Crosse Tribune

Laurie Reed has been dreading this column for a while now. It is, after all, about her.  

It's not that it's a negative column. Anything but, really. Reed has overcome plenty in her life, some of which she didn't even understand until her mid-30s.

Her father died when she was an infant. She herself had open-heart surgery as a child to correct a defect.

Now, she has written a book, something she never thought she could do. And she finally has found a job that fits her — one that plays to her strengths.

There is so much positive to talk about, but she sits and stews and waits and mostly wonders what will be said here, how she will be portrayed. Will people think she's nuts? Will they understand her condition?

She calls a few times. When is the article going to run? And something else: When she said that one thing, that's not actually what she meant. And don't put in that part where she was joking. People might not understand.

So what is Laurie Reed's condition? It's called a Nonverbal Learning Disability, NLD for short, but she doesn't like the abbreviated version, thinks it makes her sound a little dumb.

Reed, like many with NLD, has spent much of her life thinking she was stupid, with no support for another explanation. 

Raised in La Crosse, Reed's disability went undetected though grade school, junior high and high school. Every level of school was a struggle, and how she earned a college degree, when many with NLD never complete high school, is pretty remarkable. She went to Western Wisconsin Technical College, back when it was WWTI. She went to UW-Stout for a while, then
finally got an occupational therapist assistant degree from the College of St. Catherine in Minneapolis.

How, you ask?

"A lot of tutors, and I worked my butt off," she says.

You see, NLD, doesn't have much to do with intelligence. What it does is affect the right side of
the brain and drastically hampers social skills. Reed can't really tell when someone is kidding. She can't pick up on body language. Sometimes, she doesn't know when she's talking too loudly, or too much, or if she's making too big of deal about something trivial.

"The saying, ‘You're making a mountain out of a mole hill' was brought to my attention a lot," she says in her book.

Take the book, for instance. It's called "Unaware: Living With Nonverbal Learning Disabilities." Pearl Street Books is carrying it, but to be perfectly honest, it's never going to be a best seller. It's not supposed to be. It's self-published, and the point of writing it was to share her personal stories about her life with NLD.

That said, she still wants to sell as many copies as she can. So when two people came to Pearl Street looking for the book, and no one there could find it for them, she wanted to blow her stack. She was torn on how to respond, caught between not wanting to be a pushover and the fear of making another unnecessary mountain.

Can you imagine going through life not knowing the proper response for any situation? Imagine what grade school must have been like, trying to make friends, not knowing something is clinically wrong with you because it won't be diagnosed until you're 35 years old. Imagine trying to build a romantic relationship unable to pick up hints.

"We do find students at the university level that were never diagnosed," says June Reinert, the director of disability resource services for the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. "I find once they are, it helps answer some questions — ‘Wow, I'm not dumb, after all.'"

Reinert's office has an article describing NLD called "Losing your job at the water cooler." It's exactly what happened to Reed. After school, she fell into the work force, trying to hold jobs that dealt with people, but she didn't know how. She got fired from a job in Racine, Wis. She left another in Madison and came back to La Crosse. She got fired again, and this time her bosses told her she needed help.

It turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. In 1997, she was correctly diagnosed at Mayo Clinic. It wasn't depression, like others had said. It was NLD.

Through Riverfront, she now gets assistance and job training. She has a part-time job filing and
organizing — her strengths. "I've learned to compensate," she says. "I know my limitations."

Funny that the woman who finally has gotten her life in order, finally figured out what has haunted every aspect of her life, and written a book about it, now knows her limitations.

We should all be so limited.

Matt James appears at 10 p.m. Sundays on WKBT-Channel 8 and on WRQT-95.7's morning show. He can be reached at mjames@lacrossetribune.com or (608) 782-9720, ext.
446.