How to Yodel Standing on Your head in a Toilet

About the Book

Owing up to and admitting to having a learning disability as an adult – something I have tried to cover up for most of my 45 years – is not an admission that I would have considered making until four years ago. It was then that I discovered there was a name for what I live with every day. I learned that it is a disability that affects between four to six percent of the world’s population. It has been recognized for decades by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), but very little is known about the disorder in Australia, the country of my birth. The title of my book, How to yodel standing on your head in a toilet – It's as easy as living in a world without numbers, came to me very quickly once I actually began to write my story. But what’s a toilet got to do with anything? I hear you ask. There is a very simple answer. In writing a book about a disability it is important to communicate to people how it makes you feel, and the emotions you experience. I could have simply called my book ‘Two and two don’t make four’ or ‘Life simply doesn’t add up,’ but would you really want to read something like that? Neither of these two or the many other alternatives really explains the endless frustrations of dealing with a learning disability or how to develop the strength to overcome it.

About the Author

The word dyscalculia is something I did not know existed until 2003. It is amazing to me as an adult that I only discovered the name for what I have lived with on a daily basis all these years through ÔsurfingÕ the Internet and finding an American web site that talked about difficulties with mathematics. On this site I had an instant rapport with what I was reading. It struck me instantly Ð I recognized me! Distinctively Australian I was born in January 1962 in the small town of Gunnedah in New South Wales, Australia. The climate is extremely hot and very dry in summer. I remember when I was young how the dirt roads would billow pink clouds of the bull dust kicked up by the large road trains carrying brown sheep to the local abattoirs. The huge paddocks filled with waving golden wheat and pink galahs surrounded our little 580 acre farm. The farm is now sadly gone, but the old house still stands, though its new owners now have horses not sheep, and there is no longer any wheat. The roads are all tarred now, and the bull dust is restricted to the drought-stricken hills on the outskirts of the town. To describe what growing up in a small country town in New South Wales was like it is easiest to simply say, ÒGunnedah is so hot and dry that in the paddocks the sheep simply suck rocks to surviveÉÓ