Around here, the founders share a lot of common ground. We all have an obsession with helping animals, we all spend way too much time staring at spreadsheets, and—plot twist—all three of our founding board members are completely dyslexic. Every single one of us. It turns out that having a beautifully unique brain configuration is a prerequisite for running this ship.
While this shared superpower gives us unparalleled, out-of-the-box problem-solving skills, it also means that dense legal paperwork is our ultimate final boss. If you ever want to see a room full of leaders sweating, just hand us a document printed in a tiny font with absolutely zero pictures.
Lately, we have been on an epic, mythical quest to find a wonderful, magical pro bono nonprofit lawyer to help guide our organizational journey. But navigating this search has led to some highly entertaining situations that we would never have found ourselves in if our brains didn’t occasionally play musical chairs with reality.
The latest adventure happened just this week. The CEO asked our fantastic secretary to hunt down some info on potential pro bono lawyers. He dove into the internet trenches, found a link, and enthusiastically sent it over for her to review.
There was just one tiny, jumbled, dyslexic hiccup. He sent a link for a probate lawyer.
Once the confusion cleared, the entire room erupted into pure laughter. Some of our board members manage their dyslexia a little differently than others, but we have all learned to laugh at ourselves, embrace the visual detours, and find the absolute comedy when a roadblock pops up. We aren’t planning on inheriting any haunted old mansions or drafting anyone’s final earthly wishes—we just wanted some free legal help for the critters!
But this hilarious mix-up highlights a massive misconception about what dyslexia actually is. Spoiler alert: it is way more than just flipping your b’s and d’s!
Dyslexia: It’s Not Just a Letter-Swapping Party
Pop culture loves to pretend dyslexia just means reading a word backward or accidentally writing a number upside down. In reality, it’s a full-on, VIP, premium neurological processing style that is way broader than people think. It doesn’t just happen with letters—it likes to play tricks with entire words, shapes, numbers, images, and even the spoken word.
Here is what is actually happening inside a dyslexic brain:
The Brain-to-Mouth Traffic Jam
Dyslexia can directly impact spoken language, sometimes causing speech impediments or speech delays. Our CEO knows this for an absolute fact: sometimes the brain is thinking at supersonic speeds, and the mouth simply cannot keep up with the mental racetrack. When that happens, verbal sentence structures can completely flip upside down. You might find yourself accidentally speaking your sentences entirely backward, or hilariously swapping a word from the very beginning of a sentence all the way to the end.
Even wilder, your speech can pull the exact same trick that our secretary’s brain pulled with “pro bono” and “probate.” You can say a completely wrong word out loud with the full, absolute intention of saying the correct one. In your head, you know exactly what you mean, but everyone around you is left looking completely confused. The best part? Most of the time, you don’t even realize you said the wrong word until someone points it out! It makes for some incredibly entertaining staff meetings.
The “Close Enough” Silhouette Swap
When it comes to reading, instead of scrambling individual letters like a game of Scrabble, the brain often looks at the overall silhouette or visual shape of a word and says, “Yep, looks like ‘probate’ to me, close enough!” The brain recognizes the length and physical structure of a word and immediately substitutes another familiar word in its place. That’s exactly how “pro bono” instantly pulled a magical disappearing act and turned into an estate lawyer. It’s like predictive text, but with a chaotic sense of humor.
Number Gymnastics
Numbers can swim, flip, or completely lose their sequence just like letters. Keeping track of a string of digits or reading financial spreadsheets requires some serious extra mental focus because a dyslexic brain loves to process those numeric shapes in its own creative order.
Shape-Shifting and Visual Symbols
Because dyslexia is fundamentally about how the brain interprets visual symbols, it can also impact how people process 3D shapes, map directions, diagrams, and complex images. The eyes see the pieces perfectly fine, but arranging them in a specific spatial sequence or deciphering what the visual symbol represents takes a delightfully scenic mental pathway. It makes geometry a wild ride, to say the least.
Making Life Easier (Why You See a Play Button Here!)
Living and leading with dyslexia is exactly why our website looks a little different than most. If you look at the top of this blog post—and almost every single page on our site—you will find an audio player.
Because text-heavy screens can be an absolute minefield for brains like ours, we make sure the website will completely read the information out loud to you. We built this feature because we intimately understand the struggle, and we want to make our space completely accessible for anyone with a reading disability, a learning disability, or honestly, anyone who just isn’t feeling like reading a giant wall of text today! You can just sit back, press play, and let us do the talking.
Time for a Quick Brain Snack: Pro Bono vs. Probate
Because we love to turn our funny visual detours into a learning moment (whether you are reading it with your eyes or listening with your ears!), here is the actual difference between the two terms our brains scrambled this week:
Pro Bono
This comes from the Latin phrase pro bono publico, meaning “for the public good.” In the legal world, a pro bono lawyer is an absolute saint of an attorney who takes on cases for free or at a deeply discounted rate to help out non-profits and charities. This is the legal wizard we are currently hunting for!
Probate
This refers to the specific legal process that deals with administering a person’s estate, property, and assets after they pass away. It is incredibly vital work, but completely useless when you are just trying to file standard non-profit paperwork and keep things running smoothly. We can safely cross this one off our current search list.
Embracing the Scenic Route
While our search for a pro bono lawyer continues, we are keeping our heads high and our spirits light. Having a 100% dyslexic board means we might take a few unexpected visual detours, but it also gives us unparalleled creativity. Dyslexia doesn’t mean a lack of ability—it just means our brains are wired to view the world from a much more interesting angle.
A good laugh with the team makes the journey entirely worth it, and honestly, we wouldn’t trade our uniquely wired brains for anything! If you happen to know a real-deal pro bono lawyer who loves unique non-profits and doesn’t mind a board that occasionally reads the map upside down, send them our way!
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