We have a post office near us, one of the few and only shops I regularly go into, and its caused some challenges for me.

It used to have overtly bigoted people in there who would be abrupt and roll their eyes and 'tutt' and stuff like that when I didn't get my money out or didn't work out my purchase or have everything sorted before I came to the counter or when I couldn't understand my change or left it behind or forgot to collect my purchase or tried to send something half addressed or or or.

Then fortunately those people left and new nicer people came and they were kind but when I had challenges the man would say, 'look, its really easy'.

But it was never easy.

I send parcels.

To send parcels at the post office you have to come in the door then NOT line up.

Instead you have to go to a different standing thingy in the centre of the room and find the label to declare whats in your parcel, write on it then remember to take it with your parcel over to the counter by joining the queue... at the end of the queue.

Sounds easy doesn't it?

OK, so I finally achieved it after trying for one year... yes, one year.

So why was this so hard?

OK, try coming in the door and remembering that BEFORE you do something you have come to do, you must do something else.

This may sound logical to you but to me it completely boggling.

As soon as I come in I assume I should line up because that's how to get served and I'm there for get served at the counter.

So the idea of putting on hold what I've got to do WHILST I do something else, doesn't exist in my world I'm afraid.

When I do the something else, I forget why I'm there.

If I remember why I'm there, I forget the something else I've got to do first.

Get it?

Then, after months of patterning to go and do the something else FIRST I still had the problem of not walking across the room straight to the front of the queue.

As you probably know, this doesn't win friends.

But tell that to a dyslexic for whom the end and beginning of the queue are only kinaesthetically in 'relation to the door of entry'.

So what happens when you don't come in and join the queue but have to join it ONCE your inside?

Well, that's when you look at the long line of people and take the most direct route.

This is of course logical as when one comes in the door the end is always the most direct route so try teaching the body that once you are already inside the shop this isn't the way to the end of the queue.

No can do, patterning overrides, after all it is a form of intelligence and in the absence of the same visual processing as others this is my most reliable sensory navigation- body mapping.

So here I am, trying to sequence without sequencing, trying to be directional with a dyslexic brain in which left and right, beginning and end are in relation to where I came in and otherwise random and you have something not so easy at all.

Finally, the other day, after a year of trying and guessing and getting it wrong, I finally 'did' this illogical, chaotic, new system and felt very clever regardless how stupid I must have seemed to have taken so long to learn 'such a simple thing'.

But as I stood in that queue at the right end, smiling to myself, I knew I'd done what others in that queue hadn't done. I could walk in their shoes, however foreign, in a world in which almost none of them will ever find a use, worth or reason in walking in mine.

At the counter it was like I won the lottery and the nice people smiled nicely and served me like an ordinary and equal person and we joked about how taking one year to learn this simple thing 'wasn't so long'.