Essay
A hyperlexic autistic story about language, shame, and building more ways in.
Today I learned from a stranger on the internet that I am pompous and arrogant.
You will be relieved to know that the evidence was overwhelming: I used the word
Now, I know this is not true about me. The people who actually know me know it is not true. I am an educator. My entire body of work is built around helping people understand complicated things. If someone asks me what a word means, I am happy to explain it. I have spent years translating theories across academic, clinical, community, and lived-experience languages.
I also built rollover definitions into the online version of my thesis. If a reader encounters an unfamiliar term, they can hover over it and receive a definition without leaving the page, interrupting the essay, or making every other reader move through material they do not need.
That is not generally the behavior of a woman guarding the gates of her ivory tower. It is the behavior of a hyperlexic autistic person trying to build a ramp into her language.
And that is what I want to talk about today.
TL;DR
A stranger online called me pompous and arrogant because I used the word "dogpiling" and made a video she couldn't process at speed. This essay walks through:
What hyperlexia actually is
Hyperlexia is often reduced to “a child who can read really early.” That is part of it, but it is not the whole ecology.
In the research literature, hyperlexia generally refers to unusually early, largely self-taught word reading alongside an intense orientation toward written material. A central feature is an uneven profile: the ability to recognize or decode written words develops far ahead of reading comprehension, oral language, or broader developmental expectations. A systematic review by Alexia Ostrolenk and colleagues describes strong decoding, early reading, and a pronounced attraction to written material as core features. Hyperlexia is strongly associated with autism, although the two are not interchangeable and not every hyperlexic person is autistic.
I decoded print early and voraciously. I read far beyond my age. Words became one of the primary ways I found, organized, and understood the world.
Print is stable. It stays where you put it. It does not change its facial expression halfway through the sentence and then become annoyed because you failed to incorporate a piece of social information nobody said aloud. You can reread it. You can examine it from several angles. You can leave and return when your nervous system is ready.
For an autistic child, that stability can make written language more than an academic skill. It can become a doorway.
But the doorway can fool people.
When a child can pronounce enormous words, adults may assume the child understands everything those words contain. When a child reads years above grade level, adults may assume their emotional, social, and receptive language development must be equally advanced. When the child sounds like a tiny professor, people may forget that a tiny person is still standing in front of them.
Decoding is not the same as comprehension. Vocabulary is not the same as integration. Verbal ability is not the same as global capacity. A spiky developmental profile is not a failed straight line.
That last part matters enormously.
The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers. Everything above is the free shape of the argument. Below:
Yes, I am hyperlexic and dyslexic
People often hear that I am hyperlexic and dyslexic and assume one of those words must have wandered into the wrong sentence.
It did not.
I can read quickly and easily. I recognize patterns across enormous amounts of language. I have an expansive vocabulary and can move rapidly through complex ideas, especially when I am working inside an area of deep interest.
I also misspell words, mix up written output, and struggle to make my language arrive in the neat linear order other people expect. Dyspraxia complicates the physical act of typing. Dyslexia affects how words move from my mind onto the page. My language often arrives first as a whole pattern, and then I have to break that whole into a sequence other people can follow.
These things can all be true at once.
Human cognition is not a row of sliders that all move together. I can have extraordinary access to vocabulary while needing technology to organize a paragraph. I can understand a system before I can explain its first step. I can read something quickly and still need time to understand what it means relationally. I can write a 200-page thesis and still transpose letters while typing the word “the.”
This is not inconsistency. It is an uneven cognitive profile.
It is also one reason I use AI. I speak my nonlinear language into a tool that helps me arrange it into a linear form. The ideas are mine. The patterns are mine. The vocabulary is mine. The tool supports the part of the process that is difficult for my dyslexic and dyspraxic brain.
Again: ramp into the language.
When vocabulary gets mistaken for character
This online interaction was funny to me because I am 47 years old and I know myself now. A stranger deciding that my vocabulary is a personality disorder does not reorganize my identity.
But it used to hurt.
When I was younger, I was repeatedly perceived as arrogant, intimidating, overly intense, deliberately difficult, or convinced I was smarter than everyone else. I was not trying to establish superiority. I was reaching for the most precise word I had. Often, the so-called academic word was not decorative language I selected to impress someone. It was simply the word attached to the pattern in my mind.
People responded to the effect my language had on them and assigned me an intention that was never there.
Then I absorbed their interpretation as information about who I was.
That is where the shame enters.
When people continually tell a child that their natural communication is pretentious, excessive, rude, or inappropriate, the child does not necessarily learn how to communicate more effectively. They may learn that visibility is dangerous. They may begin shrinking their vocabulary, withholding what they know, apologizing before they speak, or performing confusion so other people do not feel threatened.
Girls and women are given a particularly narrow relational corridor here. Be intelligent, but do not make anyone feel less intelligent. Be articulate, but not so articulate that you appear authoritative. Teach, but make the teaching effortless for everyone else. Translate yourself completely, anticipate every possible level of understanding, and ensure nobody experiences the discomfort of not already knowing something.
And, apparently, do all of this for free on the internet.
I made $9 from Meta in August. I assure you, the personalized vocabulary concierge was not included in the package.
There is a legitimate accessibility conversation here. If a video moves too quickly, someone may not be able to process it. If I use a specialized term, some people will not understand it. Different people have different access needs, and no single format will work for everyone.
But “this was not accessible to me” and “you are pompous and arrogant” are not the same statement.
One communicates an access need. The other turns a mismatch between a person and a piece of content into a moral judgment about the creator.
Accessibility must be reciprocal. I can offer captions, transcripts, definitions, multiple formats, and clarification. A reader can pause, reread, look up a word, ask a question, or decide that a particular piece of free content is not for them. Neither of us has to be defective for the fit to be imperfect.
What I wish the adults around me had known
I wish I had known the word hyperlexia when I was a child.
I wish the adults around me had known it too.
Perhaps someone would have understood that reading far above my age did not mean I needed less support. Perhaps they would have looked for the places where my comprehension, communication, motor planning, executive functioning, and emotional development did not match the performance they could see.
I was identified as gifted, and then the scaffolding disappeared. When my performance became uneven, I did not understand that my environment had stopped supporting my profile. I understood that the gifted child had failed to become what everyone expected. For years, the story became: you peaked at ten.
Imagine what changes when a child receives a different story.
You read early because written language is one of the ways your brain finds safety and structure.
You can be brilliant in one domain and need extensive support in another.
Your ability is real. Your difficulty is also real. Neither cancels the other.
You do not have to make yourself smaller so other people can feel larger.
You also do not have to pretend you understand something merely because you can read the words.
That story could have saved me decades of shame.
How to support a hyperlexic child
First, stop treating precocious reading as proof that the whole child is precocious in the same way. Ask what they understand, not only what they can pronounce. Explore meaning without turning every beloved interaction with text into a test.
Second, use the strength as a bridge. Written schedules, visual supports, labeled emotions, scripts, captions, maps, and written choices may provide access when spoken language disappears too quickly. Early research on reading-comprehension support for autistic hyperlexic children suggests that building from strong word-reading skills, including matching words with pictures and meaning, can support comprehension rather than treating the child's attraction to print as a problem to extinguish.
Third, protect the joy. Not every intense interest needs to be converted into a therapeutic exercise or classroom reward. Sometimes a child should be allowed to love letters because letters are beautiful and dependable and theirs.
Fourth, teach the people around the child about
Fifth, remain curious about what lies beneath the words. A child may repeat a sentence accurately without having fully metabolized its meaning. Another may understand a complex concept but be unable to retrieve the expected simple answer under pressure. Some hyperlexic children may also use larger chunks of language, scripts, or echoed phrases, but hyperlexia and
And please do not shame the child for sounding unusual. Their language is not evidence of arrogance. It may be architecture.
Why I keep talking about this
Today, being misread does not hurt me the way it once did. I know who I am. I have built relationships with people who ask what I mean instead of telling me who I must be. I have created an ecology in which my communication can be understood rather than continually corrected.
But I talk about these experiences because someone younger may still believe the accusations.
Some autistic person may still think they are pretentious because precision feels loving to them. Someone may be hiding their vocabulary to remain socially acceptable. Someone may believe their need for writing contradicts their difficulty writing. Someone may think they are fraudulent because they can understand systems and still become confused by a conversation.
I want that person to have the word I did not have.
I also want parents and educators to understand that a child's most visible strength can conceal the precise location where support is needed. And I want people carrying patriarchal or neuronormative conditioning to notice the moment their discomfort with someone else's language becomes a judgment of that person's character.
You are allowed not to understand me.
You are allowed to ask what I mean.
You are allowed to need a slower video, a definition, a transcript, or another way into the idea.
But your momentary experience of not understanding me is not evidence that I believe I am better than you.
Sometimes a big word is not a wall.
Sometimes it is simply the most accurate door I know how to open.
Building the door into the page
The online edition of this essay includes rollover definitions for terms that may be unfamiliar. Readers who need them can access them at the exact point they encounter the word. Readers who do not need them can continue without interruption.
This is also a small example of what I am building through Kaleidoscope Systems: learning environments that do not demand convergence before granting access. The answer is not to flatten every idea until nobody can recognize its shape. The answer is to create multiple ways into the meaning.
— Sher
Kaleidoscope Systems →