Independence Days

All week I thought the Fourth of July fell on a Sunday.

It didn’t. It was Saturday. I checked repeatedly, the way you check the spelling of a word that has suddenly gone strange, and each time the answer slid straight back out of my head. The date sat there on every screen I own, and my brain declined to hold it.

Hold that thought. I promise it pays off in a way you won’t see coming.

I have severe dyscalculia. People assume that means being bad at maths. It’s stranger than that. I don’t merely mix numbers up; I don’t *understand* them the way you do. Dates, sums, sequences, addition, subtraction, percentages – they will not stay still long enough to be held. And yet I understand accounting and numeracy well enough to have built and run small & large companies – tens, at times hundreds, of millions in revenue – managing P&Ls and tracking unit economics. It arrives sideways, like art or music: ratios feel like bending notes, and my synaesthesia renders accounting as something language doesn’t truly reach – felt more than read, seen more than solved, almost architectural or sonic. (You’ll notice the spelling. I am culturally British, American by passport. Both count.) I *see* whether a business works long before I could recite the arithmetic underneath it.

But sms or call me with a six-digit security code and I will ask you to repeat it…