I took nine years of piano lessons as a child and quit because I thought learning to read music should follow the progression of learning to read words. After n

I took nine years of piano lessons as a child and quit because I thought learning to read music should follow the progression of learning to read words. After nine years, since I couldn't just sit down with music and play it, I thought I must be completely inept because I still "couldn't read." It wasn't until well into adulthood that anyone told me sight reading like that (i.e., sit in front of unfamiliar music and just play it) is actually a rare and exceptional skill. Since then, I've been assuming it must not follow the "learn to read letters" path at all, but now you have me wondering if the reality is between these two ideas, and my dual misconceptions have more to do with never having actually "learned" to read in any ordinary sense. One day when I was 3, my mom finished reading me a story, and I said it was my turn to read the next one. I read the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that. It all sort of clunked into place at once. It also made me an unusual reader, which I also didn't know at the time. While I can read words one at a time, like when I have occasion to read aloud, by default, I read chunks of the paragraph/page at once. I don't subvocalize the words. I just know what they say. My brain apparently just handles letters and words funny. Your comment is so helpful for me because it's helping me realize I may just need to learn to read music the way most people learn to read words, and it's not useful to think of it in terms of how I did!