Dyslexia: My story
By Jean Brownbill
I can’t stop thinking about a poem I heard recently. The piece was at first an average slam poetry performance featuring a young woman adorned in blue jeans and a bodysuit. She was talking about what she wanted to be; prettier, funnier and smarter. She wanted to write brilliant things and have people tell her how brilliant and thought provoking her work was. She wanted to be well read or at least a shortcut to knowledge. I keep going back to her words and I think about what I want to be.
I want to be happy. I want to be the smartest person in every room. I want to never be doubted. I want to know it all because I desperately want to know everything about everything. I want to have interesting and convincing opinions. I want people to say to me, ‘Oh, I never thought of it that way’ and ‘Wow, you know a lot about this’, even if the topic was just a passing fancy for me.
I want to confidently tell people to go ‘fuck themselves’ if they think my handwriting is bad or that my inability to spell most words correctly relates to my level of intelligence because dyslexia exists, duh.
I remember when I was first diagnosed as dyslexic and was told that my difficulty discerning left vs right, correcting my spelling and writing neatly, wasn’t a product of my (at the time) perceived stupidity, but a visible difference in my brain! I was over the moon!
‘I knew it, I’m not stupid’ I told myself.
I was so excited about this discovery that I stood in front of my small, rural public-school classmates and told them what I had found out about myself. I don’t know what I thought was going to come from this announcement. However, not two seconds after the words had left my lips, a boy in the back of the class said ‘You’re not dyslexic, I am, and you’re not like me’.
This comment would begin a trend of people not believing me, that would last throughout my schooling. As if I could keep this dyslexia act up all throughout my schooling. Even teachers would look at me with suspicion when I inquired if spelling mattered on the in-class essay or when I had raised my hand for a question another teacher said, ‘is this a real question or a Jean question?’ Implying that my queries were often unnecessary. I often think about how things would have been or could have been different if I was taken seriously when I was in school. Or, if my parents were not so wrapped up in their volatile marriage and various substance abuse problems and had taken more of an interest in my education. Maybe then I would have been even more insufferable than I am now.
Things started to improve once I had entered senior secondary schooling, not academically, my dyslexia continued to be belittled and brushed aside, but I fell in love with education as an escape from the life I thought I had to endure. I could study what I wanted and academic validation became a substitute for maternal affection, a habit that would continue well into adulthood. Forever that final comment on every report card and essay was ‘if you applied yourself more’ and ‘this needs clarification’. I always felt as though I could never reach my full potential and that it lives somewhere just beyond my reach.
I know it would be easy and understandable for me to be resentful. Resentful at the education system for failing me, and my parents for that matter, but I honestly don’t because if I hadn’t figured out how much knowledge I can cram into the never-ending library of my mind, I would still believe I was stupid. My father was the first person to call me that; stupid, dumb, slow, off with the fairies. I was the best teacher I ever had. I taught myself how to learn and how much power I could contain within a mind the world had already deemed not worth much.
As I fumble my way into my early twenties and my first legitimate taste of adulthood, I have realised that media is now targeted at me. Avatar 2 is coming out and I remember watching Avatar in the cinema, wearing goofy and oversized 3d glasses, being completely in awe of the beauty that someone had created from their mind. I’m now waiting for my beautiful mind creation to come into fruition.
The other week I was conversing with my one ‘human’ friend, and she said something that I didn’t realize was a fear of mine until she said it. ‘I could see you being a crazy, genius.’ She meant it as a compliment, but it struck a chord in my mind that continues to ruminate in my consciousness. What if that is my inevitable downfall and that great intelligence comes with an unsteadiness of the psyche? Am I Icarus flying too close to the sun? Am I doomed to a life of solitude and books and eventual madness?
For the last three weeks I have been on placement in a high school as part of my degree. I diligently follow a ‘real’ teacher around and desperately attempt to cosplay as a real grownup. I feel incredibly anxious that the answers or advice that I provide are wrong and that my students will suffer the consequences of my own academic hubris. Being dyslexic and being a teacher seems to be constantly at odds with one another however, I know that it matters to my students, especially my neurodivergent students to see a dyslexic person in academia and teaching.
I will never stop learning; I will never be satisfied. And now as I’m learning to teach, I am learning that my suspicions about myself are true. How could I ever want anything more than I want knowledge?
What do I want? I want to read and write and create and grow.