Growing up with dyslexia wasn’t easy, especially because I didn’t know I had it until I was an adult. I didn’t learn as quickly as others because I couldn’t retain the information I was reading. I had to go to special classes instead of staying with the other kids and I was bullied because of it. All without knowing there was something wrong.
I spent the majority of my days in school hoping the teacher wouldn’t call on me to read out loud from our textbooks. Of course if it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have any at all and I was picked on pretty frequently. My teachers knew that I didn’t read well and picked on me hoping that the practice would do me some good. But it didn’t.
When I read out loud to the class I heard the snickers and laughter as I struggled to read the simplest of words. I heard my classmates, people who were supposed to be my friends, mocking me in the distance.
There was one day in particular that will stick with me for the rest of my life. I was called on to read from the textbook by my sixth-grade science teacher. Everyone has taken a science class at some point, so we all know many of the words in the textbooks can be a struggle even for someone without dyslexia.
On this day, I was attempting to read from a chapter about the structure of a flower and I just couldn’t read some of the words. My classmates were all in the background whispering and mocking me, including someone I considered my best friend. This was when I really started to beat myself up and my self-esteem took a big hit.
After high school I made the decision to go to college and study psychology. I struggled through and even went to extra study groups in the hope that things would get easier. I had learned about different types of learning disabilities in psychology and we did an exercise in class and that’s when I realized I might have one.
Sure enough, I was diagnosed with dyslexia. All of a sudden everything made sense. All the struggling, all the failed tests, and the barely passing grades in all my classes, they all added up. I started doing some research and found ways to cope with it.
I didn’t finish college, but a few years after I dropped out I met my best friend. Fast-forward a few years, and she’s asking me to help her with a website she had started. My initial thought was, I can’t do that. Well she didn’t take no for an answer and I started writing for her.
I had a lot of self-esteem issues when it came to my writing. I didn’t think I was any good at it; I could barely put a sentence together without misspelling something. Then there were my issues with punctuation; I still don’t know what I’m doing with commas half the time.
After looking at a couple of my articles after editing, I started to come down pretty hard on myself. I almost gave up. I went back and looked at all the coping mechanisms I had used when I first learned about my dyslexia.
Here are some of the ways I was able to cope with and control my dyslexia:
I practiced reading and writing, a lot
Every day, regardless of how unmotivated I felt, I would pick up a book and start reading it out loud. I would then have someone in the house ask me questions about things that happened in the book because reading comprehension still isn’t one of my strong points.
Believed in myself!
If I stayed focused and worked on at least one article a day or wrote in my journal I knew that I could handle this career. I knew that this is what I wanted to do and I just had to keep reminding myself that I could do it. I also had a lot of great people in my life who reminded me how strong I was and that as long as I put my mind to it, I could do anything. I also gave myself a pep talk almost every day for the first year.
Learned my strengths!
Even though reading and writing weren’t my strengths, I found things I enjoyed writing about and stuck with that. Celebrity news stories, sports, gaming, even silly mom stories were my go-to and I loved every second of it. I knew that if I wanted to be good at what I was trying to do that I had to be writing about topics I enjoyed or else I would lose interest and just give up on my dream.
Climbed out from under my antisocial rock!
I was really antisocial in school, especially after that day in science class, and I decided I was just going to keep to myself. When I started writing, I learned that wasn’t going to work because I needed to be able to get my articles out to the public. This part worried me because I knew that the more people who had access to my articles, the more likely they would have something negative to say about them. I made social media accounts and decided early on that if I encountered an internet troll (there have been many) that I would just ignore them and move on. I still get an occasional troll, but I’ve learned not to feed them.
Living with dyslexia isn’t always easy, but it is manageable. There are a lot of tools out there that can help you cope. Most of what I learned was self-taught, using the internet and talking to other people I’ve met along this road called Life, and now I have a successful career writing for some amazing websites. Even if my grammar isn’t the greatest, I have the best editors in the world so shout-out to them!