My identity in my child and teen years was shaped not by who I was, but who I thought I was. I compared myself to the kids around me, and rather than see our similarities, I focused on our differences. I was dyslexic. Though I knew almost from the start of my school life that I was learning disabled, it wasn't until my parents started doing their own research when I was in middle school that the term dyslexia was ever applied to me. It wasn't until I was nineteen that I took the physiological test that proved I was dyslexic. I knew by the time of the test that I was different, but as a little girl just entering elementary school I didn't know I was different.
As early as Kindergarten I was separated from my classmates. For a brief period each day a teacher's aid came into the classroom and took me out into the hall. While the rest of the class was writing on their own, I was dictating what I wanted to the teacher's aid. Though I was physically apart from the class, I didn't feel separated from the other kindergarteners. I didn't feel different yet.
Second grade was when the differences really started to show. I now had to deal with spelling tests, on which failure for me occurred regularly. I remember studying my little list at the after-school program for kids whose parents worked late. Spelling consisted of tricks. "Should", "could", and "would" all ended with the same four letters; if I could remember that, I'd be set. Spelling tests, however, didn't quiz you on how well you could remember the rules "i before e, except after c" but whether you could remember the exceptions. After my parents picked me up from school they would study with me, trying to help me memorize the week's spelling words, but by the next morning I was as hopeless as when first assigned them.
Once, during a standardized "bubble test" I answered the question "A saddle goes to which animal best" as sheep. My teachers thought that I didn't care enough, and that I wasn't trying, at least that was the impression my parents got after they were called in for a parent-teacher conference. My mom confronted me afterwards with my mistake. She questioned me about efforts in school, but I couldn't offer an explanation for why I had answered the question the way I did, not remembering the words "sheep" or "saddle" anywhere on the test.
At school the buses came at three-thirty. The other elementary students and I would line up behind the big yellow poles and get on one at a time. Only if our line were perfectly straight would we be allowed on the bus. One day, while standing in line, I overheard the older third graders in front of me. "Three times three is nine," they were saying. "Four times three is twelve." In second grade we had only learned addition, and I was certain three plus three was only six.
But they had said three and three made nine, four and three made twelve. They were older than me, so I knew they had to be telling the truth. Still, how could three and three be nine? I took my seat, thinking about numbers. I pictured nine as nine individual dots. The dots shifted about, making patterns until they formed something similar to a square. I saw how three and three made nine and then also the remarkable property that turned nine and three back into three. I didn't share the discovery with my parents. Discoveries never seemed important to me. If I understood it, then so did everyone else. Some time later I did reveal my discovery to my second grade teacher. On a chance, she decided to put me, a poor struggling student, into the gifted seminar.
At this time in second grade I had a crush on John, a boy a year older than me. He was smart, and popular, and I wanted more than anything to be his friend. John was a good student. The teachers liked him because he knew the answers and the other students liked him for his jokes and good-natured smile. I wanted what he had, the popularity and the intelligence. I wanted to be him and from that grew the desire to be with him. Every day he left our classroom to do advanced work with the special seminar. I didn't know where he went every day until the gifted teacher guided me by the hand to the gifted center.
John was playing on the computer. He acknowledged my presence but didn't move over to let me join him. I didn't mind. The game was a learning tool, in order to enter or exit a room you had to answer a simple math question. I watched him play, waiting for my chance to say something and be noticed. He played flawlessly, knowing every answer for a while until the screen flashed up reading "fourteen divided by two." He was silent for more than a moment, so I thought I'd take the initiative.
"Seven!" I exclaimed with a bit too much excitement.
"Good job," the teacher monitoring our progress told me happily, surprised that I had gotten an answer so quickly. John was less than pleased, perhaps a little embarrassed that this silly, shy girl had gotten the answer before he had. He typed "7" into the computer and moved on without a glance.
I had gone through first grade and most of second grade with a sense of inadequacy, of stupidity. In that room I received my first really ecstatic approval but I still wasn't good enough to impress John. I felt no matter how hard I tried, I would never be good enough.
At that time the school realized my unusual pairing of strengths and weaknesses was probably due to a learning disability. I vaguely remember being in a small room with a man showing me pictures and asking me questions about those pictures, an act I now associate with disability testing. The results showed a discrepancy between the different ways of processing information and labeled me learning disabled. Content that they had found the problem, they moved me into both remedial and gifted classes simultaneously.
During English and Reading I was with the support center, and math I'd spend with the other six or seven "advanced" kids at the gifted center. I was spending more time outside of my "regular" class than in it, but the advanced kids of the gifted center were together during English, and the remedial kids of the support center spent math together. They had already formed their own groups of friends, which I never belonged to.
The learning center frustrated me. I'd finish the tasks early and the teaching staff wouldn't know what to do with me. Once, when I was particularly bored, the teacher handed me the book "Bunnicula" and instructed me to go sit in the corner and read. I hated reading. When I read a passage the words liked to move around on me, shifting to form new sentences. Nothing read the same way twice and I hated books for making me second guess myself. Still she was the teacher and I couldn't contest her authority, no matter how much I wanted to.
I sat in the reading corner and opened the book to page twenty. When I felt I had waited a sufficiently long time, I flipped ahead another twenty pages. I waited for the teacher to look over at me before continuing the cycle of skipping ahead. I had pretended to read before, looking at the pictures to get a feel for the story, and had successfully fooled my teachers in first grade. This book was thicker, but I didn't see why my method of pretending wouldn't work again. A half hour later I got up and announced I was done with the one hundred pages. When the teachers didn't believe me I had a sense of dread that I could no longer fool people into thinking I was smart.
The gifted center wasn't a much better environment for me. I was intimated by their friendships that were already formed, afraid that if I were too boisterous or loud they wouldn't like me. Remembering John's reaction the last time I answered a question correctly, I shied away from speaking.
I had the sense that I didn't really belong anywhere. I didn't spend my day with a normal class and so I didn't have a set of peers to befriend, or a teacher who would get to know me well enough to understand my unique needs and characteristics. I had a sense of drifting while all the "normal" kids got to stay in the same class.
At this stage in my life I wasn't talking much. I had difficulties with large words. I could pronounce the first and last syllables reasonably well, but the ones in the middle were slurred. I was acutely aware of my inability to pronounce long words and very sensitive about it, so I remained quiet. Most of the time my quiet nature, compounded with my poor marks, indicated to people that I wasn't intelligent. Therefore, they felt they didn't need to watch what they said around me because I clearly wouldn't understand or be affected by it.
No one questioned my intelligence directly to me, but I overheard people talking about me often, saying I would never perform on par with the normal kids. Whenever someone confronted me about my learning disability in my teen years, I remembered the times people talked about my intelligence with me in the room. Anything that wasn't the same as what I overheard was just an attempt at sparing my feelings. My teachers knew I wasn't good enough, even if they weren't telling me specifically.
Middle school was no different than elementary school. I made my visits to the learning center brief, wanting to separate myself as far from it as possible. Whenever I went, the staff present would ask how my classes were going.
"Fine," I'd say.
"Do you have any homework you'd like to do while you're here?" they'd inquire.
No." My one word responses satisfied the staff enough to let me go until the next visit.
One woman at the learning support center decided to take a more active role in my development. She insisted we sit down and discuss school. As though she thought I'd lie, she preempted our discussions by seeking out my teachers and asking about my progress before each meeting. She'd look over my transcript and act surprised whenever she saw an A as though it were a monumental achievement. Every once in a while I'd get the comment, "you're the smartest dumb kid we've ever had." I'm sure my memory is warping the comment. I'm sure I'm just remembering how I felt and not what she said. I'm sure she didn't actually use the word "dumb."
When she retired, I stopped going to the learning support center altogether. The new staff members didn't seem to notice or care, their hands were full with other students who were worse off than I.
I was on my own in high school, without the support of the learning center breathing down my teacher's neck. Ny English teacher, Mrs. Pusey, took a special interest in me. I was her project, the challenge student. She would turn me into a great academic success when no one else could, being the marvel of the teaching world. She approached me after class one day offering her words of encouragement. She said once, "this is the best paper you've ever written. It's still a D or an F, but it's the best paper you've ever written."
Half way through the semester the novelty of the idea wore off. I was too difficult to train into a great writer. Despite all her efforts I wasn't learning the rules of grammar, I wasn't learning how to write good essays. To make matters worse, I was getting frustrated. I didn't stop trying entirely, but I wasn't working as hard. Mrs. Pusey decided she no longer had the strength or energy to help me overcome the dyslexia. The disability would be forever a part of me.
Once, introducing me, she said "and this is the dyslexic student." The dyslexic student. The. As though it was my defining characteristics. I knew I was different. I knew I couldn't read half as well as the rest of the class and that my writing was unintelligible, but I never thought of myself as the dyslexic student, the problem, the challenge. I reached my breaking point in her class. I didn't have the heart to continue trying, to continue fighting a hopeless cause. I stopped working. I wrote essays the night before on loose-leaf paper. But the grades didn't change. She couldn't fail the dyslexic student, and we both knew it.
When I decided I wasn't cut out for honors English she added, in an attempt to be supportive, "Yeah, the other dyslexic couldn't do it either." I was mad. I had a name she could have bothered to learn. Giving up suddenly meant giving in to her. Giving up confirmed what she thought of me, that I was nothing more than what my disability made me. I was going to prove her wrong, I needed to prove her wrong. So I stayed in the honors program.
I was fed up with being different, and frustrated with other's opinions of me. I could be self-critical all I wanted, but the instant a teacher or peer was critical of me I was angry. I became determined to be better then what they thought of me, to bring home some mark of achievement, not just for myself but also to shove it into the faces of those who didn't believe I could do it.
My old teachers averted their eyes when I'd walk down the hall as though embarrassed by my presence. I had a growing sense of invisibility, a feeling of floating through life without a connection to any one or any subject, but it didn't stop me from trying. I may have grown up stupid, but I was tired of being that way. I was tired of being abnormal. I was determined that if I wasn't going to be average, I would be better than average. I signed up with non-profit organizations designed to help dyslexics achieve in school. One specialized in audio books, which opened the world of reading to me. At home I spent hundreds of dollars on a dictation system that allowed me to type by speaking. All of these were a great help, but what really helped me overcome the disability was the desire to no longer be defined by it.