I'm dyslexic, although they didn't have a word for it when I was in grade school. The teachers said I had 'word blindness.'
When I had dyslexia, they didn't diagnose it as that. It was frustrating and embarrassing. I could tell you a lot of horror stories about what you feel like on the inside.
I was always very quiet, and I think everyone thought that was because I was a good child. I'd sit there in silence, but it wasn't until my mother was calling me one day when I was very young that she realised something was wrong because I wasn't responding.
I hated school . . . . One of the reasons was a learning disability, dyslexia, which no one understood at the time. I still can't spell . . .
I was dyslexic before anybody knew what dyslexia was. I was called 'slow'. It's an awful feeling to think of yourself as 'slow' - it's horrible.
I was well into middle age when one of my children, then in the second grade, was found to be dyslexic. I had never known the name for it, but I recognized immediately that the symptoms were also mine.
An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.
Both my sons are dyslexic, and so, too, in a much milder form, is one of my daughters.
I would always be embarrassed to read out loud in class because I would transpose words and letters and things.
