TOMORROW.
W’s appear to be M’s, and the ordering of the letters start to scramble in my mind. No matter how many times I’ve been faced with spelling this word, I still can’t get it right.
Even just now, while writing this very article, I can’t perfect the spelling of tomorrow and another quarter of these words. I am among the one in every ten Americans with dyslexia: a learning disability that I am fortunate to have.
In elementary school I continuously failed spelling tests. I would skip over words when reading out loud. I didn’t understand how my classmates could read so fluently and catch on to the spelling so gracefully. I felt as if my brain simply didn’t work right. It seemed I was born stupid.
In third grade, my teacher, Mr. Stan, quickly caught on. One day he handed me a green notebook. He told me every time I misspelt a word, I would write it in the book and then I would keep re-writing the word until I could spell it correctly.
Soon after receiving the book, I was faced with spelling TOMORROW. That was the first word in the book. I carried that green notebook everywhere. I hoped that the longer I stared at the words, my brain would magically work normally.
One day Mr. Stan realized I kept writing my p’s as b’s and S’s as Z’s. That’s when it clicked. He suggested to my parents that a psychologist evaluate me for dyslexia. And — after two long days of testing — the results came back, and he was right.
Forty-nine percent of dyslexic cases are genetic, so it wasn’t much of a surprise, as my dad is also dyslexic.
However, there was less awareness of dyslexia when my dad was in third grade, 40 years ago. Therefore, he was never diagnosed as a child. One summer, he went to a camp for reading. When my grandma came to pick up my dad, the instructor told her that there was no shot he would be able to graduate high school. That was it. My dad wasn’t told he was dyslexic; he was told he was dumb.
Unlike my dad, I was born in an era that gave me the support to understand why my brain worked differently. After I was diagnosed with dyslexia, I no longer felt like I was stuck in a never-ending cycle of stupidity.
I developed the mindset that my disability was not an excuse, but rather an obstacle to overcome by finding the tools to do so, such as audiobooks, spellcheck and voice transcribing. Although I will never be able to rid myself of dyslexia, I have found the mechanisms to treat this disability as a road bump rather than a roadblock.
“Dyslexia thought me to face problems not run away from them,” said Bella Thorne, a popular Disney icon and dyslexia awareness advocate.
As frustrating as it is not to be able to spell “tomorrow,” I am happy that the genes passed down to me included dyslexia in the generation I live in. This is because dyslexia has taught me more than anything else: that no matter how impossible it may seem to overcome a personal setback, it can be done with perseverance and finding the right tools.
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