Narrative Essay On Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a learning disability. However, it is not by any stretch an intelligence disability. Often people mistakenly believe that it has to be. For a long time I blindly believed the same. When I was diagnosed with dyslexia I began to question my qualifications to be an impactful part of society. I believed I was unteachable and incapable of learning. Very often children are assisted in learning their right from their left by holding up both hands and identifying the hand that makes capital letter L - this is their left hand. I never understood how this worked for other kids, because to me both hands made the shape of a capital L. One hand was never omitted from the answer choices for facing the wrong direction. One hand wasn’t more obviously the letter that was at the beginning of my prefered name. To me they were the same, but to my first-grade teacher they were not. In her class when a baby faced 6 year old girl wrote letters backwards on spelling test they were marked as wrong, even if the letters were in the right order. In her class the smart children knew the difference between the lower case letters b and d without needing context.

Carrying around the large keyboard aid, I felt alienated in way I never thought possible. I was mocked for my inability to take the notes in way the teachers required, the way that made sense to their brains. I was robotically put into a category of students that was below the others. I was never seen for anything more then my recently diagnosed learning disability. It was the constant reminder that I was somehow inferior that pushed me to prove, if only to myself, that I was just as good of a student and that I was just as capable of reading and enjoying the larger books in the school library. I knew I was capable of understanding the words without knowing how to spell them or even how to pronounce them