All my life I have lived with an incurable burden upon my shoulders. Because of my burden I have been called lazy, stupid and many people show me less respect because of it. I have lived with my burden for over seventeen years and I lived seven of those years without even knowing I had it. People have studied me trying to figure out ways to help me with my problem and most times they come up short. If you looked at me, talked to me, or even spent a day with me you wouldn’t be able to figure out my burden. This burden I was born with only affects my reading and writing skills. My burden, my problem, curse is Dyslexia.
Reading disability, reading disorder, reading disability, no matter how you say it, it will always be Dyslexia. Many people don’t know what Dyslexia is. As defined by Merriam Webster, “Dyslexia is a variable often familial learning disability involving difficulties in acquiring and processing language that is typically manifested by a lack of proficiency in reading, spelling, and writing.” When people ask me what Dyslexia is and what it do I can never really give them a straight answer. I can never give a person a straight answer because I don’t know what life would be without Dyslexia. The best way I can explain Dyslexia and the way my brain works is that a normal person’s brain uses the front door to learn something. My brain uses the back door and goes down the hall and around the corner just to get to the front door.
I went through three years of schooling without knowing I had Dyslexia. In Kindergarten my Dyslexia never showed up. We mainly learned how to spell our names the ABC’s, our home phone number and what to do in case of an emergency the bases of literacy. Then in first grade my problem started to show itself. We started to learn sight words, like bird, dog and bed. Just by looking at those words you can tell that I started to have some problem with my Dyslexia. I started mixing up letters and not being able to spell and sometimes read the words. I was fine when it came to math and adding and subtracting I excelled in math. My first grade teacher thought I was just lazy and passed me on to the next grade. Second grade wasn’t much of a change. We were still learning how to read and write but now with bigger and harder words like audience, portable and hazards. On top of learning all of these hard words we start to learn cursive, which made it even harder for me to learn. Still math came easy to me when we start mutilation and division. Once again I was passed on to the next grade because my teacher just thought I wasn’t putting my all into my reading and writing.
