Dyslexia and the Myth of Success

Last night I went to the Dyspla festival Gala Night. It was a really wonderful experience. I got to mix with other brilliant dyslexic people, there were delicious refreshments, and I got to hear some very talented speakers. There is also an event called The Whispering Theater, and the showing of a film about Dyspla, both of which I thought were very powerful.

There will be events for the rest of the week for the festival, and if you are considering going I would really encourage you to do so. (More information here: http://www.dysthelexi.com/dyspla-2013/)

Having said that...It was a bit of an odd experience for me as well. Gradually, as the night went on, I felt more and more uncomfortable, and at first I wasn't sure why. I just knew I felt there was something wrong with what was going on around me, which was interesting. I poked, and prodded mentally at this feeling and tried to figure out why I felt like this...and then why I felt sad, and angry...and other things...proud, too. I didn't really like feeling proud, it irritated me.

Dyspla is all about dyslexic pride. You go there to celebrate, and to feel proud, of yourself, and other dyslexic people, right? That's a good thing, isn't it?

I slowly realized my discomfort came from a mixture of things, a steady accumulation of information, that when brought together as a whole, I just felt deeply troubled by.

Partly, it's about voices, and partly it's about narratives.

All over the Dyspla posters and materials are things about the voice of dyslexic people finally being heard, in a range of mediums, unrestricted by spelling and words...Brilliant. While talking with other dyslexics, this came up, we felt we were at the start of a new movement, where dyslexic people were finally advocating for themselves, and the word 'voices' was used again...finally all those long silence voices were being heard.

But, looking around the room, and talking to people, I seemed to be one of the youngest person there, excluding those helping run the event. I am 24, and gradually it became clear I had very different experiences to most of the other dyslexic people around me. I was identified as dyslexic at the age of 6, everyone else seemed to have found out much later, some only a few years ago. Most of them didn't get much or any extra support as children. I did, and as a result my literacy skills are very good. I actually have a degree in English and Creative Writing. I needed a lot of help to get to that stage, where as other people around me had been able to complete high level qualifications without support, with just pure hard graft and ingenuity.  If I hadn't been identified and given intensive one to one support for years, I have no doubt in my mind I would not have been able to go to university. I would barely be literate or numerate, as I also struggle with maths, and had an hour of extra tuition a week over five years so I could get a GCSE C in Maths.

I've got talents, sure...I'm gifted, as well as dyslexic, (aka twice exceptional), which it's a bitch of a thing to be. Grateful as I am for my gifts and abilities, I often find myself wishing I was not gifted, because it's very lonely, and because with the severity of my dyslexia it is infuriating. Not only have I always known I am not stupid, I have always known I was one of the very brightest, if not THE brightest child in my class (even if I didn't know I was gifted at the time), and sometimes I knew I was brighter than the people trying to teach me, but I could not express this in a way that led to validation, or at least not the sort I really needed...I'm also naturally an academic creature, and so, I became incredibly fucked up, bitter, and angry. I also used to be pretty arrogant. I wrapped myself in arrogance to protect myself from all the attacks to my self esteem, the very sense of who I was, and I was full of this terrible hate...for myself for being like this, as well as towards others for making me feel this way, sometimes just by existing.

Take away that support I had, and I wouldn't be somewhere like Dyspla. I would have killed myself. I am not saying this purely for effect, I had a miserable childhood, was bullied at home (who doesn't love a helping of domestic abuse?), and at points very badly in school, and when I was a teenager, I thought very seriously about ending my life. I went as far as getting a pair of scissor, and curling up behind my bed, and I was going to cut my wrists. I wanted the cold metal against my skin, the physical pain, and the blood, and to stick two finger up at the whole fucking world. I didn't believe in an after life, I just wanted to disappear somewhere no one was going to judge me ever, ever again...somewhere totally unreachable.

I couldn't take it, not the dyslexia, but the pressure of those bastard gifts that came with it. I couldn't deal with the narrative of my unfulfilled potential.

Basically, if I hadn't known I was dyslexic, and didn't have help, and didn't decide, actually, I didn't have to prove anything to anyone but myself; That all I had to do win the poisonous game I was playing was to opt out, to just be happy, not to strive to succeed...I'd be completely screwed. I'm acutely aware of this, and I know there are other kids with dyslexia in similar positions, gifted or otherwise. There are people like me, who didn't get the help I got, and some of them will make different choices to me. They do harm themselves, and they don't all go to university, some of them turn to drink and drugs, and I have seen it happen, and I have met some of the people who represent those depressing prison statistics. A young man the same age as me, from the same town, and he learnt to read in prison. While I was at University, that was what he was doing, serving a prison sentence, and I understood, when he told me about how he ended up there, how the dyslexia had played it's part, and I understood how the support I got altered my fate so dramatically, perhaps for the first time.

I have a terrible survivors guilt over this. It's part of why I try to do things to help. I cannot stand the thought of other people suffering like I suffered, not when I know what it is like, not when I could do things to take away that agony. If as a kid, I knew someone like the adult I am now didn't do this, I'd find them disgusting (I wasn't ever be this harsh now, but I was passionate, and I didn't quite get the complexity involved in all this). I wouldn't be able to understand how they could knowingly allow the experiences I had to continue, and that is how I felt when I looked at some dyslexic celebrates as a child.

If you are so successful, if I should strive to be like you. and you are like me, really like me, why I am I going thought this? Why haven't all of you used your money and influence to change things so children like me don't feel this bad?

Walls, of those faces...privileged, successful, perfect, faces...

I knew I wasn't going to be like them. I'm not an idiot, like I say, I wasn't going to be a movie star, or some millionaire businesses person, IT wizz, politician, or comedian...I wasn't sure I even wanted to be any of those things, I just wanted to feel accepted, for who I was, as a whole package. But that wasn't part of the narrative I had forced down my throat.

Deny the weakness...embrace the strength...deny you were ever weak to start with.

Don't we all love a good under dog story? 'Keira Knightly overcame her dyslexia,' the newspaper clipping says...and I wonder, does she really never fuck up the way I do? Do you get so good at your particular thing you can really erase your difficulties until you are left only with ability?

It was like a fairy tale, and like all fairy tales, it's always felt like wish fulfillment, and bullshit.

The hardest part is I want to believe it, I want someone to come along and tell me that really, I'm special. That I have magical powers, or some great destiny...and I don't. I'd look up at the stars at night in my garden in my teens, and I'd know...I really do not matter, all these things we accumulate, possesions, praise, awards, what grades or job I get, who was popular at school, the love and the heart break I've yet to experience...non of it really means anything. No one is really all that special in the greater scheme of things, and honestly, that's totally ok.

I'm not denying the gifts, but we aren't all gift. We cannot retrospectively re-write our pasts, and we shouldn't say it's ok to be tormented and to experience terrible things if it has been 'character building,' or you were successful, in the end, and proved all those bastards who doubted you wrong...Because, what if you don't? What about people with those gifts who cannot with grit and ingenuity alone fulfill this twisted destiny? What do you feel then if you are that person, and you look back on your life? What do you feel hearing those stories of all the people exceptional people 'like you' who made good?

Because I am terrified this will be me. That I have been through hell, and I wont be able to join the pantheon of dyslexic gods, and say 'it was all worth it in the end, now I have this perfect career, and if your a child struggling it will all be alright in the end...'

You know, the domestic abuse was pretty 'character building,' but I still have nightmares about it, and my father. I would hope no one would say to me that this was all ok, because of what I have achieved in spite of it. Yet when it comes to dyslexia, and the trauma that goes with this, the narratives we have seem to imply this. Which is very scary to me, because when abuse becomes normalized, either in a family, or community, then it is more likely it will perpetuated through future generations. I'm not saying everyone should feel bad about upleasent aspects of the dyslexic experience (which is bigger than just gift vs learning disability), just that rather than talking about how great it is to over come all that we should be furious it happened as well, and is still happening...We shouldn't be saying it's all ok, and worth it, when people do well. The mistreatment of children, especial ones with shared qualities, like race, or disability, is never ok.

And it's not just me who feels this. I used to mentor kids with dyslexia at my old school. It had a dyslexia unit, so there were lots of dyslexic children there, some with very severe difficulties. I would try to encourage them by talking about the celebrates, and so on, but it didn't really touch a lot of them. They were too distant, too removed from the lives they were actually living. They knew, as I did, that they probably were not going to be like them. They were smart kids, and they knew that sort of thing was not in their futures. What really helped, was talking about ordinary people, and telling them I was dyslexic too. I got it, I really really got it, and they were brave, and clever, and yes, oh yes their problem were real and awful...but together we were going to deal with them. We acknowledged the strengths, and the weaknesses, that eternal contradiction...and then I tried to help them accept that, the duality, to accept themselves...even the bits that made things harder, and all the social problems that came packaged with them.

But this is just the background, what set me off thinking all this was that all the people who spoke at Dyspla where successful dyslexic people of a different generation to me, and the boy on the train who had just left prison, those kids with dyslexia, and other special needs. They all said they wouldn't want to be identified as dyslexic when they were children.

It makes sense those were the speakers at Dyspla, as it is a celebration, and these were people with established careers worth celebrating. I barely have a career, and nor do most of my friends. Those kids I used to mentor don't, and nor do the dyslexic people who couldn't get by on grit and ingenuity to reach success (something I find increasingly slippery and difficult to define). But the speakers we heard were meant to be part of a debate...and I used to do debate in school, and there are two sides to debates. In this instance, every speaker agreed with one another. They all thought dyslexia was a good thing, a gift.

The speakers were people who got through with grit an ingenuity, unlike us...the others I knew with dyslexia growing up, even though we needed this too. We were the missing voices, the stories going untold...I cannot help but wonder what the boy on the train would say, if I said, with all my privileged access to education, and finance from my parents, that he had a gift. If it were me, my shadow self, the girl that was left to fail...I'd have laughed in the face of that young women, a bitter angry laughter.

Where is his voice, her voice?

I kept waiting for someone to say they felt dyslexia, and the dyslexic experience, wasn't a gift...I think that would have been very valuable.

It's really not I didn't enjoy Dyspla, and I think the speakers should be proud of themselves, and should be celebrated. I know they have suffered to, and I ached for them. I connected with their experiences. I know it's because of people like them that there is more awareness of dyslexia, and that people like me are helped now. But it highlighted something to me...and it's that we still have a very, very long way to go before dyslexic people, all dyslexic people, are really being heard.

We need Dyspla championing success, but the narrative of success can be dangerous. It's such a heavy thing to give children to carry with them through life, that desperate need for it. It still feels like playing the game that started for me in school, as a community, it feels like we are all after that elusive, ultimate gold star, that will finally give us the validation we never got as children.

Look world, we are not stupid, it's you who are stupid for not seeing how fantastic we are!

There is a terrible, hungry, sightless thing inside me, born of the pain of my youth, and it wants trophies, and accolades, and prestige...my inner Golum, if you will, it craves the Precocious, even when going after it is unpleasant, or when I'm pushing myself too hard. When, maybe, there are other things that would make me happier, and yes, it's meant I got A*'s for a lot of my GCSE English course work, and things like that, but who gives a fuck? Who is really keeping score...the non dyslexics certainly aren't, they don't care (apart from my mother, and she just wants to fix me). I'm the only one who really cares about my little achievements, and I achieve to ease a pain that is never fully going to go away. It's a different sort of weakness, and I really think I will only win, really win, when I stop playing, when I focus just on being me, and doing what makes me happy, and stop caring what anybody else thinks...but that's very difficult to do.

I think, as a community, we need more balance...and we need to kill The Myth of Success, the harmful side of this story, one that claims we all have this all or nothing birth right. That one day, if you are a very good dyslexic boy and girl, you will get to be vindicated, and celebrated, and loved, you will earn it...rather than just deserving all that as a human being, and not having anything to prove. We need to toss this myth in the volcano, and to let the thing driving us go in with it. So we can breathe freely, and do the things we really love, without feeling the need to prove anything, without needing the armor of arrogance and to talk down people who are not like us...If we really accept ourselves, and are comfortable in our own skins, we won't need to. We need to say not only are dyslexic people extraordinary, and successful but they can be ordinary, like most dyslexic people really are, and that is just as good, and just as valid.

They don't need to be creative, God knows not all of us are...some of us are sporty instead, or into IT, or building things out of Lego, or we don't really know what our particular thing is. We aren't just distant celebrates, who might or might not actually be dyslexic if we really looked into it, especially in the case of the dead ones. Why do we need to ride on the coat tails of Einstein, for instance? Why can't we be plumbers, and tree surgeons, and postmen, and teachers, and shop assistants? It almost feels like failure now if you don't go out and do something extraordinary.

We don't need it to validate ourselves or make sense of our messed up childhoods, honest...let's just be human, ok? Let's be the brothers, mother's, father's, sisters, friends, and colleagues of non dyslexics, and let's shove less celebrates and extraordinary stories of dyslexic triumph at non dyslexic people...let's show them that is who we are...the people close to them, people they love, not just the ones who go down darker paths due to a lack of support as big eyed kids, not just movie stars and athletes. We are everywhere, and we suffer, and we thrive, and we live beside them through it.

I think we'd be happier, and I think people would care more if dyslexia wasn't something attached to someone outside the world people live in day to day. If it wasn't just those two extremes...the only narratives we can tell; failure and success...

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I am adding my voice to the chorus, as someone who feels somewhere in between.

This is just me, how I feel, my experiences.

I really want you to go to Dyspla if you can, and I want you to be moved, and to question things, and to feel proud of yourself and that we have something like Dyspla, and of the people who have created if for us (I think Dyspla is striving towards sharing more voices, to give a fuller picture). I also want some of you to feel angry, and sad, and I want you to respond in some way to those feelings...because that's good, it opens things up, it creates that debate we so desperately need. It gets us moving towards improving things that bit faster. It helps us understand who we are.

And there is more I could say...but this is enough...for now, at least.

Please comment if you want to, tell me I am wrong if that's what you feel...but lets add more voices, let's talk about these things from more angles. And let's really make this movement of change happen, for all of us.