I went through a good portion of my life thinking I was stupid. I remember being very scared going into first grade because, in my school, that was the year when we were supposed to begin reading. I had struggled a bit with learning the alphabet in kindergarten, and I just had a feeling that reading would be hard for me. My premonition proved all too true. From the beginning, I was much slower than the other kids at learning flash cards and it soon became clear that I had no natural spelling instincts. But I've always been a hard worker and, with some extra effort, I was able to keep up with the other kids for the time being.

However, as the years went by, the reading assignments grew in length and I struggled more and more to keep up. I would spend hours on homework that my friends could do in twenty minutes. I always had to pretend to be too tired to focus when we did group reading assignments, and I had a small panic attack every time I had to read aloud in class. The school tried to put me in a reading help class, but that didn't last long because I was too embarrassed to be stuck in a class with the so called "stupid" kids. So I simply continued to struggle in school but also to compensate so I would look like I was keeping up with my class.

I always wanted there to be some explanation for why I had to work harder than my friends at school work. I did not fit any of the traditional diagnoses. I was not ADD or ADHD, and I didn't seem to be like any of the other dyslexic kids n my class. Because I could not put a name to my struggles, I gradually came to accept that I was just stupid. That was the only explanation that made sense to me. Why else would I be having such a hard time with thing that my friends found so easy?

Now eventually I did convince my parents to have me officially tested in high school and the results showed that I had dyslexia. I had a mild enough form and I had been compensating so much, that from the outside I did not appear to be traditionally dyslexic. I was relieved when I found out because I finally had a name for what was wrong with me.

I feel lucky that I was able to be diagnosed in the end, but I still whish I had known sooner. My hope is that in the future, teachers will be more perceptive and understanding towards children who may be suffering from dyslexia. I also hope that anyone who thinks they may be dyslexic will be more willing to step foreword, take initiative, and get help. I know I could've saved myself a lot of pain in my lie if I had not been so embarrassed to admit that I had a problem and that I needed help. No one can control whether or not they are born with a learning disability, but we can control how we react to it and deal with it.