I am at my mother's house and I was looking for fodder for we thought we were deep. I know that somewhere around here I have every note that I passed all the way through high school. They are in a white ceramic jewelry box. I just can't find the box. I know that my mother wouldn't have thrown them away.
In my searching, I ran across the "missing years" in my stacks of journals at home. I have kept a paper journal since my first day of first grade. I am absolutely certain that those angsty first two years of high school will serve my purpose.
Meanwhile I opened up my first grade journal... I want to know who didn't realize I was dyslexic.
Almost every single letter on the page is backwards for the first two months. For the first month I can't seem to decide which side of the page I am supposed to write on. By December, all my "y"s are still backwards (My name is Mary. I had to write that on every single piece of paper I turned in. In second grade, I was still writing them backwards.). In May one whole entry was a bunch of numbers... roughly half of them are backwards.
My elementary school ramblings are always entertaining to me. I think my favorite from first grade is the one of the three times my teacher wrote in the margin... 10/16/86 "yestrbay I wus riden my dick. I almost reka into the car I skinned mi stumc and mi eldo tihrs silnqs." Except that many other letters are backwards. Above the word "dick" my teacher wrote "bike" and a little smiley face. The English translation is "yesterday I was riding my bike. I almost wrecked into the car. I skinned my stomach and my elbow [two words that mean nothing to me]."
So, I kinda feel that the public school system failed me if it took three years for me to learn how to write my name correctly and no one realized I was dyslexic. Particularly since I won all the little math competitions and I was reading above my grade level. I just couldn't write.
