The space between my brain and the page

My parents never sent me to kindergarten, so when I started first grade, it was a bit mysterious to me. I had been living on the side of a mountain, chasing garter snakes, and picking wild strawberries. While the class attempted to learn the alphabet, my parents had already been reading chapter books to me like The Hobbit.

When they would read, I would trace the path over the page, soon beginning to pick out some memorised shapes. When we got through The Lord of the Rings, I was reading—from memorised shapes on the page, strong pattern recognition, and a great deal of inference, without ever sounding out letter blends.

Alternative schools and the curriculum of omission

The next year, we tried a Waldorf school with its own rituals—fat crayons, hand-knit recorder covers, daily circles about the seasons. I learned to knit, to sing, to feel, and yet there were no spelling bees.

In Grade 3, at an alternative school, I mostly chose to play outside, swinging for hours and playing on the bars.

Then, briefly, a return to public school for Grade 4. My teacher’s name was Mr Tagami, and his presence was defined by tension—a tightly held expectation of compliance enforced by the sharp, deliberate rap of a ruler on a desk. I was often daydreaming, only to be jolted alert. 

Withdrawal as protection, and the safety of home

When Mr Tagami told my mother—at the first parent-teacher conference—that I was unlikely to rise above average, she pulled me out. She refused to leave her child in the care of someone who failed to recognise brilliance and creativity. That gesture marked me. It stitched something permanent into my sense of self. It offered the first, faint possibility that I could be understood on my own terms.

Homeschool followed—long, unhurried days filled with a report on Van Gogh, with a painting in his style, with hours constructing dollhouses from scraps of wood and cardboard. There were no tests. There was no shame. There was only the slow unfolding of thought.

Only much later would I come to understand how much formal instruction I had missed in those years—through absence, through drifting time, through unexamined gaps that no one bridged.

The moment it broke me

In Grade 5, I returned to the outdoor school, still shaped by fluid movement and unmeasured outcomes. I could copy printed text well enough; but could not spell much. The gap between my intellect and written output was immense.

One day, I was home in the middle of the day, looking after my younger siblings while my father worked.

The phone rang—an adult voice at the other end, steady and efficient, asking to leave her name and number for one of my parents.

I held the pen. I listened. I began to write.

She spoke clearly and kindly, then repeated herself once, then again, then three more times—each time her tone a little more careful, never unkind, but already moving on in the way adults do when they expect a child to eventually catch up.

My hand moved slower than the words. I heard the click before I looked down at the scraw. I said

I am so stupid. I am so stupid. I am so stupid.

The “alien creature” in the classroom

In grade 6 at a public school, a teacher paused and looked at me—truly looked, both astonished and sceptical—and asked, “What alien creature are you?” I could speak fluently. I could engage with texts that far exceeded grade level. I could describe meaning, gesture at mood, interpret nuance. But I could not write a paragraph.

In Grade 6, I wrote one paragraph—what I believed was my best work. It had taken me hours. I received three out of ten. One point for each idea.

Red Xs. Question marks. Comments scrawled in haste: “Where’s the rest?”

Inference, fluency, and the missing ends of words

I had never been taught to read phonetically. My reading had formed through immersion and inference—an intuitive assembly of meaning built from the beginnings of words. I listened. I memorised. I skipped the endings, usually.

My 6th grade teacher soon divined that I was smart, with a lack of exposure. A child who had read The Lord of the Rings was presumed fully literate, fully equipped, fully fine.

Letters reversed. Lines jumped. Sentences repeated. Stories remained intact only through the interpretive strength of a brain determined to make sense.

Hypervigilance as a learning strategy

There were other glitches—the kind I would later learn to name. Thinking one number and writing another. Forgetting a sequence. Losing the thread of an idea mid-task. 

I built systems slowly, layering each one atop the last like protective seams in a garment meant to hold my mind together—cross-checking every digit on paper, re-reading every sentence aloud to catch a transposed word. Over time, that scaffold became my rhythm; that vigilance became my signature; and adults around me began to call it diligence, to praise it as conscientiousness, to reward it as excellence—as though my rituals had shaped me into a model student, a high-achiever, a girl who always got straight As, without once asking what it had cost me to become that girl, or how early the cost had begun.

When excellence collapses

By the end of university, the habits that had once held me together began to turn inward. I had mastered the art of appearing competent, and I had learned how to earn praise through control—through detail, precision, perfection, rehearsal—through triple-checking and re-reading and never allowing a moment of visible uncertainty. I had become someone others admired, but only because I had mortgaged my nervous system to meet their expectations.

In my third year, something gave way. A professor offered a critique of a paper—a conceptual piece about postmodernism more—poetry than prose—and although the feedback was ordinary, my collapse was total. I had a breakdown and dropped out. I was bedridden and unable to work for several years. It’s like the gargantuan effort I had been applying had nearly killed me. And it only took one negative piece of feedback to make me unravel. 

A different rhythm: how I learn now

Voice dictation dissolved the distance between my thoughts and the page; the delay, the detours, the labor of transcription faded, and something close to ease began to take its place. I rarely type anymore. I speak. I design with a mouse. I manage complex systems. I bill $175 an hour. I am known for clarity.

No one asks how I write and I work at home, so no one is bothered by my continual blathering.

In collaborative settings, I still falter. My eyes jump rows when reading a spreadsheet aloud, and I lose my place. I misspell client names or misassign time entries. I re-read without realising. I carry embarrassment quietly, shaped by years of correction that trained me to blush first and explain later. Sometimes, it takes me hours to recover.

And still, I perform. And still, I deliver.

The beginning of disclosure

I have started to disclose that I am dyslexic. The more I name it, the more room there is to breathe. People ask what I need. I tell them. I ask for help catching transcription errors, for grace when my edits don’t align with expected timelines, for reminders when my systems fall out of sync.

I no longer carry shame as much shame.

Each time I name my needs, I place one brick into a new kind of structure—a structure built not from vigilance and masking, but from clarity, trust, and a belief in my own right to thrive on different terms.