Dyslexia & Me

Yeap, that's me alright.

I'm tired. It's that wall again. That damned wall that ALWAYS gets at me.

Yes, It's Maths, as usual. When I get frustrated, things just don't compute no matter how hard I try. It's true, it's like I'd stare at some sort of equation and I see it and all, but it stops there. The 'sense' of the workings that's supposed to come with it is, just. NOT. THERE. This has always been my achilles' heel since, like I don't know, forever?

Oh I can still remember back then when I can't even read or write properly. Felt like a retard, hated school. Positively hated anything that had to do with 'learning'. I threw a fit or a tantrum whenever my mom asked me to study. I'm absolutely grateful that the reading/writing hell was a phase I could get over. Looking back now, it is kinda funny but it sure was NOT funny back then.

Like, I pronounced everything in a jumbled kind of way. 'Battery' was 'Brattey', 'Animals' was 'Aminals', 'Pencen' was 'Cenpen'. Letters were hard too. 'b' and 'd', 'p' and 'q' and all that nonsense. They looked like squiggles really.

I liked stories. I liked how there was a film playing in my mind when my parents read me bedtime stories which got me to love to read. I suppose when you read a lot, the problem just sort itself out. Not that I was terribly dyslexic in the first place. We, my older brother and I are only mildly dyslexic. Adi, the youngest only has it when he's little, he's a really smart kid. Way smarter than us haha. I'm pretty sure this thing runs in the family, dad has it (I think he's a brilliant man BECAUSE he's dyslexic :P), we had it. Hopefully our kids won't have it so bad =.= ahaha.

I'll always remember this most though, I was in standard two, and we had to write this short composition for BM. I handed mine to the teacher, she took a look at it and chucked my book across the classroom. Pretty dramatic. Boy was I freaked out. Didn't want to go to school the next day. See, what got her mad was:

- I wrote the composition from right to left (like Jawi).

- The letters are ALL jumbled. In some word they were in mirror images of the original one and sometimes they're not.

The teacher thought I was making fun of her. *sigh*

One more thing, I'll tell you a secret. All these spelling problem actually came back! when I type out sms-es. Yeah, freaked me out big time. Discovered this when I first got a cellphone. I tried to text a friend of mine and found that I couldn't spell. Jeez. But it was temporary. I think it's jus because I wasn't used to it. Ehehe.

As for sekolah agama? Haha. I SUCKED at it REAL bad. I studied with kids a year younger than me because I was that stupid. But really, I couldn't even get the roman letters right and they wanted me to get the jawi right? In which they looked a helluva lot more similar??? Hell no, I couldn't do it. There was 'sod' & 'do', 'tho' & 'zho', 'ba' & 'ta', 'ra' & 'zai'...etc etc. ENDLESS squiggles that looked INCREDIBLY alike.

I excelled in Sirah but screwed up Arabic. Failed it always. Jawi was bad enough then there's Arab! A whole nother language! when I couldn't even process my own mother tongue! HA HA HA. It piss me off even now actually. Egh.

Oh, there was 'Left' and 'Right' too. It did not make sense AT ALL to me at first. Haha. They were just 'one way or the other, what did it matter?' I can get these down correctly now though it remains that I've 0 directional skills. Ask anybody who's close to me and they'd concur. I get lost at school for god's sake. I never got to pin point which lab was which in high school. *shrugs*

And now, MATHS. The times table was my arch enemy. The sight of those 'X's between them numbers just screamed 'WRONG WRONG WRONG!!!' to me. I lost count of how many times I had to stand in class, or get a whack on the palm or get yelled at. It wasn't pleasant at all.

No, it ISn't pleasant at all. Not was. I still suck at maths. Maths is like art gone wrong to me. There's all these pretty shapes in it, but there's a language in the picture. One I can never master. It's a pity really. And yes yes, I've a math test coming, that's why I'm venting. I'm having one of my gazillion mental blocks when I try to study maths, but I can't, so I get frustrated and here I am. Hah.

P.S: It'd be way cool if I'm like Percy Jackson who's a demi-god and am hard wired for ancient greek. Hahaha. That's a nice fantasy take on being dyslexic! For those who saw the movie, the parts where it showed how Percy couldn't read and the words started shifting around? That's so not true! haha. It'd be kinda cool if that really does happen...at least it'll be entertaining.