I see your slumped shoulders and head down when you leave SCHOOL.
I see you reciting your presentation from memory, even though the words are right in front of you.
I see you at the library, paging through Where’s Waldo, and trying to hide it from your peers with their chapter books.
I see you cracking jokes, stalling, making excuses and sometimes getting in trouble to avoid embarrassment related to your learning differences.
I see you collapse into bed, exhausted, at the end of every school day.
And I wish the world would see you, too. Not just a troublemaker who can’t sit still. Who wears black jeans and hoodies everyday. The jokester who avoids reading in front of people.
I wish they could see YOUR HEART. How you defend your little brother and anyone who’s being picked on. How you swallow your pride to ask for help, and how you’re the first to jump up and help someone else.
You open doors, carry groceries, shovel the driveway and clean your room without being asked. You’re incredibly perceptive and can see in my eye if I’m having a bad day — and you always stop and ask, “What’s wrong, Mama?”
I see your tireless hard work and struggle. I see your frustration and how it sometimes boils into rage, and I wish there was more I could do to help you.
You may laugh when someone makes fun of your handwriting or spelling, but I see the hurt in your face. And I know you’re trying your best, which is all I could ever ask of you.
I see you, BABY. And I think you’re incredible.
Keep up the struggle and hold your head up high. You’re amazing, and someday I just know the world is gonna see what I see in you, too.
Thank you for sharing this!
Dyslexia is the name of my demon. by Rachel lang.
I have a demon inside me, she has long hair that always gets in the way, and her face is all jumbled up and backwards. She doesn’t talk often but when she does, her words don’t make sense.
She holds on to me and goes with me everywhere I go, even if I try to leave her behind. I will always have her with me- she will never leave. She is part of me.
When I read she covers one of my eyes so that some words look incorrectly spelled, while others look fine. When I write she dance’s in my mind picking up the words I want to write and throws them up in the air, they land in one big pile, confused and out of order.
Sometimes she will play a game when I write, where she will toss random letters into my words- she thinks it’s very funny. Most of the time I don’t even know she is doing it.
She is most happy when I am stressed or rushed, because I haven’t the time to sort out the mess she leaves in my head, and she can work her mischief unchecked. When I look at my finished work she spills doubt all over my mind, covering every thought with sticky uncertainty, so that I can’t remember how some words are spelled, or how others are pronounced.
She makes me hate my own work, and makes me think everything I write is wrong. She tells me that I should give up. She tells me that others will laugh at me, she says that they will never understand me, it is an argument that I have with her every day, sometimes I win the argument- and sometimes I don’t.
Sometimes I do give up, it is on those days were she is strongest.
Dyslexia is the name of my demon.