Resident Alien. Part 8.
As a dyslexic I was naturally drawn to reading narratives through pictures and comic books found me wanting. Words on a page were difficult to hold still, especially if I was distracted. Each word vibrated then seemed to collapse inward on itself from both ends, letter by letter after first flipping backwards and exchanging places. No amount of focus could keep them from doing it and everything was ineligible to me. I’ve sometimes wondered if reading via the reflection in a mirror might have helped me then because It all felt wired that way somehow. To really read took special circumstances. I had to be alone and it had to be quiet, which was rare in our house in those days, but I savored the moments when I found them. From one comic book panel to the next I tracked superheroes locked in battle as they tumbled down colourfully inked pages whilst regarding all the variables carefully along the way. Everything within the frame was essential and significant and I searched the artworks for signs and symbols with which to build a coherent narrative of my own from.
I wasn’t officially diagnosed as dyslexic until I was 19 years old and my entire life at school suddenly made a sick kind of sense. I could write but did not read well. My vocabulary was beyond my years, but I couldn’t spell any of it. I’d been pulled out of classes to show my work to people who were not teachers and tell them about the things they pointed to in my exercise books. For years I’d been bumped around from regular classes to remedial classes and back again with no apparent logic or explanation and I will never in my life forget the holy brutal horror hell of sight reading in front of a class full of vicious adolescent Droogs. Visits to the school psychologist followed this, but I think that was for another issue altogether..
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