My Dyslexia Story: Gawain Williams

Where it began

My mum was brought to tears teaching me to read, I remember it being a pain, childish frustration as the words I read out were always different to the ones expected. I’ve always been grateful for her dogged perseverance. Combined with Dads love of oral stories and history, often told with great flair to mask his own illiteracy, fostered a love of books in me despite my early problems.

By the time I reached secondary school I was able to burn through books, often making up words and names in my head to gloss over the words I couldn’t pronounce. In lessons I always struggled with copying, often being called out for poor spelling by teachers. At this point I wasn’t Dyslexic, instead I was lazy, needed to use a dictionary or was not reading the board.

The 90’s education saw dyslexia as a bit of a joke…

...an excuse for middle-class families to explain away their children’s poor grades. For the working-class neurodivergents in education, we had to find our own coping mechanisms. Looking back, I see that many of us would end up clustered together in friendship groups of a mash-up of misfits whose humour, music and subcultures were just a little out of place with most of the school.

I developed a bit of a gift of the gab, impressing the teachers I cared about (often History teachers) with brilliant verbal answers to make up for poorly structured paragraphs and mixed-up e’s and a’s. I manged to scrape into university.

My essays were always a mess. I would spend weeks in the library, reading and writing notes. When it came to structuring words into a paragraph it felt like I was dragging shards of glass from my brain. I would cry with anguish as the arguments in my head would never show on the written page. I would watch other people type, and see sentences full of sense flow from their fingers. It left me Baffled. Even now I can watch people type with amazement.

It all finally makes sense

After a particularly painful essay a lecturer took me aside and told me that if this was the regular quality of my work then I should go to student support. To me this was a great insult, the idea that my work was soo poor that I would need help, especially when I was working my hardest.

I decided to take up his advice when I heard that student support could arrange a free laptop. I figured if I could fool this lot into passing me a nice new laptop then I should go ahead and try this test. Within minutes of my assessment I realised I was actually deeply in need of support. The puzzles spun me around; the tests triggered my frustration. The only relief was when we moved to a verbal part of the assessment where I felt I could chat freely and prove I had brain. I received a diagnosis for Dyslexia. A lap was forthcoming (which did help) but even more helpful was the amazing staff at Essex University student support.

I was able to learn new coping strategies to help with my studies. I discovered many of my foibles like as mispronouncing words were a linguistic reflection of my Dyslexia. I began to mull back over on my education and felt a degree of anger that I had not been offered support sooner. There was also a shame, compared to other neurodivergent people I believed myself to be an imposter, I could read and (kind of) write, where others seemed to grapple with lives more than I did.

It took a long time to accept my neurodivergence

Meeting fellow travellers with Autism an ADHD helped me take ownership and strength from my differences. I started a job supporting children with special needs. Non-verbal Autistic children who taught me how much love and joy can be gained from a world experienced in a different way.

The confidence I could give children struggling in school when I shared with them my Dyslexia stories. We’d joke about which letters we spell backwords, and they would often react with amazement when I explained that Dyslexia was about more than just spelling.

Many had been diagnosed but no one had really explained to them how they worked differently, their short-term memory, organisation. That the letters dancing around was just one of what made us different. These pupils gave me the courage to become a teacher. I celebrated my Dyslexia during my training seeing it for the first time as assets rather than a hinderance. I realised I could see bigger picture patterns which people focused on smaller details could often miss.

When I look back

I found some of my old problems from school stinging pretty sore when some of the older teachers mocked my spelling mistakes on the board or in reports. This helped me embrace my Dyslexia further. My current school allows a much greater space for Neurodivergence. Now when I start with a new class, I take 10 minutes to explain my Dyslexia. A new class will pick out my spelling mistakes on the board, within a week they ignore them, writing the words correctly in their books. If they cannot spell a word I’ve misspelled, then we ask the best speller in the class for help.

Once this did go too far, I misspelt King Cnut’s name on the board in giant letters. The whole class ignored the hilarious spelling mistake for the whole lesson except for one boy who left the class in a giggling fit. I wish the pupils had called me out on that one.

For Dyslexic awareness weekly, I was deeply proud to be asked by my school to share my story with the entire school across assemblies. I now get young people walking up to me and telling me how they too are Dyslexic with a degree of dignity and self-respect that actually makes me a little envious of them.

It makes me feel that Dyslexia has been accepted today as “genuine” by society. My neurodivergent imposter syndrome has faded, but I feel a worry as instead people with ADHD get the eye role that we were once were met with. Quips about overdiagnoses combined with a lack of understanding about ADHD persist. I hope this fades, and that for today’s neurodivergent children with schools today capable and willing to support so much more that they get to grow up with fewer barriers.