DISCLAIMER: This story contains content of a medical nature. It is not intended as medical advice.
When I was a kid, I was reading and writing before I even started kindergarten, so my parents knew I was, and would continue to be, a snap with words and English. (This isn’t a flex; it’s just for context.)
All through elementary school, my strongest subject was Language Arts (English), and I consistently got 100% on every assignment. I was also very well-known (“popular” is much too strong a word because I was constantly bullied for being “weird”) for always cleaning up at the Scholastic Book Fairs with the blank checks my mom gave me. Mom was an English teacher (in a different district), so she was pleased to encourage my love of reading and words.
I sailed through crossword puzzles and games of Scrabble with my grandma, and I always beat the adults to the punch when we watched Wheel Of Fortune on TV. (I even solved a puzzle once before even a single letter was revealed.)
The difficulty began when I got to junior high, where we started getting reading assignments for homework and having quizzes and tests with much wordier questions.
I just couldn’t do it. I would open the textbook at home to read the assigned chapters and… entirely forget the first sentence as soon as I read the next. I could retain absolutely nothing, even if I made it through the anguishing struggle of how long it took to me read even a single paragraph, let alone an entire chapter.
I didn’t get it. I was still reading my little fiction books with no problem. I assumed it was because the content of “boring” history and science just refused to stick the same way a fun adventure about a haunted house did.
Luckily, I was smart. I knew I had the uncanny ability to remember things if I heard them (the words/phrases would kind of implant in my brain like a recording), so I asked my mom to read my school textbook assignments out loud to me. She obliged without realizing there was a problem or wondering why.
When I finally made it to high school, cleverly circumventing my reading challenges with creative workarounds the entire time, no one even suspected I had an issue with learning or retaining information. I was in all the Honors classes all through high school and always got top grades. I even graduated with an Honors diploma (which is a big deal, now that I know what I know).
My senior year of high school was particularly amusing (for me) because my English teacher hated me. She was the only teacher who ever sniffed out my “cheaty-faced” tactics. She knew I never read the assigned material, but she couldn’t figure out how I still did A+ work on papers and tests. She was correct. Not once did I pick up or read a single word of any of the books she assigned us to read, but the papers I wrote about them were always perfect. I might have been able to read the books okay since they were fiction books, but since employing my creative workaround, I knew I didn’t have to. Why waste the time, right?
What I was actually doing was listening. I would pay close attention in class while the previously assigned chapters were being discussed, between the teacher and the rest of the class, and I would absorb the material that way.
During the middle of the school year, I faced my biggest reading challenge to date. Our class had been reading Beloved (a behemoth of a book for someone like me who mostly still stuck to the Goosebumps series), and we were about three-quarters of the way through it. I hadn’t so much as checked out a copy from the library, let alone actually read any of it.
The teacher announced one day that she would be absent the following day, and we would have a substitute. She said the substitute would be assigning us a paper to write on what we had covered in Beloved so far, plus extra material from the book that we hadn’t discussed in class.
Then, she specifically stared me dead in the eye while still announcing to the class, “And the paper will be handed in by the end of tomorrow’s class. So, for those who haven’t been reading the book… keep that in mind.”
Challenge accepted.
After school, I went to the library and checked out a copy of Beloved. I began power-reading my little patootie off. I read on the couch as soon as I got home. I read through supper with my mom. I read while my mom watched TV before bed. I stayed up most of the night reading. I read on the way to school. (I asked Mom to drive me.) I read during my first several classes. (The teachers either didn’t mind or didn’t notice.) I read through lunch. By the time English class came, I had read the entire book. In less than twenty-four hours. (This might not seem like a big feat to you avid readers out there, but trust me… when you have an undiagnosed reading disability, that’s a big honkin’ feat.)
I was ready for that in-class paper.
The next day, our regular teacher was back. She seemed both surprised and, frankly, p*ssed off when she handed me back my paper with a big, fat “A+” circled at the top. She didn’t give me any grief for the rest of the year. Honestly, I think she was either stunned at my seemingly magical abilities or just stopped trying to figure me out.
Anyway, I went on to take the ACT test (a college assessment test in the US) and scored an amazing 34 out of a possible 36 on the English portion… and a pathetic 17 out of a possible 36 on the Reading Comprehension portion. Big surprise, right?
I struggled with reading my entire life and never really thought about why, since I always just found clever ways to work around it. Then, when I hit forty years old and finally got diagnosed with autism with a side of ADHD, it all suddenly made a whopping heap of sense.
What kills me is that no one — my parents, my teachers, or any other adults in my life while growing up — ever once seemed to notice my neurodivergence. I suppose it was my own fault, in a way, for always being one step ahead and completely masking my challenges by finding creative ways to circumvent them — so I never even suspected anything about myself.
After my diagnosis, I have “loosened my pants strings”, so to speak, and no longer try to hide anything. When I have trouble reading something, I speak up and ask for help. When I get bewildered and lost with instructions, I speak up and ask for more clarification. Even though I’m proud of myself for being clever enough my entire life to unknowingly hide a very debilitating challenge from the rest of the world and myself, it feels so nice to not have to do that anymore.
But I do sometimes wonder if that teacher ever figured out how I aced her class without, as far as she knew, reading a single word… including that Beloved paper.
