Hello everyone. I apologize in advance for the unstructured and not very coherent structure of my message. I have been having hard times lately because I sort of stumbled across "dyslexia" a few weeks ago and I wanted to get in contact with people who have some experience with dyslexia and how to cope with it. First of all I am 20 and a college student. I grew up in Germany and My native language is German. I learned English at a very young age from my mom and by now i feel more competent expressing myself in English than in any other language due to my hard work I invested into perfecting one language. I am in my second year at university here and I study applied English linguistics and literature and culture studies. More details on this choice follow. In general I am nto very decisive and I still have no idea what I want to do in life. My parents friends and Teachers told me I was talented in music (I've been taking piano lessons for 13 years) storytelling drawing and drama but I couldn't decide for any of these arts. Anyway my childhood "felt" pretty much average and unspectacular to me. In retrospect I do notice a few minor difficulties none of my friends have gone through: My parents confirmed I was a late bloomer and they had taken me to several counsellors because I started walking later than everyone else I started talking later and I learned some basics like tying my shoes later than everyone else of my friends who were at the same age. I was overly sensitive as a kid crying a lot and I suffered from nostalgia/ home sickness until about 14. I learned to "grow up" or rather to deny my exaggerated empathy by then. I will post this message in several replies to stay under the 20000 character limt.
2015-02-03 02:42:51
Eventually I repeated a year of pre-school/K and my parents taught me to read before I started regular grammar school and I did more or less well at home but in my reading classes at school I hardly ever participated which resulted in more than one parent teacher consulting meetings and a classification as 'timid' and 'unmotivated' pupil. I would try anything to avoid reading or writing and I remember inserting "decorative" lines of drawings between lines of writing to shorten the lengths of my texts.
Early on I developed a great aversion against reading because I never really could concentrate and it gave me difficulties recognizing words in written form compared to their written forms (In German as well as in English). Despite my parents' motivations I don't think I finished more than 10 books up to this day. I was disapointet every time I got a book for my birthday but I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings so I said thanks and hoped my parents would read it to me.
In high school I was lucky because I was able to avoid several major reading classes and I chose teachers whose focus was on oral exams and minor written tests. In my junior year I struggled because I had severe problems keeping my handwriting readable and my spelling was awful. My reading aversion had turned into a fear of books and I didn't even look at books that were thicker than a pencil. Eventually it became as severe as I didn't even want to look at book ti
2015-02-03 02:49:28
