The start

When I was little, I always thought that there was something about me that was not right. I used to look at other people in the classroom and I was confused that they were able to stare at the teacher or board and sit completely still without talking or doing something with their hands. I was always the shy kid at the back of the class that did not to talk to anyone except her friends (and herself) and fidgeted with a pen till it burst and would then spend 20 minutes in the toilets to try and clean it up. At least that is who I used to be.

In primary school, I was not doing my worst, but I also was not doing my best, so they never considered that there might be something wrong with how my brain works. This carried on until I was in year 5 until this one teaching assistant that I had been working with for a few weeks talked about coloured overlays to help me read, she then tested me and see which colour I needed (yellow, but this changes every year or two because your eyes get used to the colour) and I used it for the rest of that day and I cannot express how much of a difference it made to my reading and my eyes in the following weeks. when my parents were contacted about it, the school suggested that I would be tested for dyslexia, and my parents said ‘yes’ of course, and so I got tested. A month later it comes to the day of my dyslexia test, I was so nervous, I went in and I did the best I could to not seem like I had it, but I still got diagnosed as having several dyslexic traits (I was not happy). A year goes on and it is time for sats (important tests), and I got given a reader and a scribe and just about passed the tests.

All the sudden secondary school time comes around and I get into my top choice school (yay) and a few weeks in and just as I am getting adjusted to everything, I get taken out of my French class to be spoken to by the head of learning support; turns out I will not be in that class anymore. I got taken out of French because they thought that I needed extra support with my English and maths skills (true tho) so from then on, I would go to a special classroom when everyone else was in French. At this point I was struggling to understand what it was that they said I had. Nothing made sense to me anymore and I was freaking out because I thought my brain was melting. However, I was always told that I was not dumb no matter what scored on my tests because my brain works differently to everyone else’s, and the tests that they gave us was for people whose brains were not like mine, so I accepted that, and I moved on because it was only a trait right it was not like I had full-on dyslexia and misdiagnosed me or anything!

So, a couple of years go by and I am still holding on to the fact that I ONLY had a trait of dyslexia, and things got harder and harder as time went on, and my mental health went down as well. Not knowing why, you cannot do things that others can do as easy as breathing just baffled me and destroyed my self-confidence. I kept all my feelings, good and bad to myself, this continued to get worse and worse over the span of a year it got so bad that I got intervention one early morning from school. I was in maths and as per usual I was talking to others to distract myself from the fact that I did not understand what I was doing. when my teacher called me out of the classroom for disruption of lesson, that was when I broke down. It did not help when she said I was “mentally unstable” then sent me to the student support staff that asked me a bunch of serious questions from suicide to taking long showers. They forced me to go to counseling, but I said I would not go if they told my parent and they agreed not to. School was getting tough to where I would be getting panic attacks and anxiety attacks maybe twice or three times a week. This arrangement carried on for a year or so until it started to affect me badly at home.

I would have moments where I couldn’t speak or move and the whole world felt like it was going to end , feeling like I wasn’t in my own body and getting scared because I didn’t recognise the person in the mirror , sitting by my door blocking anyone from coming in to my room because that was the worst thing I could think of in that moment , my dad standing outside my door begging me to let him in so we could talk , my mum not eating her food because she was worried about me , not being able to breath and feel in control . All of this and more that I cannot explain was happening, and I could not grasp the fact that I was letting this happen, it felt like I was being possessed and I had absolutely no control over it.

But this is just the beginning