New Voices 2014

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homework that took a “normal” kid forty minutes to an hour to complete took my dad the rest of the evening. He confessed to me that “[he] would ask for help from a friend or bully someone to do it for [him].” I couldn’t believe my father had to result to such drastic measures in order to get through school and not to be labeled as an outcast. He spoke of his constant frustration of reading “word by word, line by line, paragraph by paragraph and [he] wouldn’t remember a thing.” He had to concentrate more than other children his age, and it complicated his life greatly. Even now, he admits that “[he] has a big fear of opening a book and relapsing,” forgetting everything he was taught on how to overcome his dyslexia, and “even now things switch on [him].” During my father’s younger years, he admitted to me that “[he] used to cry all the time [and] actually ripped a book into pieces once.” He had a troubled childhood. He constantly acted out and missed school. He was “very brutal at a young age to a lot of people [and] [he] think[s] [he] made it as far as [he] did on 99% common sense.” He became very reckless, missing school and ignoring any attempts to improve his reading skills and comprehension. He got into trouble numerous times and embraced a bad boy image. He was “very sidetracked and disruptive, [and] having to get used to something like that is weird and unfair. [He] always asked, ‘Why me?’ [He] hasn’t really met anyone with the same problems as [him],” and it really bothered him. My father still has trouble comprehending even now that he is older. He relies mainly on common sense to get him through life just like he did when he was younger, but he admits that there “really is no need since [he’s] retired.” He still struggles with spelling and vocabulary, but it doesn’t bother him to have to ask for help every now and then. “It’s like limbo. You can’t fill the void,” and there are just some things that can’t be improved upon. I believe he isn’t bothered by it as much because nobody judges him for it. My family accepts him as a regular person, not as a man with a reading problem. He isn’t bothered by it as much as he used to. It’s become his personality and molded him into who he is now. My father still struggles with dyslexia, but “there’s not much [he] can do about it now. [He] kind of just [goes] with it. It doesn’t bother [him] that much.” He’s just happy none of us ever grew up having the disorder “because there were many signs with the way [we] used to spell stuff when [we] were little, but [we] got through it. It was just simple child mistakes.” We would write a letter or a word backwards, but none of that kind of behavior showed up later in life for any of us. One of my dad’s biggest fears is any of his


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