THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN ORGASM AND AN ORGANISM...

I have always been a chatterbox. In fact, I think I could talk the hind legs off a whole pack of Donkeys and the whole damn farm with it. By 3 years old I could hold a full conversation at the dinner table chatting away like no tomorrow. 

So when it came to reading and writing,my parents were oh so slightly confused. No matter what they tried to teach me, I just couldn’t get the words on or off the page. They’d spend hours drilling spellings of the most simple words with me or teaching me to write my name. Only to be met with a frustrated little Rosie confused as to why she was being made to complete such complex tasks. 

By the time I was 5 they had identified the cause, like many others in my family I was dyslexic. As the years went by I came to a general understanding of how bad my dyslexia actually was. Words would dance on the page, I wrote almost everything right to left and whilst classmates read chapter books,I struggled to complete a picture book with a few sentences. As for spelling anything correctly, well that was just something of a distant dream. 

By the time I was 9 I had come to the realisation that something had to change because I couldn’t be left in the dust by all my friends at school. I longed desperately to write in books with little lines on the pages and be able to sit and write a story on my own. Looking back, I think all I wanted was to meet some other kids who were in my shoes, but at a small primary school in North Yorkshire there weren't many of us to start with. 

I was always so keen in class, my hand was the first to shoot up. I was always up for joining any team, I did anything and everything I could to be like everyone else and find some common ground, but kids can be mean. I was constantly told I was stupid. Some days I even believed it but most days I let the insults fuel the fire in my belly. My wonderful mum gave me lessons in the morning before school. Having special lessons during the day and help outside of school, I slowly but surely started to get the hang of words in general.

When I got to secondary school I thought I had cracked it. I was free from the extra lessons and being told everything would take me a little longer than everyone else. But, and there’s a but, because I had spent so much time learning how to read I was behind everyone else in my class. The best option was for me to be removed from mainstream education and put into a small group with kids ‘like me’.

For the first time in my life, I was meeting kids my age who also struggled just like me and I learnt pretty quickly that dyslexia came in all different shapes and sizes; for some people it affected their maths, some their ability to write it down on the page, for others it was reading something and being able to put together what it said. 

In a new school, with new friends, we started to navigate the new challenge of high school.

Over the years we spent together, we grew pretty close, in our little learning support world. We bonded over the fact that the world of words was a minefield of strange vocabulary rules and letter shaped obstacles. 

There were times when we laughed at our word fumbles. Once I got the word organism and orgasm mixed up in a biology test and on another occasion, I wrote a whole essay for our study of Macbeth and mentioned Banquo's Goat about 20 times instead of Banquo's Ghost.

Sometimes it was tough. When Michael Gove decided to change the GCSE English syllabus and take out the spoken word element, we all had to sit the exam a year early to give us the best chance of us passing the exam in the first place, leaving us SICK with nerves and studying our arses off. Or the time we were told that we shouldn't take a language because we would need to free as much time up as we could to ensure we could pass all our other exams.

In that class of 10 people, I discovered that each and everyone one of them had a talent that made up for all of our struggles when it came to words. One of my classmates discovered his ability to picture 3D shapes in his head and became very talented at design. One of the girls in the class found her passion for textiles and now has an incredible career in the fashion industry. Another had an undying love for science and chemical equations, going on to study it at a top university. 

You may be wondering why I have shared this, why is it relevant? Well, in life you may have setbacks, you may have something you struggle with that means you need to go the long way round. That’s what my classmates and I did, together. But when you come out of the other end and you look back, you will see how far you’ve come, how much you have learnt and who you meet along the way. 

I am writing this using spell check (thanks Grammarly!), once I have finished I will get my computer to read it back to me so I can spot any mistakes I have made. I have my own set of shortcuts to help me get the job done and if I wrote you an email or you read a post of mine, you’d never know the difference.

The lessons I learnt in that class were far greater than how to use the correct conjugation of the verb or when to use a comma and a full stop. It was how to use the support of my peers to empower me and that common ground gets you a very long way.