How To Get Past Dyslexia to Find Hidden Talents

Would a learning disability, called Dyslexia, found in all members of the family effect a child’s ability to learn their own native tongue, English?  This is the story of Linsey Daman, who fought past dyslexia to find inner talents and strength. She is courageous, driven, and an inspiration to us all.

-Naima Mora

Linsey Daman

“Please allow me to introduce myself; my name is Linsey Daman, Director, Cultural Arts Center of St. Louis, LLC.  I am admittedly dyslexic with a long lineage of severe dyslexia on my father’s side and even a slight possibility of it on my mother’s side.  My mother had hoped that maybe it had skipped a generation but unfortunately it hadn’t.

During my early years of education, neither my mother nor teachers were aware of my condition until that day where the simplest homework assignments started to become more challenging.  This was the first sign that something might not be quite right.

Learning even my native tongue, English, was a difficult challenge when I was young. Several teachers thought I would never truly comprehend the language or always suffer with spelling and grammar mistakes.  Other teachers forced me to seek additional help with reading and see a language specialist after school hours.

They were concerned if this language learning problem wasn’t addressed early on that I might not be able to fully advance mentally and therefore threatened to keep me back a year in school.  Scared with all the threats, I eagerly signed up for a reading specialist to assist me with these challenges.  I remember very clearly that I couldn’t read with ease and stuttered on every word.  The other children in my class always teased and picked on me horribly due to these mumbled speech errors.

I still don’t enjoy reading out loud to this day due to the sheer fear and panic these grade school teachers had instilled in me.  The school even had me attending special reading classes separate from the normal class, which made me feel awkward and “the odd one out” when I was separated from everyone for reading time.

I didn’t feel as bad about the after school hours with the reading specialist because it was done in a private lesson format.  Hence, no one other than the teacher, my mother and the school district knew about these sessions.  Therefore, I felt like I could hide my disability a little bit more than being publicly separated from the other kids in the 4th grade.  After what I felt were endless sessions, I finally was able to stop the special tutoring after school program.  I moved onto the 5th grade and took things slowly, but in stride.

I was picked on quite a bit in the younger grades, which didn’t help my already deflated ego due to my inability to read without falling all over my words.  Math however was probably the worst childhood difficulty that I faced over all.

I specifically remember a time when a teacher had out a very complex puzzle in the back of a room and I was sitting in front of it with a headache.  What was challenging to me was a cake-walk for the majority of the students in the class.  I couldn’t concentrate well and all of the colors ran together.  All of the other girls were putting pieces into this extremely large, brightly colored puzzle and I felt like I was the only one who couldn’t see the edges of the shapes correctly.

I remember the reds and the greens ran together and all of the colors were in a complete blur.  Now as an adult, I look at this incident and consider it to be “sensory overload” because there were too many bright colors clashing, sharp edges and loud background noise to concentrate.  A migraine formed due to the stress, loud noise and color complexity.

How do you make sense of something you don’t understand yourself?  I was too embarrassed to ask for help so I attempted to take a piece and put it in the puzzle.  Of course, it didn’t fit and I remember trying to make it fit but it wouldn’t work.  I attempted to force or push the puzzle piece into a place that simply wasn’t going to allow it and therefore it bent the nimble edges resulting in ruining the puzzle piece’s integrity.

I also remember being even more embarrassed for trying because I thought everyone noticed and would think of me as a failure.  I began to cry over this event, but did not go into full tears; just a little wetness around the corner of my eyes and that was that.  Luckily no one noticed these tears, as far as I was aware.

In high school, I remember going to classes feeling foggy, dizzy, my mind was cloudy and confused.  Was this the dyslexia talking or was this something more sinister at work here?  Was I truly “slow” like so many of my teachers predicted?  I remember having to work twice or three times as hard to memorize facts, dates and information for tests.  I mainly used my photographic memory to get through school.

I still use this gift to this day and it has come in handy many times, especially in high school.  A lot of times when I was in too much pain to think clearly I just thought about my notes and tried to recreate the paper in my mind.

I remember as if it were yesterday, I used to take these long walks to study information and memorize test information.  I talked to many leaning specialists and everyone advised against me walking and studying because they thought it would be too distracting for the normal learner let alone me.  I chose to listen to my instincts and I began walking with my handwritten notes from class.

I was so determined to beat this condition, disability, challenge, whatever you call it that I even walked in the rain sometimes.  I remember my papers would become runny with the ink but I didn’t care because I was focused on learning.  Up to this point, I’d tried all of the conventional learning methods and nothing worked really well so I thought it might be worth a try.  My mother recommended it to me as a way to help me target my learning ability.  This technique of walking and studying helped me more than anything any other educational advisor had mentioned before.

HOW DID I DO IT?

When it came time to taking the first test after using this new learning method, I remembered the information perfectly.  I was shocked that despite the fact I was taking the test with a migraine I could recall information during this time of pain.  Normally I just gave into the pain and basically gave up on the test but this time I decided to fight the pain and the dizziness and work through it.  When a question was asked on the test and if I didn’t know it I recalled the wet papers from my long walk and I remembered the placement of where the subject was on the paper.

For example, if the question was about something British, I remembered that the word British appeared once on the top of page 9 and hence I closed my eyes and asked myself to re-read page 9 of my notes.  I was then able to pull up a photocopy of page 9 in my brain and re-read the exact wording from the notes.  From this, I had the answer in my head and wrote in the correct response on the test.

This is truly a gift, especially when accomplished during sheer pain of a migraine.  This moment in high school Psychology was when I realized that I might have a gift.  I believed up to this point that I had been cursed on many levels but in actuality I had a true and rare gift that could be used for good.  If I only knew about it sooner it probably could have made my younger grades easier.  However, I felt it was better late than never to discover your talents. ”

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