"Painting Papers"

What if I told you that I have a superpower? You would likely guess that I’m lying, and you would be right, for the most part.

My superpower origin story begins at the age of ten. I walked into a doctor's office, high up in the sky. With strong fluorescent lights surrounding me, puzzles scattered all across the office, and a hello-my-name-is sticker on my racecar shirt, I asked my mom “What's going on?” She responded, “It’ll just be a few games and we can leave.” She was right. This was not your routine check-up; I drew a house from memory, and solved wooden puzzles as quickly as I could. In actuality, I recall enjoying this doctor’s “tests.” After I was done playing games, I overheard the doctor speaking to my mom as I continued to play with the wooden blocks. I heard this strange word: Dyslexia. I had no idea what the word meant, I didn’t even know how to spell it, but I knew I had it and it wasn’t good. I remember being terrified, wiping my sweaty palms on my Children’s Place khakis. I was terrified of this new name tag: “Hello my name is: Dyslexia.” My attention was piqued; I listened closer to what the doctor was saying and overheard the words that would stick with me for the rest of my life: “Learning is going to be really difficult for Ricardo. Don’t expect a lot out of him academia-wise. His grades will definitely be lower than the average.” Without even knowing what dyslexia was, I thought to myself, “I’ll show you!” Mom got me McDonald's and drove me home. Nothing made me more nervous than this day, and for a good reason, I had no idea what I was in for. As the car sat in traffic, I wondered if it was permanent, if it was contagious, and if I was stupid. If I was stupid. This last thought stuck. When I got home my older brother, who shares the same disability, noted my pain. He knelt down, looked me in my watery eyes, and said, “Don’t worry, you have a superpower now.”

I had a superpower, but it did not feel like that for many, many years. “Ricardo…Ricardo, can you please read next.” My head peeped up from the Magic Tree House book and my heart sank to my stomach. With, what felt like, millions of eyes staring at my Dyslexic name tag, I stumbled over readings my classmates blew through. I stuttered, read slow, and couldn’t even say some words. I hated reading. I could never focus on the story, all I could focus on was “reading next.” When I finished my circus act of reading, my eyes shot up from the “unreadable” words. And with a flushed face and manic eyes, my attention was less on reading the book than reading my classmate's lips: “Why can’t he read? It’s so easy. I read like that when I was five. Ricardo, more like Retardo. He must be stupid.”

What stuck with me from my “origin story” was not that I was a superhero, but that I was stupid now and there was nothing I could do about it. Stupid was who I was. Dyslexia made me stupid, my grades made me stupid, and my slow reading made me stupid. In my mind, the Doctor diagnosed me as stupid and my grades were simply showing my parents, classmates, and teachers that I would always be stupid. I was determined to find a cure for my terminal stupidity. The hypothesized cure was to be nothing less than the top of my class. An A+ was the only medicine. This did not come easy. I spent hours upon hours mastering my schoolwork. I sat in my room and saw the moonlight turn to daylight while memorizing, word for word, the in-class reading for the next day, just to avoid reading in front of others. My entire self-worth was dependent upon my grades. This resulted in anxiety, and what I call dyslexia headaches: the feeling of not being able to use my brain anymore because reading is so draining for me. I forced myself to continue to read when my head was physically pounding. I became addicted to my A+ medicine and refused to settle for anything less; this addiction continued into high school.

I began to see my disability as a superpower when I found my art. Both of my dyslexic brothers are artists, one is an industrial designer and the other is an architect. They used their dyslexia to see things differently than other minds, designing art in new ways. I admired their work but felt like my dyslexia was only a hindrance to my passions of reading and writing. This was until I began to see my passion for English as an art. I began to fall in love with English, learning from the masters and applying their techniques to my own writing. However, my writing process was nothing like the master's. I am a dyslexic author. I see words differently, I see sentences differently, I see English differently. I see English as a puzzle, seeing the reading as the board pieces that enable me to fill the middle with the beautiful conglomeration of sentences structured by a dyslexic. My writing is unique; my brain works differently and showing how my brain works through writing is my art, and building my English puzzles in new creative dyslexic ways is my superpower. 

My educational journey is a strange adventure due to my dyslexia. It took me till my Sophmore year to learn how my brain works and how I learn best. Learning how to control my dyslexia, rather than being controlled by it, enabled me to fall in love with learning. Today, I have realized I was not alone in my passion for education being held down by grades. I see many of my classmates still struggling with this today. Education has become a way to figure out how to pass a class with minimal effort, or in my case a way to prove you are not stupid. School is something to trudge through. Perhaps school should be seen in a dyslexic light, as a puzzle to be solved. A dyslexic sees most things differently, perhaps we should see learning differently. Everyone learns differently, we need to learn how we learn before we can learn, before we can truly fall in love with learning. We don’t talk about it but it is rare to do school because you want to. I believe that if everyone learns how they learn this will enable them to find their art and feel like they can fly, feel like they are a superhero.