“Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile… a stain upon the silence.” Samuel Beckett

A few days ago my co-worker asked me to do the one thing I dread the most ever in life. That one act churns my stomach. It paralyses me. When thinking about doing that one action, I seize up, I can’t breathe, and I feel as if I am not in control of myself. You see, on Tuesday the sweetheart that he is appeared in front of my desk around 2.30 pm holding a small, purple coupon offering a 20 percent discount on coffee. It really was like Christmas all over again. My heart went mad with joy. The caffeine junkie in me was contemplating when I was going to get my next quick fix, and his offer could not have been more opportune. For those of you who don’t know, coffee does not just make my world spin ‘round, right ’round, baby, right ’round like a record, baby, (by the Flying Spaghetti Monster I hope the younger people reading this get that reference. I’m not that old). Caffeine makes up about 95 percent of my blood content. I would call myself a coffee vampire, but too many people have written bad vampire books for me to make that joke with any dignity. So, back to my story, my co-worker went to everyone in the office to ask if they wanted some coffee goodness. I, of course, down to my last twenty before payday, jumped at that 20 percent discount. Then the dreaded request comes.

“I’m never going to remember that,” he casually says. “Could you wright that down please?”

Fuck I thought. Oh fuck!

Suddenly anxiety swelled up inside me, and I felt as if I had taken my last breath. I hate writing down things for people. It is truly one of my worst fears. Sometimes I even write down things in my most atrocious handwriting so that no one else can read what I have written – sometimes not even myself.

Naturally, being the insufferable must-know-it-all that I am, while writing this blog post I googled what the fear of writing is called. I first found verbophobia, which is the fear of words- but no, I love words. Words are my life, and my dream one day is to write the right pattern of words that engrosses the world, so no. Next, I found the word graphophobia, the fear of writing or handwriting. Very fricking close, but I am not afraid of writing, or I would not have a blog, be a writer or a journalist, and quite frankly other people are afraid of my handwriting, not the other way around. So obviously, I realised that I have scriptophobia, the fear of writing in public, or to put it simply, I am dyslexic and it terrifies the hell out of me if someone reads anything I write and it has a spelling error in it.

So, when my kind co-worker asked me to write down my coffee order, I had to concentrate. He was standing over my shoulder, so I could not type my order and then write down what I wanted like I normally do. I really had to focus. It is coffee creamer not creemer. My mother took her time to teach me the difference between ‘ee’ and ‘ea’ words. “The sheep and the queen are not in the same dream,” she would say. The word is sugar not suggar, not suger, sugar has one ‘g’ and no ‘e.’ My mother also had me sit down and learn particular words that I could not spell phonetically. Don’t even get me started on the difference between words with ‘c’ and ‘s’ or American versus British spelling. Those things still confuse the fuck out of me. I was genuinely afraid to write down that order and look stupid. But I love coffee, and I had that 2.30 feeling, so I wrote that order and drank that cup of coffee with a little too much sugar and coffee creamer. It was fabulous.   

I have never kept my dyslexia a secret. I am very open about being dyslexic. The only people I refuse to tell are my editors. I don’t make any excuses for myself, and I try to work on par with my co-workers. I don’t succeed all the time in submitting an error free story, much to my humiliation, but it makes me feel good to be a writer who does not use her learning disability as a crutch. I knew that if I was going to become a writer, then I would have to embrace my dyslexia. That was the only way I would overcome my fear of writing- and trust me, when I was younger, I was very graphophobic. When I realised that my fear of writing was keeping me back from sharing the fantastic stories in my head, I knew I had to embrace my words. (Btw, I think I should get mad props for resisting the urge to make a Batman reference. Just saying.)

 If you ever get an email, a text message, an IM or handwritten note from me and you notice a misspelt word, then feel privileged. That means I am comfortable enough with you to let you see my flaws. It means that I have told you my problem and I trust that you won’t make me feel like less of an intelligent person for it. Of course, I am also almost incapable of telling if I misspelt a word unless there is a red line under it, so then it could also mean the spell check on my phone, computer or internet browser was just plain rubbish (heads up for any dyslexic person, Wordperfect sucks).

I guess my greatest fear is looking stupid in front of other people. For more than two decades of my life I grew up thinking I was dumb. When my mother was taking me from educational specialist to educational therapist I would ask her what was wrong with me. I knew it broke her heart to hear me say that, but I also did not believe her when she said nothing was wrong; I was fine; I was normal. However, it was very easy for me to believe my wicked primary school teacher who made me stand in front of the class as she instructed my Standard Five cohort to applaud me for misspelling the name Jhon. At ten years-old I believed her when she said I was not smart enough to achieve anything, so I should set my ambitions low. It took me ten more years to overcome that feeling of inadequacy, and sometimes I still feel as if I have to overcome that self-doubt.

I know better now. I know me now. The funny thing is, the more you do, the better you become. All those years when I shied away from writing, when I chose to perfect my mathematical skills instead of my linguistic skills, I was doing myself a great disservice. The day I chose to switch from a Mathematics degree to a Literature degree was the day I stopped running away from my fears.

I have kept all of my writing from since I was a teenager. Once in a while I look through them to see how much I have grown as a writer. The more I write, the better I get, and now I write every day. For more reasons than I can explain, my dyslexia has become an asset to my skill as a writer. I will certainly explain it more in a later post, but for now I will say that my life has always been about the story – any story, and I don’t think I will stop until I have told all the tales that I want to tell. My dyslexic story as well.     

Thank you for reading.

 

With all my heart,

Rae Ewenheart

 

P.S.

Please note that any misspelt word you see in this post was written intentionally. I hope all you Potterheads out there get the reference. Yes, dyslexia is Riddikulus.

As an FYI, because I don’t trust myself to properly proofread my work, every week I send my blog to a brainy know it all amateur editor in Germany who fastidiously (I hope) combs through this text for any errors. Thanks again Juani 😉