A Writer's Notebook, Day Eight-Hundred-And--Ninety-Six

I am thinking about certain personal myths that have been part of my identity for a very long time.  When I was young and began school, my experiences were very extreme and difficult.  As a dyslexic student, I had a great deal of difficulty learning and the school was not equipped to offer any help.  Instead, I was ignored and convinced of my own failings.  I believed I was notintellectually capable of reading, for example.  

The results of this were very extreme.  I was a young child and the impact of being pushed down in this way were very extreme.  My father always spoke of how I changed, how I lost a certain spark.  My mother has expressed similar feelings as well.  Now, I am sure that there is a truth here, that I did change.  I was wounded, and I cannot really describe what I felt at the time.  I accepted it as true and right, as normal.  I deserved it, because I was just stupid.  But, I did not want to be, and it crushed me to be in that situation.  That is all true.

Yet, I cannot help but feel there is something wrong in that story, that it is truly harmful for me.  Not because I do not recognize that I changed, but because the notion that I lost some spark that was an essential part of my spirit suggests I was broken by that experience, and that nothing I have done since, nothing I ever can do, will restore me.  I do not want to be trapped seeking a return to a version of myself I do not know, or to believe that the bad things done when I was in those first years of my education have doomed me for life.  Even more, I am afraid to think my mother thinks that.

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