This guest post is by Leigh Stevens of whereapy.
If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things.
—Epictetus
Image is author's own
“Are you stupid? You sure look stupid. Everyone else in this room handles this level of work. If you can't do simple conjugations you shouldn't be in my classroom.”
That's what you get when the middle school basketball coach is also your advanced language arts teacher. Much to my eternal frustration, I was that “stupid” kid. I am dyslexic with an auditory processing disorder, which means I don't understand verbal instructions very well, but at the time, the school didn't know that. As a first-grader in the early 80s I was placed in the special education classes: the “speds”. It didn't help much that I came from a financially poor family, relative to my peers. And I was a girl. And blonde. There was just no escape from the stupid jokes.
I was inspired to write this post after reading a piece by the Blog Tyrant a few weeks ago. As far as marketing goes it's a standard emotional headline tactic designed to pull you in. It's a good post. Except that, at the time, it frustrated me in a big way, bringing back all the garbage I went through as a kid. So here's my response.
Persistence pays
A learning disability can hamper your blogging practice. Not so much functionally—there are people who can help you write cleaner prose. The real kicker is the emotional baggage created by years of verbal abuse, of people insisting that you're not very bright. It's hard to have confidence in your writing abilities when it was always assumed that you just weren't smart enough to succeed.
My experience in school followed the same pattern, over and over. At the end of each school year, I would graduate from the special education reading class, and be placed in...
