Lost in a Haze
For as long as I can remember, reading and comprehension were difficult. Words on a page were hard to grasp. Understanding teachers was challenging, and I often struggled to express myself clearly or fully comprehend what was being asked of me in school.
I could feel the teacher’s frustration.
Eventually, I was referred to a reading specialist outside of school who used a rather unique method. She would give me a piece of candy to suck on while she ran her finger along a sentence for me to follow. The candy, she said, was meant to keep me focused. She also hid little treasures around her beautiful property and had me search for them; glittering bits of jewelry tucked among flowers and shrubs. I remember that vividly. I’m not quite sure what the exercise was intended to accomplish, but she had me write stories about my treasure hunts, and maybe, just maybe, that early encouragement, wrapped in something magical and fun, planted a seed. A seed that, many years later, would grow into writing children’s stories. At least, that’s what I’d like to think.
But the joyful approach didn’t last. My visits ended, and in their place came treatments that were far less magical. I was given drops that had an Alice Through the Looking-Glass effect, making objects loom large and then shrink small. I stared for hours. Did someone advise my mother that it was a good idea? What was “wrong” with me? No one really knew. This was the early 1960s. And while dyslexia had been written about as far back as the late 1800s, it was then referred to as “word blindness”—barely understood and hardly recognized.
“Dyslexia was first identified and largely discussed as ‘word-blindness’… until the 1960s, when dyslexia in its modern form came to prominence.” Back in 1963, Dr. Samuel A. Kirk first used the term “learning disabilities,” a collective term for children who were challenged in reading, speech, and language.
Fast forward, years later, I began to understand something no one had the language for when I was a child: dyslexia doesn’t dim intelligence, it simply redirects it. While others absorbed information in straight lines, mine came in spirals, images, and stories. I didn’t know then that dyslexia often comes with a vivid imagination, or that visual thinkers process the world in fragmented, layered ways. All I knew was that the traditional classroom wasn’t designed for a brain like mine.
But life has a way of revealing gifts in places where you once felt only frustration.
Over the years, the very things that made learning hard became the foundation of my creative world. I found myself drawn to pictures, rhythm, metaphor, the spaces where meaning lives beyond the literal. I learned that storytelling doesn’t always begin with perfect grammar or neat comprehension; sometimes it begins with feeling, intuition, and perspective. Perhaps that is why, much later in life, children’s stories felt right for me, felt good. Full of heart.
And that is one of the reasons I share this part of my journey now.
Many children sit in classrooms today feeling lost in their own haze, as I once did. Children who think something is “wrong” with them simply because their minds work differently. Parents who don’t yet have answers. Teachers searching for ways to reach a child who slips through the cracks of traditional education.
If my story helps even one child feel less alone, or one parent recognize a spark instead of a struggle, then speaking about it matters.
My books often center around courage, perseverance, and possibilities. The characters soar, discover, overcome, and believe in what seems impossible. That is no accident. Those stories come from a place deep within me, from a girl who once felt unseen in a classroom yet somehow found her way into worlds filled with stars, music, punctuation characters, and little horses who fly.
And perhaps this is the greatest gift dyslexia ever gave me: the ability to see stories everywhere, even in the places that once felt like shadows.