What sustains me: Reading
By: Natasha Fowler
Tags: Biography, Neurodiversity, Recovery, Narrative Therapy, Dyslexia

This was transcribed and left to show its mistakes. I am experimenting with writing with my dyslexia left in. I also recorded an audio version here.

— -

I used to skip to the end of books, to see what was going to happen. Full stop. I didn’t want to feel the tension that is the purpose.

I miss reading. I read catch 22 as a child, I read it maybe six or seven times. I didn’t understand most of what was going on. But I could sense what it might mean. I read Pride and Prejudice. I read it again and again and again. It was a place of comfort. I read Madame Bovary. I read the cereal box. I read the dictionary.

Reading was a trance – an escape. My eyes would fixate. I would be in a complete private space. Full stop. Nobody disturbed readers in a house that was proud of its literacy. Full stop.

I wasn’t reading. Full stop. I can’t read in the usual way. Full stop. I have phonetic blindness. I had not connected the sounds that create the words to the letters that create text. The words that I know as text are stored as 1000s of pictures that my mind has to recall. I read by looking at the shape of the paragraph, pulling the words that I do know, and filling in the gaps through my own imagination. Full stop.

I can read and read for hours, and barely tell you what had occurred -although I had a sense of understanding as I read. Full stop. As I read I was in the atmosphere of the book. I was in the sensory world, that the words that I could receive, created. Full stop.

Under the strain of reading, my body gradually become more and more tense. Full stop. This tension became a sort of protective posture. A place that I could go that was familiar. Where nobody interrupted me, where I was safe.

At school I learned about the analysis of text. Full stop. This would become one of my great loves. Considering the many ways that words could be interpreted, the many connections that they make to different ideas and images – this was my place. And still, I could not read. my ability to analyze was outstanding. I could not recall the details needed to fill in quotes, remember the names of characters, recall dates and details. Meanwhile, I knew what it meant to stand on the street with Madame Bovary waiting for her lover.

I make sense by speaking, I process information and understand by talking. As we grew older, we were allowed to speak a little more at school, but still not enough for me to convert the richness of what I received into processed information I could carry without pain. I was excited. I was tense.

As the hormonal shift of adolescence occurred. I would become angry and be offered the posture of not caring, of being too cool. I took the story offered and continued to experience the disease of unarticulated spirit.

I was sustained by color, shape, light. smell, the texture of the world I knew through my senses, and through my imagination. Above all else, beauty, was the most important thing. The ugliness of my inarticulation, the ugliness of my handwriting, the ugliness of my emotional awkwardness, the ugliness of my tense inflexible body. The ugliness of my desire for intimacy and the persona of isolation that had grown up in the vacant space of an explanation for my experiences. Thousands of impressions of faces that said you’re weird/ incomprehensible/stupid/impossible/annoying. The space of misunderstanding.

This space created in the cathedral. The low warm lighting in the pizza restaurant. The suede of my red shoes. The glaze on the vase I chose for her Christmas present. The dull warm sound in the protection of the sand dunes. The smell of my people’s beds. The velvet on the chaise lounge in my friend’s house. The greens of the marshland behind our house. The feeling of the room even when I fell asleep trying to keep up with Henry V at the old theater. The curve of the banister in the Le Coubroiser house. The Chorus of The Hebrew Slaves, the pace of her panting voice on the track Horses. The incense and Nanny’s soap in the clean architecture of the 70s church building. The texture of the checked coverings of the seats on the tube.

I wish information was colours I could cut and shape into collage. I wish the full vital richness of what I perceive could be conveyed into a material reality. I wish I could explain that for you less abstractly. I wish you knew what the colours of my new jumper mean to me. I wish I could trust that you already do.

-/// – -

Transcribed by https://otter.ai