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For the longest time, I struggled to read. For me reading was a tangled string of letters on a page, it was impossible to follow along when the string was full of so many knots and tangles that I wasn't even sure where they began. It always seemed like everyone around me had not been handed the same tangled ball I had, their words never knotted in the first place, just a smooth string that they were able to glide across effortlessly.
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Mandatory reading assessments did not escape my hate.Stuttering across words in front of a teacher who tapped at the table and checked her watch with a huff whenever I paused,was a humiliating process.Sometimes when she got impatient enough,she’d read me the word I was stuck on.It made sense when she said it but when I looked back down at the page and another jumble of letters came up only for it to be the same word I had gotten hung up on before,i simply could not recognise it.
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In fourth grade I was put into a split class. An influx of new eager kinds would mix up with tired, unsure older kids, who had already gone through what we looked forward to, and knew the disappointment that waited on the other side. I never dared talk to the fifth graders, just as they never bothered to talk to us. There was an invisible wall built between the two grades, and no one was brave enough to scale it, including me.