Zibby Mag

By Darcey Gohring

I’m in a third-grade classroom in the suburbs of New Jersey. A small, freckled girl, I sit slumped behind my desk chewing on a fingernail. The teacher is at the chalkboard working through a math problem.

“Who can tell me the next step?” she asks.

Several hands shoot up eagerly. I drop my eyes to the composition book in front of me, praying she’ll pick the boy next to me who is practically jumping out of his seat, fluttering the fingers on his outstretched hand.

“Let’s have someone new this time,” the teacher says as she surveys her options. “Darcey, what do you think?”

My stomach drops as all eyes turn in my direction. I look up, biting my lip. “Um…um…” The seconds tick by. The boy next to me rolls his eyes. The girl in front of me whispers something under her breath. They’re growing tired of this same scenario playing out every time the teacher calls on me. I swallow. “Um…I…I…I don’t know.”

The teacher shakes her head. “Darcey, you need to pay closer attention!”

What she doesn’t realize is that I am paying attention, or at least trying to. I just don’t understand.

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A few months later, I’m sitting in a waiting room with my mother. “What kind of a doctor is she again?” I ask. Mom says she is a doctor for your brain. That sounds kind of creepy to me but when the doctor comes out, she looks nice enough.

In her office, the doctor gives me all kinds of tests and keeps saying things like, “You’re doing great, Darcey” and “If you need a break just say so, ok?”

The tasks are easy. Put cards in order. Tell her what some pictures look like (they look like splattered paint to me). Arrange tiles in order to try and make a story. Turns out, it’s pretty fun, and I’m starting to feel happy I got to miss school for this.

In the car on the way home, I wonder if the doctor fixed me and if I’ll start to understand like all the other kids. But when we get home, Mom says we need to talk. After examining the tests and my work from school, the doctor said that I have something called dyslexia.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“You see things differently so you are going to need a little extra help.”

“Why can’t the doctor just give me medicine to make it go away?”

Mom shakes her head. “That’s not the way it works. And they don’t have anyone at your school who knows about dyslexia, so next year you are going to have to go to a new school where they have special teachers.”

I don’t care about the special teachers. I care about my friends and our recess club. I just want my brain to work the same way as all the other kids.

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I’m in fifth grade now. I have friends at my new school but I hate going to the pull-out class for students with learning disabilities. I hate the way the resource room teacher comes around to collect us all like a herd of cattle. I hate the way my friends talk about what they did in the classes I missed. I wonder how I’ll ever catch up if they keep learning more and more while I’m still working on the same old things.

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I’m in middle school and I don’t have any friends in my classes. I thought I might be with at least a few from my elementary school but now grades are divided into different sections—basic, standard, and honors—and every friend I had from elementary school is in standard or honors.

No matter what kind of a student you are, everyone with a learning disability, like dyslexia, is automatically put into “basic” in every subject. Basic is for the kids everyone calls stupid; the brunt of lunchroom jokes. It’s the place for the fuck-ups, the class clowns, and the kids who are already out back smoking cigarettes and stealing liquor from their parents’ cabinets. I spend most of the first year sitting silently in my classes.

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I’m in seventh grade. On the first day of school, I walk into my new resource room. There, smiling back at me, is a tiny, blonde woman named Mrs. Worthington. She likes my wild outfits and my artsy style. She talks about how imaginative I am and how much she likes my writing. She asks me about the acting classes I take on the weekends at HB Studios on Bank Street. “An actress training in New York City! I mean, how cool is that?! I wish I was as creative as you, Darcey!” she says and I beam. She is the first teacher to focus on the things I’m good at.

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I’m in eighth grade sitting in my guidance counselor’s office. Mrs. Worthington has helped me rehearse this conversation for the last couple of days. This is it, now or never.

“I want to be moved up to standard in English and history. My grades have been good and I think I deserve it.”

My counselor smiles. “That would be very unorthodox. Basic classes are usually a better fit for students with learning disabilities.”

“But, that’s not fair,” I say. “Shouldn’t I at least get a chance to try?”

For the next few months, I will visit my guidance counselor several more times with this same request. Finally, she relents and I get moved to standard in two subjects. I have to work twice as hard as most of my classmates to be a fairly average student. I’m also keenly aware that the other students can get a C or a D and will be allowed to stay, but if I do, I will be moved back to basic.

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I’m in high school. My interest in theatrical arts has led me to stories and storytelling. My mother has encouraged my creativity. My room is full of books like Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, A Tale of Two Cities, and Dubliners. The pages inside them have notes in the margins with specific sections underlined or highlighted. There are notebooks full of song lyrics and quotes. There are journals filled with dreams and insecurities and heartbreak and ideas. I understand my mind doesn’t work like everyone else’s. I see the stories in pictures. I imagine the scenes in them in vivid detail. I feel the emotions of the characters viscerally. I am aware that this part of me is unique but now I’m starting to like it.

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I’m in college and I’m in love. I met the object of my affection in a freshman writing class. Early in the semester, the professor brought us outside and asked us to write about what we saw around us. As I sat on the grass contemplating which details to include—the feathered green leaves on a nearby tree, the sound of a bird chirping, the texture of the brick on a building, the sun on my face—I could feel a new part of myself awakening. I was being asked to write about my own experience in the world. Before then, I had admired the craft of other writers, but now I was learning how to create it myself. I’m in love with the art of writing—the way I can bring words together, shape them, and mold them into something beautiful.

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I’m 24, working as a research assistant at a lifestyle magazine. Two incredible editors have mentored me for the last year. I’ve written profiles, round ups, and features, but today I am sitting in one of their offices with a new piece. It’s an essay about how the foods we grow up with not only fill our stomachs but our spirits as well.

As I watch the editor read the piece, trying to interpret her expression, I convince myself that this was a mistake. The magazine takes only one essay a month. It’s for real writers who know their voice and write things that make people think. How could I think I was good enough?

Finally, the editor looks up, but before she can say anything, I jump in. “Yeah, I mean…I just thought…I don’t know, maybe it was something?”

“Darcey, I love it!”

“You do?” She nods, smiling.

The essay runs in the next issue. Colleagues come to my desk and tell me they had tears in their eyes as they read it; they connected to it in so many ways. The magazine gets letters from readers about it. For the first time, I feel like a real writer.

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I’m nearly 50, and for many years I never told anyone about my dyslexia. But today, I know how much it would have meant for that little girl in a New Jersey classroom to hear my story. Dyslexia taught me how to stand up for myself. It helped me find the work I love to do. It makes the work I do richer. And it makes me better at teaching others how to do that work. Even the quietest among them have a story worth telling.

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Darcey Gohring has 25 years of professional writing and editing experience. She is an editor at Zibby Mag and the host of the Zibby Mag Online Writing Community. For six years, Darcey was the managing editor of a lifestyle magazine and has held almost every position in the editorial field. She specializes in personal narrative and memoir. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, HuffPost, Business Insider, Scary Mommy, among others. Her essay “Looking Back at Cancer and Coronavirus” was recently nominated for a Zibby Award. She was a contributing writer for the anthology, Corona City: Voices From an Epicenter, where she shared her experience of being diagnosed with breast cancer in the first few weeks of the pandemic. Darcey leads writing workshops and has served as the keynote speaker for conferences all over the northeastern United States. She recently completed her first novel. Visit www.darceygohring.com for more.