I'm Not Dumb, I Just Can't Spell: A Dyslexic's Journey (ePub)

I've used my dyslexic journeys as a thread to show the circumstances that influenced me through short personal stories, with the knowledge that there's always someone with greater problems. Or, as Mark Twin said, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

It may seem presumptuous of me, one who has never read a novel or any book other than texts, to explore the thought of creating lines of words, especially when using my life as the storyline. These words are the culmination of five years of painful self-editing of my dyslexic's scribbled writings, contrasting my affliction with real shortfalls: kids searching for food in third-world dumps; one's loss of arm and leg and running a 100-mile event six months later; a mother's child with learning defects; a blind young man stumbling across the Gobi desert for a week long event; young girls rented by the hour; to those whose faces required reconstruction, and the personal relations that shaped my eight decades. How preposterous such a thought from someone like me to portray such suffering and joy of life; but think how sorrowful it is for one with the pure ability and the skills to write but no life experiences or journeys to write.

A'last, I'll ask forgiveness for those grammatical and mechanical mistakes you find. I could have had an editor make perfect these lines of words, but my passion would have been dissolved. So I'll give warrant for the coming journey: Life's a blood sport! Look not on one's affliction as a victim but as a reason to push forward into the fray, a garnishment of life!