What is the hardest exam question you have ever faced? Perhaps it was one in university? Or perhaps one in one of the major exams we have every few years in school? I’m certain we all remember it well. The frustration, the anxiety, the sinking feeling that this exam was not going the way we wanted it. I’m sure you remember that question, that question you wished did not exist. I remember mine too but, for the life of me, I cannot remember a word it said.

 

Because I could not read it.

 

I was seven years old and I could not read and the invigilator would not read me the question either. Could I have answered it? I do not know. I still don’t know what it said. Such is the life of a dyslexic, a life where people find things easy and do not understand why you do not.

 

For those unaware, dyslexia is a learning disability related to languages. It expresses itself in various ways and for me, it manifested in an inability to learn phonics, trouble with spelling, a hard time rhyming, and difficulties writing. As such, at the tender age of seven, I entered primary school with the reading ability of a child of four. English was not kind to me.

 

Though that did not stop me. Fast forward over twenty years and I now have five published novels and over two hundred rhyming poems to my name. I love to read and my ability to write is one of my strengths. Not a soul can tell I am dyslexic. After all, what is a dyslexic doing as an author? How could the girl who could not read, write?

 

Well, it’s been a hard road, one that started when I was a very little girl.

 

Ignorant beginnings

 

I knew I could not read before I entered primary school but no one else knew. Even as a child, I was embarrassed by the defect and so, I took great pains to hide it. I memorized entire children books so I seemed able to read and, when we had to read out loud in kindergarten, I would mimic the teacher. In this way, I hid my inability to read until I entered primary school where a reading test outed me.

 

I suppose it must have been quite a shock to my parents. I had every appearance of being able to read. I even had pictures of me ‘reading’ books. However, the test results could not be argued with and I was enrolled into the learning support program. It was run by a wonderful teacher, Dr Ow Yeong, who took care of every child and made sure none of us ever felt less for our difficulties. The program was run with classes to teach us how to read and also a buddy program where older students would read with the younger students. There was no judgement and, in this program, I found that I did not have to be embarrassed about my inability to read. It was a safe space to learn.

 

I had a similar experience at home. My parents never made me feel less for not being able to read. Instead, they took action. From a family friend, they obtained a series of books called ‘Peter and Jane’, designed to help children read. Unknown at the time, it was a wonderful gift for a dyslexic. I could not handle phonics and with these books, I did not have to. Each spread of pages would have on one page, a simple phrase, and the other, an illustration of the phrase. In this way, I began to memorize words and their meanings as pictures. To this day, I use this method and almost every word I know has a picture in my mind. I later learned that this method is known as ‘sight words’.

 

It was also a method which suited my good memory and, by the end of the year, I could read. I retook the reading test and now my reading age was nine. It seems easy to say now but I’ve never forgotten the hardship I had learning to read. How hours were spent before books reading words I did not know when I could have been playing, how I had to memorize spelling words on the plane on the way back from my first holiday and, how helpless I felt looking at an exam question and not being able to read it.

 

Likewise, I’ve never forgotten the first time I was able to read on my own. It’s a memory tinted with gold. I was like all the other students at assembly, all silently reading but, for the first time, I was reading too. I even remember the story. It was one of the more advanced Peter and Jane books with a story about an island. I was just doing what everyone else was but that moment was liberation. I could read!

 

And I’ve loved reading ever since. It’s an ability I treasure. With it, I also left the learning support program and even returned as a senior student helping younger students to read. By all appearance, I was normal.

 

Though, there was still one problem, spelling. I have a younger sister and it did not take long for my parents to realize that while my sister could spell without issue, I could not. Every exam she would simply study. I would study and make a list of key words which my father would then test me on as spelling words. Inevitably, many would be wrong and I would then spend ages learning and memorizing the spelling of those words before being tested again. The cycle would then repeat until I got it all right.

 

It was strange but none of us knew the reason for this. However, my family has always been practical. Solve the problem first, figure out why later. We adapted to compensate for my spelling and so long as I did well enough, that was fine.

 

It was also in primary school where I first learned to write. We had a supplementary class when I was eleven which taught us how to write by ‘imitating the masters’. In the class, I learned that this was something I could do and, very soon, I was writing stories in my free time. They were not very good and to this day unfinished but I had plenty of encouragement from my father and Dr Ow Yeong. As always, the aim was to progress rather than to achieve.

 

Understanding

 

I remember the day I received my PSLE results. I did well enough to go into the Express Stream but badly enough to sink to my knees upon learning my results. I could not go to the school of my choice and instead went to another school on the other side of the island. It was the beginning of four years of very early mornings.

 

Though perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. My English teacher at the time noticed my issues with spelling. He asked if I mixed up letters like b and d. I did and once even wrote the word ‘bed’ with a person on it to remember which was which. He grew suspicious and asked me to get tested for dyslexia.

 

My parents took his advice. An appointment was made and over two days, I was tested for dyslexia at the Dyslexia Association of Singapore (DAS). The conclusion? I was poor at phonics, had trouble with rhyming words, and should be able to write better than I was. I was dyslexic.

 

Since I was already coping with it, this was a moment of relief. Finally, we understood why I had so much trouble with spelling. After years of questions, there was an answer. At last we knew what was wrong and, since we knew, we could do something about it.

 

On the DAS’s advice, I was later signed up for classes to learn phonics. I’m embarrassed to say that I remember almost none of what they taught me besides there being three ways to pronounce the letter d and how to pronounce the letter x. The classes were painfully difficult and, since I was already coping using sight words and technology, I eventually found them unnecessary. In the current century, I did not need to decode the pronunciation of words if I could simply learn how to pronounce them online. If I could already memorize any word I needed, why did I have to suffer a headache just to break them down into their component sounds? I reasoned that if being dyslexic was analogous to being born with no legs, I did not have to learn to run with fake legs. I could simply get myself wheels. That was what sight words were to me and so I ran with them.

 

As such, I left the DAS classes after a year. However, their diagnosis and advice stayed with me. Among other things, they suggested that I get extra time for my examinations and my parents applied for this. It was granted and so I learned what it was to have an invisible disability.

 

It is not possible to tell if a person is dyslexic on sight. There is nothing in their appearance, behaviour, or speech that makes it clear that they are dyslexic. Even now, unless you give me a spelling test, there is no way to tell I am dyslexic at all. Perhaps that was why my school was unsympathetic. To them I appeared normal and I was doing alright in my classes. Extra time was an administrative burden. Just for me they needed another examination venue and no one was very interested in providing it.

 

So I ended up taking my exam in a wide variety of places. I had it in the Vice Principle’s office, in the librarian’s office, in the home economics kitchen, in the drama room, in a meeting room and so on. The most often place was an unventilated storeroom in the General Office. I was often forgotten there. There was no invigilator with me and there was once a time they did not collect my paper when the exam ended. At another time, I was not informed of an error in the exam paper. I found out after returning to my classroom and seeing it on the whiteboard.

 

The worst of it was that I never knew where my exam would be until just before the exam. It was almost a routine. Right before the exam I would ask my form teachers where my exam was. They never knew and so I would run down to the General Office. If they didn’t know, I would run to the examination centre and they always knew where my exam was. I then had to run over there and begin my exams. It was an interesting way to deal with pre-exams jitters.

 

However, there was later another girl who had been in a terrible accident and she had extra time as well. Unlike me, she was well taken care of. Her injuries were very visible and, when I got to the exam venue, she would often be there already. She had already been informed beforehand.

 

Fortunately, my parents put their foot down when it came to my ‘O’ Levels. I had discussed it with my form teacher and she told me I was to be put in the hall with everyone else. When their exam ended, I would continue while they stood up, packed their things, and made a huge racket as I continued my exam. She told me I should be understanding.

 

We weren’t and I got a proper classroom for my examinations at last. My ‘O’ Level results were alright but I got an A2 in English. I didn’t do well enough to go to the school of my choice and so I was sent, once more, even further away from home.

 

Hiding in Plain Sight

 

By now, I was not only writing but loving to write. I was also beginning to finish my short stories and so, despite my dyslexia, I joined my JC’s Creating Writing and Journalism Club. Given my previous experience, I knew it was best to hide my dyslexia. In secondary school, my classmates often did not believe I was dyslexic and my English teachers were unsympathetic. One had even given me only one comment for my essay, ‘Spelling. Spelling. Spelling.’. Little did they know I had by now a literal book of spelling words at home which I had to be tested on before the exams. It seemed exposing my dyslexia would only hurt and not help.

 

So, I hid my dyslexia. I also gave up my extra time and so to the school, I was normal. I now took my exams with everyone else and, as far as anyone knew, I wasn’t dyslexic at all. The fact that I was in the school’s journalism club helped with this. Far from being unable to write, I was a reporter covering school events and writing in the newsletter. I was writing rhyming poetry as well and, since I had memorized all the words I knew, I became rather fast at writing them. Practice helped and, in those two years, I wrote almost a hundred poems which I published on a poem blog.

 

I was hiding in plain sight and the fact that no one could tell I was dyslexic helped. Alas, my cover did get blown later in my first year in JC. Dr Ow Yeong was featured in the Straits Times as a caring teacher and I was featured with her. In that article, a single line mentioned that I was dyslexic. Soon enough, two of my CCA members came up to me laughing and told me that one of their friends had read the article and said that I was dyslexic! They did not believe it and found it to be a great joke.

 

Thankfully, there were only the three of us in the room and so I could admit to being dyslexic and insist that my two CCA mates kept it a secret. They kept their word but to this day I don’t think they believed me. Even so, my secret was safe.

 

By now, my practice writing was helping me become good at it and it also helped with my studies. I wrote to study and wrote many notes. My dyslexia also made me a visual thinker and so those notes were filled with diagrams and mind maps. This especially helped me in economics.

 

Though the greatest gift my dyslexia gave me was perseverance and discipline. After spending my childhood forcing myself to learn spelling instead of playing, I could muster up enough discipline to give my all for my ‘A’ Levels. The result? 6As for 6 subjects taken. I had finally done well enough to attend a school near my home.

 

Becoming an author

 

After the ‘A’ Levels, I started my first novel. It wasn’t well done and even I find it boring at times but over my university years, I kept at it and finally finished it after I graduated. It seemed by now that dyslexia was just a bad dream but it was still a fact with a long shadow. I found myself considering it as I made my choice of university course. In addition to considering future job prospects, I also considered the sort of spelling words I would have to deal with for each course. Quickly, I ruled out engineering and law and all of the sciences. Medicine was out of the question as well.

 

I am good with numbers and so I eventually settled for Accountancy in NUS Business School. There, I discovered that all my practice writing had actually made it one of my strengths. I could write the reports required with ease and could edit my classmate’s writings to ensure a coherent report despite our different writing styles. I was also able to transform one writing style to another. I later learned that this was a form of overcompensation. By being bad at writing but loving it and always wanting to do better, I had made myself very good from sheer effort.

 

It was an effort I kept even after graduating. Writing became a consistent hobby. My first novel was followed by another, Non-Speaker, based on the trials in my childhood. The rest of the Speaker Trilogy followed before I finally wrote ‘Rename the Stars’, my first published novel.

 

I published Rename the Stars in 2020 and then the Speaker Trilogy in 2021. My latest novel, Questing, was published in 2024. In 2023, Rename the Stars was made available in our National Libraries. When I learned it was available, my family made a trip down to the library I had visited every week as a child in primary school. Seeing my book there on the shelf was a surreal experience. Now a child like I was could one day pick it up.

 

I seemed to have come full circle.

 

Looking forward and back

 

Looking back, I see that my becoming a dyslexic author was not by my effort alone. A great deal of effort was needed but it was not enough. In many ways, I was extremely lucky. There was a good amount of chance involved; from sight words when I was just seven to that one writing class when I was eleven that started it all. I had also trained my memory since I was a young child which enabled me to use sight words quickly and so compensate for my dyslexia adequately. I was also fortunate that I started writing before my dyslexia was discovered, before the word ‘can’t’ could be used on my writing.

 

For ‘can’t’ is a terrible word and to my good fortune, no one whose opinion I prize has ever used it on me. Since I was a child, my parents and Dr Ow Yeong were always unwavering in their support and encouragement. I was not allowed to carry the shame that so often accompanies a disability. Instead, I was reminded that I was only different, not less. If I wanted to write, then I would write and they would always encourage me. My father always said that what mattered was progress. So long as I was getting better, that was enough.

 

Now that I’m older, I finally understand some of the wisdom in his teaching. It is a patient strategy. So long as I kept progressing, I would eventually achieve and, if I didn’t stop, I would eventually exceed.

 

In 2019, after I published my first poetry collection, I received an invitation from Dr Ow Yeong’s student from NIE, to give a talk about my journey at the primary school where she taught. There, at the end of my talk, I challenged the children to a spelling test. They would give me a word they could spell and if I could spell it, I got a point. If I couldn’t, they got a point.

 

I lost and I got so tired from spelling I couldn’t keep it up in the second session. Still, I look back on that memory now and I laugh. I am still dyslexic and I always will be but as I look forward to the rest of my life, I’m certain of one thing.

 

It won’t matter.