Dealing With Dyslexia – Short Film

Submitted by Judy Hanning on Wed, 2017-03-29 16:00
The first indication that Mykaela was different from others was in the way she held her pencil. The young girl gripped it in her fist. She always felt behind her classmates at school. While her friends were reading chapter books, she struggled with picture books. While others were mastering cursive, she was having difficulty with elementary printing.
Whenever Mykaela would pick up a book, letters on the page would twist, turn and hop pages when she tried to read. If she focused too hard on reading something, she would get horrible migraine headaches. When she discovered that she was not alone with her reading issue, and that even celebrities had dyslexia, she decided that she would not let anything stop her from reading again.
Author “My parents realized I was falling behind in grade school. When everyone in my grade was reading chapter books, I was struggling doing picture books. When everyone in my grade learned how to print and moved on to cursive and received their cursive license, I was struggling to print and never received mine. I felt like I was stuck 10 feet behind everyone else, and this feeling got worse as I got older.”

Key Takeaways:

1
The film shows a young woman struggling with reading due to having dyslexia, which started as a child where she had trouble printing words and keeping up with others’ reading level.
2
Reading for too long while dyslexic can be painful, causing headaches as the letters and words appear to swirl and flip around a lot. Dyslexia also affects day to day tasks like setting the microwave and doing crossword puzzles.
3
This struggling to keep up with everyone else is unbearably isolating until she realizes that she is not stupid, or alone- many successful celebrities have dyslexia too, including Whoopi Goldberg, Steven Spielberg, Anderson Cooper, Cher and Keira Knightley.