BOTH: "You just need to focus."
"Oh, I'm a bit dyslexic too."
"You're a bit slow, aren't you?
"Can you spell dyslexia?"
D...Y...
S...
Lexia!
Ohh.
"You must hate reading!"
Obviously I do.
I'm the complete opposite - I love reading.
It takes me ages and ages to read books.
I'm 21, I've read one book in my life.
So I didn't read till I was 12, and then I read a book a day.
It's a glitch! Because when I read,
I sometimes read and I follow the sentence down
and then I go back up.
I end up reading the exact same line
over and over. Exact same line, yeah.
The words, when I used to read,
like, used to move around and just go crazy.
I get extra letters and letters going... Mixed around. Yeah.
Yeah, they're just funky and sometimes like "Hey, I'm an O,
"I'm going to go over here,"
and it's like, "You're not meant to go there."
"Have you tried spell check?"
Yes. I was literally about to say, spell check is my best friend.
Spell check is useless,
because if you can't spell the word in the first place,
you don't know whether it's correcting it to be right or wrong.
After you do an essay or something like that,
you can just press one button and you be like,
"Yeah, that's what I meant, that's what I meant, that's what I meant."
Social media is the worst.
I have to get three people to check anything I post,
just in case I put something really rude.
I hate it at the same time. "Did you mean this?"
"You condescending little BLEEP. But yes, please, thank you. Thank you."
"You just need to focus."
So I've had that all my life. "You need to focus, you need to focus,
"you're not focusing. You need to try harder."
My parents, my teachers thought I was just...
Had attitude problems.
I'm lazy! According to people.
According to my mum, I'm lazy. Lazy gang!
And they just thought I was rude as opposed to
thinking that I couldn't engage with what was happening.
"Ah, put Post-it notes around your room, like, do a mind map,
"use different colours." That never used to work for me.
Cos everyone is different, everyone should, in my opinion,
learn in a different way or at a different speed.
I enjoy going at my own pace, you know?
I'm not lazy, I just like going things at my own pace. You know?
Heyyy! To all of those people!
Ohh. "It's not fair that you get longer on exams."
I would swap it in a heartbeat, though, to not have dyslexia.
I've had people say, "Well, you shouldn't get extra time in exams,
"because you don't have extra time in life"
You could give me the whole night
and I'm still not going to finish it.
I basically wouldn't have any qualifications
if I didn't have extra time.
If you've got an additional educational need
and you read a bit slower,
you need to be given that time to process.
Everything that was going on in my head,
I wanted to put it on the piece of paper,
but I couldn't read fast enough and I just couldn't write fast enough.
And it just used to make me panic
and I used to have the worst anxiety attacks.
HE LAUGHS
"Oh, I'm a bit dyslexic too."
A bit? A smidge?
"Oh, I'm dyslexic too."
I think it's kind of, like, condescending sometimes,
because I think sometimes people are actually faking it.
They don't get what dyslexia means, so it's kind of their own ignorance.
It's just the ambiguity of it.
It's like, if you're bad at reading or you don't like reading
or, like, say you've got ADHD...
I think there's loads of things you could mistake for it.
For people who are genuinely dyslexic,
it's incredibly frustrating and...
Really patronising. Yeah, and really patronising.
I've had people say this to me
and I kind of feel like they're trying to belittle...
Who I am. Yeah.
Any true dyslexic wouldn't go, "I'm dyslexic as well."
You try and hide it the best you can, until someone finds you out,
you just go, "Yeah, I am," and you instantly become
very aggressive towards them. Yeah, you go, "Yeah? And?"
"Yeah? And? What? Come on, then!"
OK, we've got... "You're just a bit thick."
Cold world.
"Stupid", "bit of an idiot".
"Slow", I've been called "idiot", I've been called "weird".
"Waste of space." Well, maybe dyslexic people are stupid,
by someone else's standard.
Yes, it's important to talk about diversity as race and gender
and all those different things,
but there's also diversity in how people learn.
If you're trying to take a super fast test and you're dyslexic,
then yeah, yeah, you're BLEEP stupid.
"You'll never amount to anything."
So I've just graduated in Nutritional Science.
I'm doing a Masters in Molecular Biophysics.
I'm an officer in the Merchant Navy.
And they were all like, "She's not going to do anything,
"she's got loads of negativity, she's not trying."
It was almost something that I said to myself in sixth form as well.
And I think that's the worst thing - I started believing it.
It's about perseverance. Yeah, no, definitely. Key motto in life.
"Don't worry - you'll grow out of it."
You'll learn to cope, is probably, like...
I didn't grow out of it. I would say... Still here! ..I grew into it.
You know, it's taken me so long,
and all my life I've been crap, crap, crap, crap, crap.
And now I'm like, "Actually, I have a reason,
"and I know why it is, and this is my reason.
"I'm not being stupid."
I probably wouldn't have learnt that I was really creative
and that I could do something with that.
I wouldn't be me and I wouldn't have
some of the amazing ideas that I have
without thinking in the way that I think.
Do the stand-up and say, "I'm Declan and I'm dyslexic."
I'm Priya and I'm dyslexic.
Yeah. That's it. Yeah.
It's just... Just crack on with it, don't struggle on your own -
It's not worth it. It really isn't.
Yeah - just own it.