Note: This was written for Ontario Reads, but as their website is currently down I posted it here for the time being 🙂
Jeanie: Can you please introduce yourself.
Gibby: Hello there! My name is Gibby and I’m excited to be talking about my favorite subject 🙂 Here’s a little about me before we get started…
I’ve always been one to color outside the lines and now I credit my dyslexia for that! I love cheese (the sharper the cheddar the better!), am terrified of snakes (yes even the totally harmless ones!), I enjoy house plants but totally don’t have a green thumb and are constantly killing or almost killing them, and I’m on a mission to re-frame the way dyslexia is seen.
Jeanie: How/when did you figure out you were dyslexic?
Gibby: Well, now that you know my life story let’s dive in!
I was officially diagnosed with dyslexia when I was 21. The reason it was so late was because when my sixth grade teacher suggested I get tested I was fully against it. I strongly believed that the label would be a death sentence for me, marking me dumb for everyone to see. I was terrified my friends and peers would think I was stupid, that I would be made fun of, that my friends wouldn’t want to be associated with me anymore, and that I would be alone, having only the school janitor as company. So I kept my brain’s troubles to myself. My solution was to just work harder and harder.
The good and the bad thing is that this worked pretty well for middle and high school. Yes, I didn’t have much of a ‘normal’ teenager life as it was typical for me to spend five to eight hours on homework each night. However, I graduated successfully with all As and Bs which is something I’m still to this day proud of. So off I went to the University of Maryland having no idea the disaster I was soon going to be in.
In college my tactics just couldn’t keep up with the workload as they depended on putting hours and hours of work in.  So I started to sink, slowly at first. A bit like a frog placed in cold water that gradually gets hot, who doesn’t notice when the temperature gets to boiling.  
Part of my problem was denial. I just couldn’t understand with how hard I was working that it wouldn’t somehow all work itself out. But it didn’t (and that’s an understatement!) I failed two classes my sophomore year and was placed on academic probation. If I didn’t get my grade point average up the following semester I was going to be asked to leave the University of Maryland. This shook me to the core with shame and embarrassment and left me without a leg to stand on when it came to getting tested. It was no longer a legitimate argument that I didn’t want to because of peer pressure as there was too much at stake now. So I got tested and it was confirmed that I was Dyslexic.
Part of my problem was denial. I just couldn’t understand with how hard I was working that it wouldn’t somehow all work itself out. But it didn’t (and that’s an understatement!) I failed two classes my sophomore year and was placed on academic probation. If I didn’t get my grade point average up the following semester I was going to be asked to leave the University of Maryland. This shook me to the core with shame and embarrassment and left me without a leg to stand on when it came to getting tested. It was no longer a legitimate argument that I didn’t want to because of peer pressure as there was too much at stake now. So I got tested and it was confirmed that I was Dyslexic.
I’ve got to admit that at first I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with my accommodations. I needed them to succeed, but I hated that I depended on them so much. However, when graduation began to get closer and closer I did realize they were a large part of my success.
Jeanie: Talk to me about how you view your dyslexia.
Gibby: After finishing college I started a medical massage business and about a year in I hired a business coach. She had become very successful scaling her massage business and so I wanted to learn how to do the same. However, instead she gave me so much more. During one of our weekly phone conversations she was trying to teach me a seven step process and was excepting me to grasp it on the spot. Not only could I not remember the correct order, but I couldn’t keep tract of all seven pieces either. I panicked that she was going to think I didn’t care, wasn’t dedicated enough, or wasn’t paying attention. So for the first time ever I outed myself and told her I was dyslexic. I expected her to back off and ask what I needed (which was more time), but instead she did the opposite. She launched into the positives of dyslexia and how it was so great that I was dyslexic. ‘So great!!??’ I wanted to scream. To me it was like saying cancer was a positive. Yes, that dramatic. Up until this point I believed that I had been successful despite my dyslexia not because of it.
To make a long story longer (as my mentor says) this discussion turned my world upside down and ultimately led me to googling the positives of dyslexia. Here is where I found Nessy.com and read their list of dyslexia strengths. This moment was monumental for me because staring up at me from the screen were all the character traits I loved most about myself. The most meaningful being my out of the box and big picture thinking. It was in that moment that I realized dyslexia was all of it. Not just the difficult, challenging stuff like I had previously thought. That was the moment in which I went from hating and being embarrassed by my dyslexia to respecting it. And then, further down my journey I embraced it even more and realized it’s my (and every other dyslexic) superpower.
Gibby Booth Jasper is a dyslexic entrepreneur, speaker, author, and host of the Dyslexia Is Our Superpower Podcast. After discovering that her own dyslexia wasn’t a death sentence and actually the exact opposite Gibby began a journey to re-frame the way dyslexia is seen. Her mission is to create a world where no dyslexic thinks they are stupid because their brain works differently. She can be found online at gibbybooth.com
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