Michelle
Michelle was born in Italy to Chinese parents, and she first came to the UK in 2010. She graduated in Fine Art from Oxford University and her performances and workshops explore the ideas of community, belonging, identity and memory.
Extract from a conversation in 2019:
During my GCSEs, I requested a SpLD assessment as I was finding it really challenging to manage time and essay planning. Most other students of Chinese heritage at my school took EAL (English as an Additional Language) classes, while I didn’t have a language barrier (I went to an international school before coming to the UK), I feel that the stereotype against Chinese students at my school had contributed to how I was assessed. My assessor (who was just a regular teacher at the school) made me write out ‘a quick brown fox jumps over a fence’, as many times as possible in ten minutes. He commented that I was ‘'really fast', 'my spelling was really accurate' and that my handwriting looked ‘normal’ and that therefore I didn’t have ‘it’. I wonder if he would have done a more comprehensive assessment for me if I wasn't an international student.
I felt like after that, anything I didn’t understand, any reading and writing elements that I struggled with were definitely because I wasn’t ‘good enough’ or I didn’t work hard enough; the result of requesting an ‘assessment’ only made me feel worse about my difficulties, and reluctant to seek any more help. I relied on being extremely diligent and pushing myself daily (to the brink of exhaustion) just so I could achieve the results I wanted (and I did, more or less). I really wished, however, had I been given the correct diagnosis earlier in my education, that I would have taken better care of my wellbeing and known what other specialist support there is available or what to seek.
I went to my dream university, but just like many peers here, I felt like I was an impostor and outsider.
My college is dotted with ‘no entry’ signs everywhere - in front of the library, on the way to the hall, on my shortcut to the laundry room - to keep out the tourists. Even after 3 years at my college, I still get custodians running after me to check if I am a student here. I suspect it has something to do with my being Asian and carrying around the art school camera from time to time.
In seminars, it always takes me so long to organise my points that when I am finally ready, the conversation has already moved on. If we are being asked to read one line or a paragraph, I would only read my line over and over again in my head, paying no attention to what anyone else is saying just to make sure it comes out correctly.
I’ve always found it difficult interpreting long passages of text, but in the final year of my undergraduate degree, juggling exams revision (mainly reading old notes and texts) and preparing for my dissertation (reading and essay planning), I was felt so overwhelmed by every aspect of it. In hindsight, I realise that this is due to my poor short term memory and processing speed, as my dyslexia report later concluded.
I would have never thought of reaching out to the DAS (Disability Advisory Service) at the university if it wasn’t for a friend having shared their experience getting assessed and how useful this had been for them.
By the time I had my SpLD assessment, which was 3 hours of various tasks and entirely different from my initial ‘assessment’, I was in the penultimate term of my final year of my degree and had already completed all the written exams. By the time I met with my dyslexia tutor for the first time ever, I had 3 weeks to go until my dissertation deadline.
Nevertheless, I am so glad that I had arranged the assessment, and I am so grateful for all the support that I have received in those very short weeks since the diagnostic report. It felt like suddenly a sudden weight (self-blame) had been lifted off my chest, and I was seeing myself through a whole new lens: self-acceptance. Learning more about dyslexia, and specifically how it affects me, I am finally able to focus on finding the right writing strategies and study skills, the ones that work for me.
Talking about languages;
In Italy, we were told to learn through memorising extracts from textbooks - I wonder sometimes if my slow recall speed is because I learned and still store words and concepts in different languages. It’s as if all my vocabulary is categorised by the memories of how I first learned it. Numbers, for example, I find it more comfortable counting in Chinese as those words were first taught to me in Chinese by my parents.
The alphabet is an absolute nightmare for me. I can speak 5 different languages, but each one has a different pronunciation of these same letters.
Olivia - The only thing when I moved country that didn’t have a language barrier for me was art and maths.
Michelle- That resonates a lot with me as well with art.
It’s so frustrating when the environment around you pressures for quick answers all the time. In a way, art is its own language and one that you can also enjoy the process of presenting its various elements.
