Pretty shoes and Strong Girls

I just turned it off. I’ve decided that I’m done. If I’m wrong, then I have at least 4 more months of hell. If I’m right, then I am free woman.

All the struggles of growing up with dyslexia come back when I study. I hear that smart girl with the pretty shoes laughing at me because I can’t recognize the difference between chief and chef.

I remember me struggling to get it together for the geometry test, and then finally paying off the dork in class for me to cheat my way to a “B”.

There I am my freshman year in college, hanging out with kids in remedial math. There I am excelling in foreign languages. Its memorization. The same way I learned to read and write. Other kids have special things called phonetics. I have spell check and a dictionary.

I hope I’m done. I hope this chapter is behind me. Yes, I can fool the whole company into thinking I’m a pretty good accountant. They don’t know that if I had to add anything in my head, my eyes would pop out and roll out onto the floor. Loss ratio? Just nod after someone else comes up with it, like you knew it way before they did.

I’m hoping this is the last time I have to sit for the CPA. Once this is done, I plan on hanging it up with my degree in accountancy (which I still don’t think is real word), but then right next to I plan on placing a childhood picture my mother refuses to hand over to me.

She thinks I put myself down with it. I think it inspires me. It’s a typical little drawing of a house and flowers, and across the top it reads, “To Karin, Love Me”.

Only special kids with specials tutors can read it. It’s written with those crazy little backwards letters that supposedly kept me a step behind. In reality, it kept me one step ahead of the other kids with their pretty little shoes and straight A’s.