For my forth audio story, I chose to listen to “I always lived in fear that someone would discover that I couldn't keep up.”, on Story Corps. This recording was of a man, Sean Plasse, being interviewed by Blanche Podhajski about being dyslexic. He talks about having difficulty his entire life, and specifically recalls an incident in which he was playing Trivial Pursuit with a girlfriend, but was afraid to read the cards because he didn’t want to make a mistake. Despite this dyslexia, he managed to graduate as Valedictorian, thanks to coping methods. He would match specific words to images in his mind (he says up to 10,000 a semester), and would ask others to explain, among other things. He managed to get through in life with methods such as these, but struggled throughout work with even spelling the names of those around him. The story ends with Sean being testing for learning disabilities, and learning that, while his IQ is in the 99th percentile, his reading ability is only in the 14th. This, he says, was a life-changing moment for him.
I think that this story appealed to me, because, beforehand, I hadn’t really known much on the subject. I thought it was extremely interesting how detailed and specific his methods were for matching words to images - for example, he explains “…imagine a parrot flies along, the parrot lands on the car, the car explodes, and the smoke and the feathers rise in a figure eight. That represents a word for me, and that word is polycarbonate. Poly is the parrot, car is the car, the explosion is like a bomb, and the eight is an eight.” I thought that that was just insane. His way of telling the story was interesting, as well. Even though he only gave a snippet of what his life of dyslexia was like, it left you wanting more. You could easily imagine his story being expanded to much longer than two minutes. You can tell that his story was an interesting one, because, when the recording ends somewhat abruptly, you’re left wondering “What Happens Next”.
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