What I would discover years later as an adult was that I have what is known in the reading world as “symptoms of dyslexia.” Not dyslexia, but “symptoms of,” which means letter reversals, pretty bad spelling, and what looks on the paper like sloppiness. This was throughout my early schooling and high school I have some of these papers. You can see it. It says, “Your work is very sloppy. Why don’t you proofread?” And, in fact, this was me. It wasn’t being sloppy. It was just this nature.
And my parents would appear to have known this. Or, they had me tested at some point, but never chose to tell me or any of the schools that I attended. I think it was a time when parents were sort of embarrassed by this sort of thing. So, I didn’t know about it, and maybe it’s a good thing; because I just thought I wasn’t doing very well. And if I kept working at it, I might get better.
But the result of that is that when I finally got to college, I was so sick of being criticized and being told “sloppy” and “careless” that I didn’t take any English classes. I didn’t take any of those requirements. But I was reading and writing voraciously. I sort of just didn’t know any better, and kept going.