It’s not everyday that you learn you are just like your favourite Movie Star hero. But both Tom Cruise and I are Dyslexic. I saw Tom (it’s like we are on a first name basis now) interviewed last Sunday. When asked how he overcame his Dyslexia he said, “Hard work.”
That’s how I overcame mine.
Of course, when I was fifteen no one seemed to know what Dyslexia was or cared to investigate. If you couldn’t learn to read you were considered ‘as dumb as a stick’.
The girl next door was in my Grade 8 class. She loved calling me dumb. When people tell you, you are dumb because you can’t read, you begin to believe you are dumb. With that comes a lousy self-image.
As a condition of passing Grade 8, I had to attend Northern Vocational School in Toronto, an hour and a half city bus ride away. The smart kids went to Earl Haig High School, a five-minute walk away.
No big deal. When you believe you are dumb, you make the best of it. In my case, comedy in the classroom became my routine. (I later taught Improvisational Theatre) I made up stuff and entertained fellow students – and some teachers.
By age fifteen, the Toronto Board of Education decided they had enough of my entertaining and disrupting class. They had no sense of ‘ha-ha’. I was expelled.
Fifteen was too young to be out of school so my dad signed a paper saying I was needed to work to support the family. It was either that or I would be sent to a juvenile detention centre.
So, it was out of the house and off to live with an aunt and uncle in Sudbury, Ontario, where I found a job operating a marina.
I did try and get back into school – but Ontario felt they had enough entertainers and didn’t need me for a return engagement. The Canadian Army wasn’t interested in me either. They wanted people who could read. I was functionallyiIlliterate.
To make a long story short – and to show how Tom and I used hard work to succeed – at age 17, I moved to Alberta – worked as a cowboy and by a total fluke, got into high school.
The high school principal lived two doors up from where I was staying. I was out of work by the end of August and asked if I could go to his school. I explained what had happened in Ontario and he said, “Fine, come the first day of school and we’ll get you started.”
The principal was ‘Mouse’ Taylor. He’d been a bomber command navigator during the war. Like most Prairie Canadians of his generation, he was willing to give everyone a second chance.
The teachers were great. They did not mind that I could not spell my own name (I kept leaving the ‘e’ out of my middle name).
All these people at the school and the families I lived with expected me to succeed. I had to work four times harder than the smart kids. But like all Dyslexics, I had great observational skills, looked for patterns and had great story telling skills.
And since the principal, the teachers and the families I lived with were so good to me, I didn’t want to disappoint them. I worked and worked and worked at teaching myself how to read. I practiced reading for hours. I’d go on the roof and read out loud or I’d read to my 2-year-old niece who I babysat. She was never critical. I put in a lot of hard work! I could not disappoint the people who had shown confidence in me.
See! Tom Cruise and I, we figured it out. Work four or five times harder than the rest – and you can overcome the challenges of Dyslexia.
The following is from the University of Michigan dyslexia website:
“Cruise spent his childhood trying to hide his dyslexia from his peers. Diagnosed at the age of seven, Cruise describes his younger self as a "functional illiterate". He could barely read in high school or through his earliest roles.
“Cruise got his first big acting job at the age of 19. As he started to embrace his love of acting, Cruise realized that his inability to read would hold him back if he didn’t work hard at it.
“I had to train myself to focus my attention. I became very visual and learned how to create mental images in order to comprehend what I read,” said Cruise.”
Tom Cruise | Dyslexia Help at the University of Michigan
Tom’s latest Movie is playing in Moose Jaw.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
