My third-grade teacher believed I was ready for the Gymnasium, the academically advanced school, rather than simply continuing into the fourth grade. My father, however, dismissed her recommendation. He believed he was a better judge of my abilities.
So he decided to test me himself.
He took a book from the shelf, opened it to a passage about Socrates, and told me to read aloud.
I tried.
There were words I had never seen before, and I struggled to pronounce them. I stumbled over several of them.
That was enough for my father.
A child privileged enough to attend the Gymnasium, he told me, should be able to read perfectly. He gave me five minutes to study the passage before I had to read it aloud again.
Then he picked up a bamboo stick.
As I tried to prepare, he stood there tapping the stick against his shoe. I knew exactly what it meant.
He watched the clock.
Five minutes.
“Read.”
I began again.
This time everything went well until I reached the first word of the second paragraph. I hesitated.
Without warning, the bamboo stick came down across my head.
“Continue,” he growled.
I tried.
The words became more difficult. I stumbled again.
The stick struck my head again.
I tried another word.
Another mistake.
Another blow.
That was how we made our way through half the page.
By then, tears were running down my cheeks. My hands were trembling, and fear had taken over completely. I could no longer concentrate on the words in front of me.
Finally, I could not continue.
“Useless,” my father said. “You are too stupid to read. You don’t deserve the privilege of attending the Gymnasium. Your place should be given to an intelligent child.”
I never forgot those words.
From that day forward, reading aloud became something I feared.
In the fourth grade, whenever I was asked to read in front of the class, I fell apart. Words I knew suddenly became difficult. I stumbled over familiar sentences, dropped endings, and began misspelling words I had written correctly before.
Reading and writing became torture because every mistake felt dangerous.
Long after the bamboo stick disappeared, my father’s voice remained.
You are too stupid to read.
The fear followed me into adulthood.
Years later, while taking a college journalism class, I was asked to read aloud in front of the class. Almost immediately, the old reaction returned. After the first few lines, I began to stutter.
Then I reached the second paragraph and stumbled over a word.
Suddenly, I was no longer simply a grown woman standing in a college classroom.
My eyes refused to focus. The words seemed to wiggle and shift across the page. Then I remembered that the class was being broadcast on television, and panic took over. The lines began to blur and cross into one another until I could no longer find my place or recognize the next word.
Overwhelmed and humiliated, I left the classroom.
That experience forced me to confront something I had never fully understood.
The frightened child standing before my father with a bamboo stick over her head had never completely disappeared. Whenever I had to read aloud, especially under pressure, part of me returned to that room. A mistake was no longer simply a mistake. My mind and body reacted as though making one would bring punishment and humiliation all over again.
For years, I had thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I had associated these difficulties with dyslexia without understanding how profoundly fear also affected my ability to read and write under pressure.
Now I began to understand the connection.
My father had intended his test to prove that I was not intelligent enough for the Gymnasium. Instead, it taught me to associate reading with fear, mistakes with punishment, and imperfection with humiliation.
Fear disabled me then.
And decades later, under the right circumstances, that same fear could still take the words away.
After graduating in journalism, I went on to study psychology. It was then that I began to understand that this childhood experience may not have caused my dyslexia. Instead, years of fear had conditioned my brain to associate reading aloud with punishment and humiliation. When I was later asked to read in front of others, my amygdala could interpret the situation as a threat and trigger the same fear response I had experienced as a child. I could read the first few lines perfectly, but then, without warning, my heart would begin to race, my concentration would collapse, and the words would seem to move across the page. I would freeze and stumble over words I knew perfectly well. The danger was no longer there, but my brain and body reacted as though it were happening all over again.