ArtBizVoice: A Life Before Limits ( A little personal history.)

Dear Mr. Trump,
 I have read your bio  so I will give you mine now. Well, ok it will be more like a personal history.

I am a 57 year old college graduate who trained in art and education.  I really wanted to have a business and journalism degree, however,  I have dyslexia. I was willing to try but everyone did all they could to talk me out of it. Since spelling is a bit of a problem for me; well one must adapt.  Lets just say in the 1970’s no one was going to let someone who couldn’t spell into those sort of jobs. I also trained for a year at a small western Virginia college in Horse management. I have a life long love horses.

One of the problems with having Dyslexia is that you really seem sort of dumb to the rest of the world and lets face it, people who can see fine have no trouble making fun of people who fumble for their words, cant tell the difference between g, h, d, y, and b ( if I close my eyes I can sometimes write them correctly with a computer) and  cant tell when to punctuate or when a letter doesn’t belong.  I have been laughed at many times by people who should know better. Intelligent people even.

The up side of Dyslexia is that I can look at a model in art class and draw it completely backwards in detail.  Which on a number of occasions surprised my Professor. The scary part of Dyslexia is making sure your check book is balanced.

After college I was hired by a small rural private school to teach art and fill in. It seemed I was so talented that they eventually gave me my own class and made me liaison with the public school system in dealing with special needs children. I was 23.

 I loved the children, however,  being in the class room made me claustrophobic. I was encouraged to go for a Masters in special education with recommendations to University of Virginia. However,  the truth was  I was afraid I couldn’t pass the entrance tests  and qualifications exams, and how on earth would I ever write so people could read it.  How on earth could I ever read all those books.  The one thing that really never crossed my mind was how much it might cost. 

At that time, I also intuitively felt myself  becoming weak, it was just a feeling. I knew I only had a small window of time to have horses, so I bought a few and started training and coaching. I don’t regret it one bit.  I was at my happiest but  I was having issues either with genetics or just that my body wasn’t made for that kind of work.  One minute I was filled with hopes and dreams of helping anyone, rich or poor to work with horses and the next I was flat on my back with a number of health issues. I don’t think I was as depressed as much as I was in mourning.  In 1988 I went on disability.  I have been trying ever since to figure out how to get off of it and using my talents and skills to sustain my own life.  I was right at the edge of actually pulling it off in 2008 when “change” happened.

I'm trying to keep these letters short so I will share with you what I did to improve my chances for success  in my next letter.

Have a wonderful weekend. I hear that we are suppose to be having  very warm weather on the east coast.
~L