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Overcoming Dyslexia, and Turning a Corner in Life
November 3, 2006 from Morning Edition
(Soundbite of music) INSKEEP: For as long as he can remember,
31-year-old Sean Plasse has struggled to keep a
secret. Here he tells his friend Blanche Podhajski
about the learning disability that he has spent his life trying to hide. Mr. SEAN PLASSE: I can remember playing
Trivial Pursuit with a girlfriend and her friends, and being so terrified to
read the questions off the Trivial Pursuit card in front of other people
because I thought I'd make a mistake or say the wrong word. Ms. BLANCHE PODHAJSKI: And yet you graduated
valedictorian of your high school class. Mr. PLASSE: I developed a lot of coping
skills in high school. If it was my time to read out loud in class, I might
pretend I didn't feel well. I'd also find the smartest kid in a class and ask
him to explain the novel to me so I'd understand what was going on. Even in college, I continued to struggle. I
really hit a wall with the amount of reading involved. They used to convert
words into pictures. For example, imagine a parrot flies along, the parrot
lands on a car, the car explodes, and the smoking feathers rise in a figure
eight. That represents a word for me, and that word is polycarbonate. Poly is a parrot, the car is the car, and
the explosives like a bon, and the eight is an eight. I used to convert about
10,000 words into these pictures every semester. So I always live in fear my
whole life that's somebody would discover that I couldn't keep up with the
pace of work in school. I ran into the same challenge as I worked in
marketing and advertising. I'd be there late at night or I come in on Sundays
and print out the emails so I could underline and circle words as I read
them. I had trouble remembering the names of
people I worked with and how to spell their names. So I used to keep the
business cards of the owners of the companies in the drawer of my desk and
I'd pull it out and figure out how to spell their name. This is even after a
year of working with the people. And I got laid off because they said I
couldn't keep up. So I became a carpenter, which is a visual
field. But I was still struggling as a carpenter. I can remember I was just
very down on myself and I didn't know what to change. But I came across an article in Fortune
magazine, which said the dyslexic CEO. It talked about this
very intelligent, successful CEOs who'd made it in life with severe learning
disorders. I looked up learning disorders in the phone
book. And I went in for this full day of evaluation. At the end of the day,
the evaluators came in and they said we want you to know before you left
today that your IQ is in the 99th percentile, but your ability to read and
decode words is in the 14th percentile. It's the first time my entire life had even
been explained in that way. I got on my pickup truck and cried all the way
home. It was just a - it was a changing point in my life, a turning point. (Soundbite of
music) INSKEEP: Sean Plasse
and Blanche Podhajski at StoryCorps.
Plasse is now a general contractor in Copyright ©1990-2005 National Public
Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein
may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This
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