The demon in my head

From about the age of 10, the education system pretty much wrote me off. Sure I could do maths, but reading and language were a mystery. I had teachers who defined me as backward, whilst others told me I would never survive Secondary School because I could not do dictation let alone read anything that was more complex than something that you'd find in a 6 year old's reading bag these days. I was not a child you would 'statement', but I was also not a child that anyone believed would get very far. Luckily I have a mother who thought otherwise.

Twenty-two years down the line and I have just completed my second year of a theology undergraduate course at the University of Cambridge. This is not my first degree either, I have already successfully completed an undergraduate masters and postgraduate masters in engineering. However, the last 22 years have been a continuous battle - not just with the words on the page, but with a demon telling me I can't and shouldn't be doing what I'm doing and how ever hard I try to prove it wrong, its still there.

This week was results week, never a good week in my life especially these past couple of years. I doubt and over analyse. I beat myself up over the smallest of errors and the most insignificant comments. I convince myself I did not work hard enough or put enough effort in. I am very rarely happy with the results that are written on the piece of paper, because however high or low the marks are, I have still failed.

All of this I know is stupid, and there are plenty of people who will read this and tell me to stop being stupid. But I do wonder somedays whether if my dyslexia had been diagnosed at the age of 10 things may have been different. Would I be sat here now, two years into a Cambridge degree? Would I have spent the last 22 years trying to prove a point?

Who knows, but maybe it is time to say whatever point it was I set out to prove I have now proved. But please forgive me if I occassionally still beat myself up.

It's like being in a scene from "Mona Lisa Smile"...

I thought I'd take a break from reading and put my mind to more reflective use. Now, if I felt like being a real swot, I could of course get on with next week's homework for Pastoral Theology and start a narrative theological reflection on something or other. But since I have absolutely no idea what I'm meant to do and currently can't be doing with reading another slightly obscure text to try and work out what I'm suppose to be doing - I'll blog instead!

Now, as some of you out there know, I'm dyslexic. Which means, though I'm apparently a visual learner, reading is really not one of my strengths, and when I see page after page of words I get slightly disheartened and start wondering what's on telly. And of course in lectures, when we do get handouts or even the odd powerpoint, they are general pages and pages of words. This is why my first degree was in engineering - very few words and lots of pictures!

But this year, things have changed slightly - I've found a paper which involves pictures! To be precise it is all pictures (well there is talking from the lecturer too, but all the same there are no words on the screen). Being that the course is entitled 'Icons and Images', I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised, all the same I did find it very amusing when in the first lecture the lecturer walked in to the class with a box of slides tucked under his arm.

I don't know how many of you have seen the Julia Roberts' film 'Mona Lisa Smile', but at that point this lecture started I was transport to a scene in the film where the Julia Roberts who is teaching art history to a group of girls is going through picture after picture, exploring what these pictures represent, what the artist is trying to get across to observer. I never thought I would every find myself in such a class, but every Tuesday afternoon this is now what I do - look at picture after picture, being taken on a journey through religious art and iconography, learning to see what the artist is trying to show me. I may not agree with some of the theological aspects of the art, and I definitely can't get my head around veneration of images and icons. But I'm being to appreciate how artists have tried to depict pictorially things that even the most esteemed theologians struggle to put into words.

So here's to images and icons - my picture-based theology paper, when I get two hours off from looking at words (bliss).