Gabriel Genesis

Ms. Alexandra Cohl

FIQWS 10105 HA10

September 21, 2018

Quite A Development

If one spends more than 30 minutes trying to understand the meaning of a sentence with one “double-negative”, one might have a serious problem. In my case, I had dyslexia. Briefly speaking, this is when you don’t understand the context around the text or certain words you read, and also have serious troubles with writing. I wasn’t an idiot. Ironically, dyslexia doesn’t affect the general intelligence at all. However, if you add to it such things as an archaic and emotional character, lack of ability to finish anything, weak concentration, and blunt idealism, you might get the picture of what my writing and reading process looked like 4 years ago.

I was born in Moscow, in a huge political capital of Russia (which traditionally detonates each 50-100 years), in a family of post-Soviet intelligentsia. High expectations, high standards, and high ambitions surrounded me as I was growing up. There was also a good Anglo-Russian high-school with a soapy smell, students in the same uniform, screaming teachers, and pretty girls. As our culture is, commonly speaking, very “language and literature-centric,” 50% of our homework was writing essays and analytical reading. People who weren’t doing that faced not only poor grades, but to be publicly embarrassed in front of the whole class, which was even worse. Such high attention to language puts a high pressure and responsibility on each student and when my problems started to appear, that pressure was increasing.

I wasn’t a victim of constant hatred coming from teachers reading my writing, partially because I was winning poem contests, and partially because I was doing well on other subjects, and also wasn’t failing any exams. But, over time each writing and reading task required muchmore work than it used to and came out as mediocre at best. Realization of my appearingdisability to read and write well was very stressful and extremely depressive. Moreover, I didn’teven know that such disease even exists and was so ashamed by my progressive “idiotism”, thattold no one about it, not even my parents. It got even worse when I decided to become a filmmaker and a screenwriter. Each time when I was trying to write a story or a script, couldn’tfinish it, and dropped it, my unstable character would take over, mix with dyslexia, and make my creative process completely anesthetized. Without knowing it, I was making everything even worse, and eventually my self-confidence and self-valuation levels went to zero, I started having social problems, and turned into a closed person.

These weren’t the best times, but you cannot live your entire live in depression, stressing out, and blaming yourself, so after a short while I decided to do something. It happened around 4 years ago; I was reading “The Foundation” by Isaac Asimov, one of my most favorite writers. At the end of the first chapter, I realized that my reading skill had suddenly dropped down significantly; I couldn’t understand anything I read a minute ago. The dyslexia wasn’t just an irritating joke of nature anymore. I was enraged. Instead of dropping the book, I forced myself to read it very slowly, out loudly, and to analyze each word, then each sentence and then each paragraph I went through. That wasn’t easy at first, but later, as I was reading more and more, it got much better. I started to apply my new-discovered principle to everything I read: books, journals, magazines or articles. Over time, it became automatic, and helped to decrease problems with reading and concentration.

Continuing to get myself out of my comfort zone, I applied to one the best film schools in Moscow, called McGuffin. Even though it was a crazy move for me, at the time, the vibe at the school was crazy too: violent teachers, close friends, creative nights, broken responsibilities, smoking after stressful film sets…I honestly miss all that. One of my majors in the school was writing, which I always thought of (and still think of) as my weakest part. It took me tons of trials and errors, deleted documents, and self-hatred to come to the conclusion that the problems may not be connected only to my dyslexia. I was constantly at war with my emotional character which was just thinking differently. For example, since the high-school, I was always taught, that every writing should start with an outliner, a sequential list of paragraphs, and ideas you gradually develop. However, I was always thinking emotionally and randomly, jumping from one thing to another, and as soon as I was writing the list, my entire creative process just blocked. So, I decided just once to try not to fight it, but instead let my nature do the work itself. Ironically, that one time I decided to write the script differently I won the pitch contest of ideas the next day and because of that directed my first film. These two situations completely changed the way I looked at life, and in a couple of years I think I finally put myself on the right track.

The most important question still remains, though. Have I overcome all of the problems I had? The short answer is no. I’ve almost outgrown my dyslexia, but I still have some leftovers of it. For example, half a year ago my English teacher spent so much time explaining me the meaning of two words “context” and “content”, that I think I could apply for a doctor’s degree of semantics if I wanted to. Plus, my character and the way I think didn’t disappear. Still random, polar, emotional and constantly changing. However, if you asked me if I feel that I am the same person I was four years ago, I would keenly disagree. Even though I failed to change my nature, the way I was trying to fight with it turned out to be much more important than the goal itself. As dyslexia was fading away, my habit of analyzing text didn’t. If four years ago writing or reading even one coherent paragraph was a result of enormous struggle, now I just try to develop my own way of writing. Of course, these are only two examples taken out of the general picture, which is much more detailed and broader than what I wrote here. So, to conclude this already oversized piece of text, here is a James Cameron quote: “We set a goal this high and we might fail, but our failure is going to be better than the success of others.”