The Trouble with Writing

Youseph Tanha- 2011

Hello book reading people of the Internet! My name is Youseph Tanha, (pronounced U-sef Tan-Ha) and I live in the capital city of Juneau, Alaska. I am very grateful to Tina for giving me this opportunity to address all of her readers. This is a big deal for someone like me who has just published his first book.

Writing does not come easily to me. I am a child of the eighties who was diagnosed with Dyslexia at the age of nine. It was a time when Dyslexia meant to people of authority that you were mentally slower than everyone else and that you would be lucky if you could read by the time you finished with grade school. “The world needs janitors.” my third grade teacher would say to me. 

School was crummy for me in that respect. My science and math skills scored at or above my peers. My only problem was that the letters and numbers on a piece of paper always looked like they were jumping and twisting around. This made reading next to impossible. I used to come home from school, pull out my homework and work on it until bed time and I still would not be done with it!

When I was diagnosed with Dyslexia, I went through a process of finding corrective eye lenses that would keep everything on the page steady for me, but by the age of 9 I had already picked up several bad habits that make writing very difficult for me even today. For example, I always get my “There”s and “Their”s mixed up, along with my “to”s, “two”s, and “too”s. “Where”s, “were”s, “we’re”s, and “your”s and “you’re”s. I know these differences come easily to most people, but I always have to check on them to make sure I am using the right ones.

Reading is still difficult for me, but over the years I have gotten better at it. I still can’t read a book as fast as the people around me, but that does not stop me. The only way I can improve is to keep reading and writing. It’s not only something I enjoy but I also look at it as practice to improve my skills.

There is a story about Oscar Wilde that I have seen floating around the Internets for a while. The story goes that he once included with a manuscript he was delivering to his publishers a compliment slip in which he had scribbled the injunction: “I’ll leave you to tidy up the woulds, wills and shalls, thats and whiches.” It is encouraging to me that such a master of language as Oscar Wilde, also needed some help form time to time. The thought of that leaves me feeling hopeful for the future.

All that Matters by Youseph Tanha