Both my first and second grade teachers recommended I be held back a grade. “Asha you’re killing me!” and “weren’t you listening?”, along with other exclamations of frustration were standard responses I was met with. I don’t blame them for losing patience with me though, I often lost patience with myself. Feeling victimized by my mind as others nimbly capitalized on theirs, I couldn’t see past middle school.  I began neurofeedback therapy for treatment of my ADD symptoms. 2 days a week, 3 hours each time with travel and traffic, I repeated the process of goop spread on my head as a conductivity medium for the wires placed in a number of places to measure my brainwaves. This went on for over two years along with improving my study techniques, changing my diet, and implementing various bio hacks. My academic struggles subsided, and a love of learning was substituted in its place. This transformation was a result of implementing research (online articles) with a test subject (me) in a control setting (school). 

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       I had a feeling there was still something wrong. I tried multiple different methods to improve my ADD, yet I continued to struggle with reading and spelling. Once I reached sophomore year, and was taking 2 hours to read 20 pages and my classes became taxing, but I continued to persevere as I loved to write and had a deeper yearning to learn. Finally, once my junior year came along, I decided to stop suppressing that doubt that dominated my thoughts and began researching dyslexia. I took a couple of online tests and I met the majority of the symptoms seen in dyslexia students. So I pushed my fear aside, and exclaimed to my mom that I might have dyslexia. After 35 pages of paper work, a 250 question survey,  and 12 hours of testing they confirmed my suspicions. Despite my initial worry, a sense of relief came over me, followed by shock and confusion as they exclaimed that my language skills were over 99th percentile, in the most difficult area for verbal testing despite my results being extremely low for skills that should have been mastered between first and third grade. My results demonstrated how my frontal cortex was compensating for the deficiency in the parietal and occipital areas. My faith in myself and my brain’s ability to adapt was restored. 

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        By finding different methods throughout my life to help me compensate for inherited deficiencies, I was able to train my brain to have higher language skills, which is an area I initially found challenging. My experiences with ADD and dyslexia led me to build a website to help other students with learning differences discover tools to overcome their challenges in and out of the classroom.  No one should feel that beginning circumstances determine future outcomes.