I Couldn't Read a Word in First Grade—But What I Learned Instead Changed My Life Forever

In the first grade, I moved to a brand-new school. Our house wasn’t finished yet, so every morning, I woke up before the sun, drove an hour to school with my parents, and then took the school bus back to the skeleton of a home my parents were building. Each day brought a new piece of the puzzle—a wall here, a roof there. Watching the house come to life piece by piece fascinated me. It was as though I could see the blueprint of an idea turning into something real, solid, and permanent. That process of creation shaped how I see the world, how I approach challenges, and even how I built my 'own' internal language.

But on the first day of school, my focus wasn’t on the house or the progress it made. It was on the pit in my stomach. The school was small, in an even smaller farm town, and everyone seemed to already know each other. The teacher quickly picked me out as the new kid and asked me to introduce myself to the class. My cheeks burned as I stumbled, trying to annunciate my name; one syllable at a time, I spoke, "Sh- hair- eh- den."

As my cheeks slowly turned back to normal, the teacher motioned for me to come to the front of the room, and with a smile, she handed me a big red book—Clifford the Big Red Dog. “Let’s see where your reading skills are,” she said. My heart pounded in my chest. I couldn’t read. Not a single word. I didn’t know how to sound out letters, let alone form sentences. I couldn’t even read “I” or “am.”

I stared down at the book, its bright, happy red dog staring back at me. Then I glanced up at the class and caught glimpses of shifting bodies and raised eyebrows. A girl in the front row tilted her head, her lips slightly parted as if waiting for something—anything— for me to start reading. A boy leaned back in his chair, smirking, his eyes darting between me and the teacher. My teacher’s expectant smile delayed, her fingers twitching ever so slightly against the desk as the silence grew louder. I looked around the classroom, my eyes desperately scanning the walls, the windows, anything to stretch the moment further and push the tears back. As I stretched the silence to its furthest, my throat tightened, and tears streamed down my face as I closed and clutched the book against my chest. Unable to endure the humiliation any longer, I spun around and dashed out of the classroom, heading directly to the bathroom, where I locked myself in a stall and cried.

I didn’t know it then, but that moment became the first piece of a new blueprint for how I would navigate the world. I became obsessed with patterns, with the subtle shifts in tone, posture, and expression that revealed what people weren’t saying. I learned very quickly that you can be intelligent while still being classified as 'illiterate.' So as I was slowly building a language between the barrier of our brains that reads behavior, it upheld my confidence as I couldn't read their language, and they couldn't read mine.

At the same time, I watched as my parents’ house took shape—one nail, one beam, one brick at a time. Their dedication to creating something permanent mirrored my own efforts to create meaning from the tools I had. While the house became a physical symbol of resilience, my growing ability to read behavior became an invisible yet powerful structure, allowing me to navigate and understand a world I couldn’t yet put into words. Even on that first day of school, I was beginning to decode a reality far deeper than what was written on the pages of any Clifford book. Just like the walls of that house, my own understanding of the world was constructed piece by piece, even when the tools I was given didn’t seem to fit. I may not have known how to read that day in first grade, but I was already learning how to decode the world in a way that would serve me for a lifetime.