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Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service, where we report the world, however difficult the issue, however hard to reach podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.

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Some podcasts are about the news. Some podcasts are about politics and science and history. But my new podcast for the BBC World Service is about losing the man I loved.

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It's called Goodbye to All This, and you can find it by searching for goodbye to all this wherever you get your podcasts.

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Everybody is telling me I have to learn to read in order to make it what you have to learn to read. And I knew him like I can't read, so I can't make it. It was a total relief to find out that I was dyslexic. It was an extremely empowering piece of self-knowledge. Nobody knew anything about dyslexia. You were made to feel like you were lazy. You're stupid. I'm able to look at the big picture. I'm able to simplify things.

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And that's all I think, dyslexic thinking. Dyslexia literally means difficulty with words. And it's a condition that affects one in five of us worldwide. Words are at the core of communication they use as a measure of intelligence. Every test, every entrance exam, every job application relies on them.

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And we dyslexics can easily fail. So what happens when people with dyslexia move out of education and into the adult world? What difference does it make if you can put a name to what you are experiencing? This is dyslexia on the BBC World Service, a two part series told AM produced by people with dyslexia. I'm Stellas up in. At the age of seven, I began to fall behind at school, I would do anything I could to avoid having to spell or read aloud in class.

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My parents took me for a test with a specialist who told them that I had something called dyslexia. It was a real blow, but at least we knew what we were dealing with and found help and support.

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Many don't. We have asked people with dyslexia around the world to share their experiences.

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Good morning. My name is Alex Agry Orleans. Nobody knew I had dyslexia until I went to university and I was diagnosed at age 25.

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So I had a pretty horrific time in Ghana. I was beaten every day, couldn't do maths, couldn't tell the time, I guess, in the 70s.

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No one really knew about dyslexia there or in the UK, so it was pretty tough for me.

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Joey Thomas is the founder of Dyslexia Ghana. I was in a school where I was performing OK, but when it came to reading and spelling, it was quite difficult. So one of my teachers told my mom that they've discovered in America that there was something known as word blindness, and she was pretty sure that that was what I was suffering from and that I wasn't lazy. Obviously, my mom was horrified and scared because she didn't know what word blindness meant and she couldn't understand if I can actually see or not see.

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But I could see the words, but it's just I couldn't pronounce them. So that was not very nice period for a child and quite frightening because there was no support.

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I didn't find out the word blindness was actually dyslexia until she was in her 20s at university.

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Finding out about dyslexia gave me the confidence to go back to my parents to say, look, that teacher years ago was right about this word blindness, but it's called dyslexia. And this is not just me, but there's a lot of people out there who are also suffering from the same thing with the right support and with the right intervention, one can achieve their dreams. Before I knew the word dyslexia, I watched as my classmates raced ahead of me.

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I knew I was different and I feared something was wrong. The consequences of failure to screen for and diagnose dyslexia are very, very. Sally Schaikewitz is a professor of Latino development at Yale University, where she co-founded the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity. Sally is the author of the influential book Overcoming Dyslexia. A child who's not identified, does not receive evidence based instruction, continues to struggle and sees him or herself as a failure.

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As a result, often children who are dyslexic are bullied and teased, and it gets to the point that that child would rather be sent to the principal's office than to read in front of their classmates. And they come to see themselves as not and preschool far too often dropping out. So there's a high prevalence of prison addiction. And so far, these students who have not been identified and are dyslexic are half as likely to go to college. They have a significantly higher unemployment rate and lower lifetime earnings.

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Hi, my name is Cady Coleman, Djokic, founder of Dyslexia Jenya. I was diagnosed with dyslexia in 2010 at 40 years old. Before then, I suffered from depression, anxiety and low self-esteem. Putting a name to it was a game changer for me. Before then, I thought what I had was unique. Otherwise more people would be talking about it. Now I know about 20 percent of the population have dyslexia.

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Joy Thomas and I was telling everybody that there's this thing called dyslexia and that the children that are in school and that can read we're not stupid and they're not lazy. So I made it my own personal crusade to support the people that might be suffering from dyslexia in the community. Sometimes I feel totally chaotic organization, concentration, maths, even telling the time of the month of the year can be an issue, but those aren't the only things in life.

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Dr. Sally Schaikewitz, she you can have this weakness, but it's surrounded by her sea of strength in higher level, big picture thinking strength, such as vocabulary, problem-solving, empathy, general knowledge, comprehension and concept formation. And that's very important because it establishes that as a dyslexic, you can be very bright and yet read slowly.

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My name is Lee and I live in Israel. When I was a little girl, they said I am simply lazy. She has difficulties. No point to make too much effort. She can go and study at the lowest level. Nobody believed that I have abilities except fortunately a few. They saw my abilities, saw my talents. They realized that I am simply dyslexic.

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We think both my mom and dad are dyslexic, although they've never been diagnosed.

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My mum Lawford is now a respected artist. But as a girl growing up in the 60s, her teachers didn't think she would amount to very much at all. Oh, hello, my lovely. Oh, good to see I've come to see her in her studio right now.

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Yes, it's a total mess still, you know, often a sign of dyslexia, but you haven't actually been identified as dyslexic because it wasn't really something that was done when you were a kid. I think they just thought, you know, there's a kid who's perfectly intelligent, but she's just being really naughty and she's being really stubborn and she won't do her work. So we will humiliate. So they used to take me down to my sister's class, which was three years below, and show my books to the class and compare them with my sisters who wasn't dyslexic.

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And by that stage, I think I was kind of slightly immune to the humiliation. And I think part of you just cut off and you think, oh, well, none of this is accessible to me, so I'll just give up.

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So when you took me for a test, did you recognize any of the traits of dyslexia that they identified in yourself?

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Certainly the avoiding things that taking a lot of time to read stuff, feeling a little bit stupid in class, which you were starting to feel. But I think one of the main things was just the inability to follow stuff on the blackboard, because at that point, that's when that sort of thing was starting to happen and you couldn't do it. And I just thought, oh, God, I remember that you look down onto your piece of paper to write, you look back up again.

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You've got no idea where you were. And that was horrifying because you got further and further and further behind.

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And it was of just horrible soul destroying when my brothers were identified to do start to see even more patterns.

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Well, yes, because we think your dad's probably dyslexic, too. And his father was probably dyslexic, but the dyslexia expressed itself in different ways.

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Hello, my name is Ulrica Yakima. I am 47 years old. I live in Sweden in the state it was I was diagnosed dyslexia when I was twenty five years old. One of my hardest memory is then what I was a child. When I told my comrades a story, I spoke incoherent. They didn't always understand what I said. Then they froze me out and bullied me. I became afraid to speak. I became quiet.

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Girls and boys react differently to the challenges of dyslexia, with girls often becoming shy and withdrawn. This is Dr. Sally Schaikewitz. For a long time, only boys who are identified and not for any logical reason. Then if we go back to the 1980s, 1990s, we do brain imaging and we decided to do boys and girls. And lo and behold, we found signs in bold. And then we looked at the teacher's comments and what we found when teachers were describing boys.

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They describe boys who jumped out of their seats, told girls hair called out, etc. and these boys were far more likely to be referred for an evaluation. And then there were the girls who were sitting quietly in their seats, but not reading. They were overlooked totally.

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Hi, guys. My name is Gideon Blobbing and I'm talking from London.

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Gideon is a youth support worker who draws on his own experiences as a teenager to help other young people.

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So when do you find out your dyslexic? So funnily enough, I was at university and I'm 19 and my friend is dyslexic. And he says, I reckon you are as well. Yes, I need now I can understand it more. So then I went to the theatre centre and asked them for a test and I came back and I was dyslexic, as I wish I knew when I was younger.

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What difference do you think it would have made if you'd known when you were a kid?

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I probably wouldn't have been disruptive in class because I had a class clown was a coping mechanism for me. When you don't understand the work, if I don't see your friend and then just have a laugh at the whole class laugh and then not the whole class is disruptive and now you don't have to feel like you do understand the work, so you get off to follow.

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In his teens, Gideon became involved in a criminal gang in his area.

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People join the wrong crowd to be valued to have that community. If I'd known I was dyslexic, then it would have been a lot better for me and I wouldn't have been so low because I didn't know so confused. So I thought that another way to validate, to feel alive and for and for ambitious and phobic.

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Many young people with more severe dyslexia and no support check out of education without the basic literacy skills they need for working life, the shame soon make things very complicated. So you hide in this whole thing the whole time in your life, you was hiding everything, you know, these excuses or I didn't have my glasses today or oh, you know, I can I take the form? How can I can I do that? You know, I was an army wife.

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I married my ex-husband and he wanted me to write letters to him while he was away. So he would write letters to me, but I couldn't write letters to him. This is Jackie Hewat name. She didn't know she was dyslexic until she was in her 40s after decades of hiding her difficulties. You know, I was so frustrated with myself. I hated myself. You know, I would self-harm. I didn't understand about me. I didn't understand why I couldn't learn like everybody else.

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Why was it so hard? Why didn't I pass the qualification? I was in low paid jobs, which if you look at the statistics of dyslexia, this is where we all end up. And I think going into the prisons, I found that so many people had gone through the same as what I had gone through.

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With specialist support, Jackie trained as an educator and has since dedicated herself to helping people with dyslexia in prisons in the U.K. Her research, along with that of her colleagues in the U.S., has revealed that 50 percent of the prison population has dyslexia.

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My name is Amiri Baraka and I currently reside in New Orleans, Louisiana. When I got around the third grade, I knew that something was wrong. Then I knew it because we had spelling tests and so I could never spell the words. And I was embarrassed. I was ashamed. But I knew something was wrong because I started skipping school every Friday to avoid the spelling tests. And when I got into the sixth grade, a teacher first year of my English class called me up to read and she had me up there for about 15 minutes.

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I didn't know, not one word. I was sweating profusely. People were laughing and I knew that day I was going to be a dope deal.

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They have gone through the classroom environment. It doesn't suit them. They become class clowns.

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They really get angry, frustrated, and they want to be out and struggling in school and get into a lot of fights, doing everything that I can to get out of class, get out of school. And I was just so bad. I was just like fighting me and everything was coming coming through me because I just couldn't function.

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So if you think of somebody who's confidence this system and they cannot read and write, but so how do they get a job if they have to fill in forms, how do they get work? If they have to go to the benefits office, there are too ashamed and they get angry. So this is where you see a lot of people being shouted out, screamed out because they are so angry in themselves because they can't do it. They can't speak to someone.

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They can't admit that they can't read or write. Well, then you're going to prison. And again, the first thing there is filling in forms. They're getting angrier and angrier now with a man we find a lot of the men are punching out and become very violent. So then who's going to take that person on for a job? So they've now got no money. They've already been in prison once, but it doesn't end up at once because then it goes twice, three times, four times we were meeting men have been in prison 14 times.

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Amir was in and out of prison until he was given a longer sentence. So four years flat in prison.

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I can do four years flat. And that's when I said to myself, in these four years, I am going to learn to read. I wrote every word down that I didn't know, though tomorrow, yesterday, anywhere. I didn't know over and over and over to spell them. So I learned to spell a little bit and I got into a good class once I got to the penitentiary and there was a teacher there and he loved teaching. And he told me he said to me, he said, I noticed your writing and said, you can't spell well, your brothers and sisters are like that.

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So, no, my brother and sisters went to college, so he had a lady come in and had me tested for dyslexia. And then about two weeks later, they came back. They told me that I was dyslexic. I didn't know what that was. So no one told me that it was a reading disability. People had it. So that's when I really felt good about myself.

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Once Emma was released, he received specialist help and he now campaigns for dyslexia screening for kids from low income backgrounds.

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I tell you, I've got remediation. And I said to myself, oh, God, as somebody had done this for me when I was in the third or fourth, fifth grade, I would have never gone to prison. And I don't want another kid to go through what I went through because it's affordable. Across the world, dyslexia assessment and support is still a privilege. It is one of the only disabilities that you have to pay to have diagnosed, and your access to help is entirely dependent on where you live and your financial resources.

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Joy Thomas of Dyslexia Guana.

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You know, one of my missions is to give children and the parents that kind of oh, thank goodness I'm not stupid. Oh, thank goodness I'm not lazy. People then get some kind of relief in themselves and said, oh my gosh, all this time I've been thinking, there's something wrong with me. There's nothing really wrong with me. And I'm OK. But say in Ghana, if you've been assessed, then you need extra support. Who's going to pay for that?

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Apparently is now finding money to send all these other children to school. So you're going to also pay for the extra support that you need because you're dyslexic.

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Oh, dear. And identification can be everything. Many people with dyslexia learn to work with the challenges and find professions in which they can thrive. For my mum, that was art.

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Do you feel that dyslexia in any way helps you as an artist?

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I think it totally helps me. I remember your brother had a test and the educationalist started talking about his problems of sequencing and how, you know, his ideas and thoughts were jumping all over the place. And I thought, well, yeah, that's exactly what mine do. And I can't necessarily finish something. I'll start something. I'll start another thing and another thing. But what that ends up doing is it makes lots of room for surprises, makes lots of room for accidents.

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And I think that's where creativity comes.

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My name is Jason Fernandez and I'm from Goa, India. I think it's impossible for me to separate what may be quirks of my personality and what is better attributed to dyslexia. There's a lack of discernible organization in our living or workspaces, and that can justifiably irritate parents and partners. But I really think it's just a physical reflection of our minds. The best way to describe how my mind works is if you've ever seen a Jackson Pollock painting, imagine that happening in three dimensions in real time and all in the inside of my brain.

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In other words, I'm dealing with something that is clearly not designed to be orderly.

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Our brains are different, and some people believe that this is a great advantage. Kate Gregs is the founder of Mapai Dyslexia. I think the stigma around dyslexia is a serious barrier, because if you are constantly focusing on the things that you struggle at from a very young age, it is going to impact your confidence, is going to impact your life.

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And it's really important that all kids, as young as you can possibly pick them up, understand that they have strengths and those are the things that they need to put as much importance on as the challenges.

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The world needs diversity across every single area, and it needs cognitive diversity, it needs diversity in the way that people think.

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And instead of thinking that one way is the right way in the way that we test is the right way, we need to really flip that and see that there are other people who think in a way that is hugely important for the world.

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Some employers actively seek nervous workers because they find unusual solutions. Studies have shown a correlation between high cognitive diversity and high performance in groups trying to solve difficult problems, such as cracking codes. The reason we're able to do what we do is because we can bring a huge mix of minds to any given problem people that we're trying to catch, if you like, they're all actively trying to evade us. And the element of surprise for us comes from being able to think really differently.

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Al is a senior director at Key. He's also dyslexic. GHQ is one of the UK government's intelligence agencies. It works closely with MI5 and MI6 and they are on the lookout for dyslexic agents.

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It sounds like you're actively setting out to recruit dyslexic employees. What do they bring to the workforce?

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Well, we tend to be able to think about things differently, to be able to join different pieces of information together. So if I give an example from my own experience, so I'm quite good at joining pieces of information that I might have picked up sometimes over years, and suddenly they sort of explode in my head into something that makes a lot more sense than it did. But, you know, we're not all the same. Dyslexic people bring different strengths and different problems as well.

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Are there any particular areas that you see dyslexic people really thriving?

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Well, so that's a little bit hard to talk about, because the areas where we need that sort of thinking, the sort of really looking at problems in a different way, tend to be in the more sensitive parts of our business because they're the bits where we're really trying to outwit people that we're after.

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I'm Louise and I'm an intelligence analyst and a 24/7 operation center here at HQ. And I use my skills to combat the threats that the UK has. There's so much data constantly coming in and that always needs to be analysed no matter what time of day it is. The chance I have ever seen a bigger picture so I can often spot patterns that my colleagues can't always see. So it just feel sometimes like a superpower.

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The world needs cognitive diversity and many dyslexic adults will tell you that they are who they are today because of their dyslexia and not despite it the matter where you are in the world.

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There is a clear pattern on how governments and leaders use the power in there. My name is Robyn Curnow.

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I'm coming to you from Atlanta, Georgia, in the USA. So I'm an anchor for CNN International. And before that, I was CNN's Africa correspondent.

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I'm Robyn Curnow in Atlanta. This is CNN. My early school years were really, really tough, I went to four schools by the time I was 10, I was held back a year. The teachers just really didn't get me. And I was really considered the dumbest kid in the class.

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And that came to a head as a kid when I must have been then about eight or nine when one of these teachers decided to tell my mother that I wouldn't amount to very much.

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And she said something to my mother, like, you know, she's a sweet little girl.

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She'll make someone a good wife and mother one day. And my mother told me that as a nine year old. And I think that fire of, like, I am not just going to be a housewife was something that burned in me.

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You know, I was determined to prove them wrong.

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I think the interesting thing about being a dyslexic is that you become extremely adept at finding alternative ways to survive. You work harder, I think, than most people. You find another plan, you quite sneaky. You know that sometimes you know where your trigger points are. So you either prepare ahead or you find ways to deal with it on your own. So you become extremely resilient and you also become a bit of a street fighter.

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And I think you've managed to get through all of those years of school. Not only are you a street fighter, you're pretty well prepared for life because you've had to elbow your way through everything. I don't miss the classroom, the spelling tests, the exams. But if we survive school, having learned to read and write, we can find those things were really good. Dyslexia means we have to work harder, but it makes us more resilient.

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This program was produced and presented by me, Stella Zabin with Toby with us. Dyslexia is a cost in radio production for the BBC World Service.

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Thank you for listening. There will be more from the documentary podcast soon. The documentary is just one of our BBC World Service podcasts. There are many others to choose from.

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Hi, I'm Sophie Townsend and I'll be telling my story in a brand new BBC World Service podcast. It's called Goodbye to All This. This is what it sounds like. This guy is a deep and cloudless blue. The sun's shining. It's lunchtime and I need some air. So I walk out of the office leaving the document. I'm writing midsentence. I walk down a busy street, noisy with traffic to the grocer to buy some potatoes for dinner.

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The grocer hands me my bag and my change and I fumble, drop the coins, almost hitting my head on the counter on the way up.

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He laughs sympathetically at my clumsiness, says, you're OK. I say, I think my husband has lung cancer. Goodbye to all this is a story about losing the man I loved and going on without him. It's about raising two girls through grief, being alone and surviving mostly intact. It's a brand new podcast from the BBC World Service. And you can find it by searching for goodbye to all this wherever you get your podcasts.