This is a post I’ve been kind of putting off for a while, but I’ve given in and started writing it. One of the reason I want to write this is to explain a bit more about me: I’m dyslexic and I’ve known this for a long time, since it was discovered in primary school, so both reading and writing are a big thing for me. I’ve always had to do both as part of school, and to be honest school really didn’t fill me with motivation to read or write – we never seemed to do anything that tickled my interests, from constantly doing Romeo and Juliet, comparing poetry, I don’t know if it was the way it was written or it just being old, but I never seemed to get it. Just didn’t make sense and I found it very boring and didn’t really enjoy it. I just didn’t seem to tickle my interests, but it all changed when my dad took me to see ‘Touching The Void’ in the cinema in Belfast when it first came out.
I found it so inspiring that I wanted to try winter climbing. When I found out it was based on a book of the same name by a climber called Joe Simpson, telling the story of his and his partner Simon Yate’s expedition to climb a mountain in Peru, I asked dad to buy the book for me. He did, so I started reading it (it took me a couple of months but I read it). At around the same time I was on a program called DDAT (now the DORE program) to help develop part of my brain that hasn’t developed very well when I was younger. My parents had tried help with different things, but I didn’t think I really understood why I had do all this extra work compared to the others in my class but the DDAT program I wanted it do. As I was reading another one of Joe Simpsons books, in the waiting room to get tested again which I had to do every 6 weeks, one of the staff commented that it was ‘one of the best things to see – a client reading in our waiting room’. This gave me a big confidence boost and since then I’ve read a lot, mostly climbing books, -Joe Simpson, Simon Yates, Andy Cave, Andy Kirkpatrick and now I’m getting into a bit of fiction with Clive Cussler, Dirk Pitt and Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl. It’s been a bit on and off but I’m still reading, and my library of books has grown from a few climbing books, to lots of books, and now I have a Kindle it’s going to grow even more. Just wish I had the space for the real thing!
Writing is another area I wasn’t that motivated with. Like I said before, school really didn’t help with the motivation (rather, it put me off), but reading about climbing and all these trips away inspired me so much. Andy Kirkpatrick’s books and his blog have especially inspired me – seeing what another dyslexic can achieve, by himself and with the support of family and friends as well as he enjoys messing around with climbing gear like I do but on a larger scale. So I thought I’d give it a go myself too, to help with my confidence with writing and help my spelling, and maybe one day I’ll be writing a book. But at the moment I can write about my climbing, my climbing style, put up some of my photos online and talk about the photos. Then maybe I can get my head into gear to write some gear reviews on my blog, when I find a new bit of climbing gear I want to play with and learn to use.
Maybe this will help inspire others reading my blog and give them the same inspiration that others have given me.
It may take me a while to put some stuff up, as it’s still taking me some time to put what’s in my head onto paper so to speak, and read over it, and get my friends to read over it and help me spell-check it before I post it online.
Hopefully I can keep it up!
