A letter about a language disorder, and a great love for reading

I want to write you a letter about my love for reading. Even now, after graduating college, my interest in books feels very...new and fresh. I was a late bloomer growing up, my education somewhat complicated by a severe language disorder, which I still have to this day. It’s called MERLD, and it stands for Mixed Expressive-Receptive Language Disorder. Have you heard of it? It means exactly as it sounds: a profound difficulty with both receiving and expressing language – with converting words into understanding, and understanding into words. I tend not to think or talk about MERLD too much because I’d rather not dwell on my limitations. But lately, it has struck me that being neurodivergent is a central part to how I read, think and even dream about books. 

To start, I am a slow reader. Historically, I’ve always been slow to understand books and slow to finish them as well. I’d say that I have a good idea of what’s going on now from beginning to end, but when I was younger, I barely understood anything. Every page was just a hopeless haze of words. The best way I can describe reading in childhood is actually through memories of watching movies with my sister. We would be two hours into watching a film, and I’d look at her and ask, “What just happened?” I recognized the faces and their voices, could sense that the music swelled before something important happened, but beyond that, I couldn’t quite trace the plot. Who was the main character? What was their problem? It was always my wildest guess. 

My experience with school was somewhat similar. I was terrible at following directions, not out of defiance, but simply because I couldn’t process the words spoken to me. For most of my early life, I knew that I lagged behind my classmates in reading, writing, science, and mathematics. Having little aptitude for the sciences, I started to identify myself as a “humanities person” in the sixth grade. But even then, I’m almost certain that I loved books in a hazy, yearning way, without ever fully grasping their meaning. I loved Jane Austen, or at least the idea of her work. I had an overwhelming aspiration to read ancient Indian texts such as the Bhagavad Gita which motivated me to study Sanskrit in my free time. Overall, my relationship with books was more dreamy than precise. Books felt enchanting and mysterious, as compelling as the open sky above—each a portal to another world I couldn’t quite reach.

It is interesting to think about how far I’ve come since then. How much clarity and revelation I can receive from a text now—thanks to some coping strategies I’ve adopted over the years: an index card to highlight one line at a time, or, sometimes an audiobook to read along with me. I’ve put so much effort and self-belief into the act of reading that, over the years, this activity that once seemed impossibly challenging has now become a favorite pastime.

For all the past difficulty I’ve had with language, it is curious how it dominates my consciousness today. I think and even still daydream about literature and its possibilities. Like, isn’t it amazing that a whole lifetime’s worth of knowledge can be condensed into a 200-page hardcover? Isn’t it wonderful that just by reading, your life and the author’s voice intertwine, and in that shared space, something no one else can create comes into being? I am blessed to understand what I read, but even more than that, to feel what the author meant, line by line. Literacy is a gift. 

Right after graduating college, I had a flashback to the way I once saw books: as portals, vast and luminous like the sky above. And it struck me that maybe my ten year old self was right. The books I love most are gateways to a kinder, more inclusive society. Memoirs and history books in particular offer something rare. They urge you to look up and outward, to see other people’s suffering in great detail, and also to refuse its normalization. To read is to agree, even briefly, to carry someone else’s truth alongside your own. It is possibly one of humanity’s most radiant acts – an open door between separate lives, given freely across the ages.