Justine Scott-Gray, who was a pupil at Dunfermline High School, was told she would be better off in a “manual career” and felt her life was going nowhere when she left school to become a riding instructor.
She had always struggled at school, and it wasn’t until she met someone who encouraged her to pursue higher education, that she discovered she was Dyslexic.
Justine told the Press: “It was in the early 80s when it wasn’t uncommon to be an undiagnosed dyslexic.
“There wasn’t very much in the way of standard testing. You had to be unteachable in every level for them to even consider having you assessed for anything, so I just sort of limped through school thinking well, that’s just what you get.
“When I was in the earlier part of primary school, I was probably the same as everyone else. You build strategies to keep up, you learn how to memorise the shape of a word and you find ways to do it.
“I remember winning a writing competition because I wrote a story and I remember being so chuffed and so excited that I’d gotten first place.
“But it was almost like the best and worst thing in some ways because I had the wonderful experience of people saying how great I was at writing but then the same teachers saying ‘Oh you’re really not keeping up, are you’ and actually asking ‘Are you not putting the effort in?’ almost suggesting that I was lazy.
“You grow up and internalise it a bit and think ‘Oh I’m not lazy, I’m working really hard,’ but then that makes you feel like you’re probably a bit stupid because nobody has told you you have dyslexia.
“You just know that you’re working as hard as you think you can and you’re still lagging behind the rest of the class.”
Fortunately, Justine met a local senior HR professional who encouraged her to try academic studies again, this time following her natural ability to connect with people.
Now, decades after struggling through school, Justine is a successful international life coach.
Through her academic coaching training, she was encouraged to face her fears and do something that scared her. As a result she took to writing down the poetry she had been creating and sharing them online.
“I had intermittently written poems in my diary,” she said. “Just bits and pieces, but I had never had the confidence to do anything with them.
“Then I started coaching people professionally, coaching people with dyslexia, coaching people that are going into leadership roles and part of that was that you were challenged in the course to do something that you were really uncomfortable with.
“So it was actually part of my qualifications that I was challenged to go and start writing poems and posting them into this private group for people to read.
“People would feed back to me that they loved them and that they made them emotional.”
After getting amazing feedback on the poems that she wrote, often using the medium to explore her own experiences of childhood, bereavement, addiction and challenges with her Dyslexia, Justine decided to go all in and put them together as a book.
Her first collection of poems, entitled ‘The Poet’s Poison: In the darkest place lies the greatest treasure’, has now been published.
She continued: “I feel incredibly proud that I did this but also really grateful because my name is on the book, but I should have written one hundred names on it because of all the people who have been part of the journey and also part of the support.
“I think I feel so grateful that I’ve had people that have really been able to encourage me, for me to be able to step out of the shadow a bit and shrug off the limiting belief that I was given as school that as a dyslexic you’re stupid and that nobody would ever want to hear anything you’ve got to say because you’re not as intelligent as everyone else.
“There are so many people out there that for one reason or another have difficulty with learning and I would love them to read the poems and feel that there is hope, that they are the masters of their own destiny. ”
