A great piece. All my kids were / are dyslexic and I think I know who they inherited it from. It took me forever to learn to read and I was always hopeless at spelling and languages. Like you I was bright enough to compensate. One year I was bottom of the class in French, German and Latin but top overall.
I realised my daughter might be dyslexic when she was about 8 yrs old. Out of a hundred kids in the school she was 6th in Maths and 66th in English. I asked the headteacher how often that happened and he said he had never seen it before. We got a diagnosis from a qualified psychologist and remedial teaching and suddenly she liked going to school, the headaches dissappeared, the tummy ache dissappeared and she started to leap forwards.
I think the most important thing for us was that we caught it before her maths suffered because she couldn’t read the questions. In another year her maths and English would probably have had the same scores, dragged down by the poor reading.
One of the worst days of my life was after those pivotal exam results when my eight year old daughter said to me in tears “Have I missed my chances to go to university?” No one should do that to a child. The fact that I had to guess the diagnosis and the school didn’t says volumes too. — She did get to university.