As a child, Lucy Senior slept with a piece of paper marked with the word ‘was’ under her pillow.
She found those three letters — W.A.S — so hard to piece together, yet a complex word like 'elephant' she could easily understand and read aloud.
"'Was' I always got stuck with because I could never quite get that word, I slept with it under my pillow to try and remember," Ms Senior said.
"I really struggled with being told I was lazy, being told I wasn't good enough.
It wasn't until her first year of university that Ms Senior was diagnosed with dyslexia. Three years later, she was also diagnosed with ADHD.
Her world started to make more sense.
"I'm not stupid. My brain is just not wired to learn with literacy, its pathways are too long, so it misinterprets information, it sees one word in every form that it could be," she said.
Ms Senior was determined to become a teacher, in part to make sure other students did not have the negative schooling experiences she'd had with some teachers.
"I had teachers that would sit down and put the extra effort in and thought I could do it," she said.
'Different lens, real insight'
Ms Senior is the art teacher, librarian and teacher aide working with special needs students at St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School in the outback town of Blackall, 10 hours’ drive north-west of Brisbane.
"Luce just comes with a different lens and real insight … she's such an asset to the school," principal Samantha Suthers said.
"It's not just with the kids too, it's actually for the parent community body as well, so Lucy has come, and she's made us think outside the box."
As the school's art teacher, she's teaching children to communicate in visual mediums.
"I couldn't read so I could communicate through pictures, I could read a picture book, I loved visualising so it was something that I could do as well as anyone else."
New strategies for neurodiverse students
Dyslexia is estimated to affect one in 10 Australians, according to the Australian Dyslexia Association.
But that number could be up to one in five when including the continuum of mild to severe cases, however many cases go undiagnosed.
The association's president, Jodi Clements, said neurodiverse teachers like Ms Senior could make a valuable contribution to schools.
"Because of that lived experience, when they work with children who have similar neurodiversities, they can understand what they're going through, and they can relate at a really high level with empathy."
'You can't teach if you can't spell'
Ms Senior has done extensive research to build "tools" to cope with her learning disability and is grateful her school is open to hearing her ideas.
"There's that open dialogue there as well, so I can give a voice to those kids that neurotypical people might not understand.
"I don't just do research in that stuff now, I'm consumed by disability, I want to learn as much as I can in that regard."
But she admits it has taken time to overcome her struggles with stigmas about dyslexia.
"A lot of people were like, 'If you can't spell, you shouldn't be a teacher'," she said.
"I can spell, I just muddle the letters up sometimes. One day I'll be able to spell a word, the next day I can't produce that word because my brain is just not wiring that pathway just yet."
