From the left-hand side: A scroll bears comments from one of my high school reports, for Welsh. The teacher praises my enthusiasm in class, and comments that I was successful in the tests, however that to improve my written work, I will need to read more Welsh books.

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Next to the scroll, the story unfolds, as a copy of the illustrated children’s Bible, and a Welsh cookbook I once used to make a chocolate cake, tip colourful strands of information down onto a violet brain – the colour of sodium valproate; the brain has an ear beneath it, and one of my sea-pottery jewellery in it, and drops of sodium valproate drip beneath the brain. A sound wave, which may relate to seizures or else music, emanates from the brain, then flatlines, then gives way to musical notes and an indication that I ‘dance to the beat of my own drum’.

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From the brain, purple symbols of the butterfly effect – as seen in the Lorenz system – fly upwards, before metamorphosing into actual violet butterflies – one of which settles on a tab showing English words spelled phonetically, as noted in my dyslexia assessment.

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Beneath the tabs, a violet table of mutations – which ordinarily would display rules to be committed to memory – shows a confusing, melted jumble of letters and rule headings, further complicated by a butterfly and a hazy purple eye, weeping purple tears. The foot of the table is replaced by a musical stave or pentagram, which indicates the importance of music in my coping mechanisms regarding memory, and the almost sole positive school report received, which was in music. However, a bass clef sets the tone of low mood as the word ‘trawiadau’, which means both beats and seizures, replaces any notes; the remaining words indicate that beats/ seizures affect memory.

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Beneath the table and the drum detail, a quote from an academic journal article explains that both seizures and antiepileptic drugs (AEDs such as sodium valproate) have long-term consequences, including on memory.

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Above all of this, there is a psychedelic – or psychotropic – storm, raining violet medicine down on the scene, affecting everything in my life.

 

On the right-hand side of the page, signs in the style of road traffic signs, give us the information that dyslexia assessments are only available in English – not only in 1996, when I was assessed, but now still in 2025…and beyond to who knows when?!

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The all-seeing eye of the assessor is looking at the phonetically spelled English words and understands that this may be further complicated by my Welsh-medium education and my relationship with the Welsh and English languages. However, the assessor is not a Welsh-speaker, and thus a solid language-barrier, indicated here by a brick-wall, prevents them from seeing the mutations table; they have no concept of mutations, much less the complications these might present for my ‘ACID scores’. As things stand, my ACID scores (in the floating table) resulted in the following comments:

 

“Given such a wide scatter of results it would not be relevant to reduce these to what report to be Intelligence Quotients”.

 

The second scroll bears some of the comments from the dyslexia assessment, which details from my assessment, including problems with memory and a variety of cognitive processing areas.

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The main message of the piece, therefore, is that whilst my Welsh-medium teachers believed that the solution to my literacy problems lay in a need for me to ‘read more Welsh books’, in reality my memory and cognition had been adversely affected by seizures and use of AEDs to prevent seizures, and this was confirmed by the dyslexia assessment, to some extent, as there was a clear indication of additional educational needs – even when assessed in a very different language to that which I was receiving my education. However, this was just the tip of the iceberg, as my most prominent difficulties were with grammar rules, including mutations – which were not tested for by the English language test. This chasm still exists in the Welsh-medium education system and will exist until a Welsh-medium dyslexia assessment is in place.