How Superman Learned to Fly

“Don’t you put that boy in Special Ed,” my grandmother warned my father. “He’ll never get out.”That sentence wasn't a suggestion. It was a spell. A protection spell. A declaration of war against a system too quick to box up brilliance and throw away the key.

I didn’t understand the weight of her words at eight years old. But looking back, that moment became the fault line where my path split. On one side: conformity, diagnosis, low expectations. On the other: resistance, revelation, reinvention.

I come from a bloodline of educators—my mother a professor, my aunt a superintendent, my grandmother a retired special ed teacher who had seen firsthand how the system fails the very children it's supposed to help. She knew the trap: once labeled, the label sticks. Once placed in special education, many never left. Not because they couldn’t—but because no one fought for them to rise.

So she fought for me.

At the time, I didn’t know I was struggling. I didn’t feel “slow.” But the metrics shifted—grades slipped, attention waned, and I wasn’t keeping pace with my older godbrother, Virgil, someone I used to surpass. That confusion haunted my parents. My father, a man who believed willpower could bend reality, didn’t see a deficit in me—only distraction.

Still, I was pulled from classes. Not to be remediated, but to be evaluated. That’s when I met Dr. Saunders.

He didn’t wear a cape, but he had white hair, thick glasses, and a gentle way about him that made me feel seen, not judged. He looked like Colonel Sanders from KFC. I thought it was a joke. Maybe life was making fun of me. But it didn’t feel like punishment. It felt like discovery.

Week after week, I sat in his home. We played with numbers, shapes, symbols—things that felt more like puzzles than problems. And then came the IQ test. I didn’t know what it was at the time. I just remember liking it. It made me feel alive, sharp. And when the results came in, Dr. Saunders told my parents my IQ was just shy of genius. That number stuck to me like armor.

That was also the day I was introduced to the word dyslexia. Strange word. Hard to spell. Even harder to carry if you let others define it for you. But Dr. Saunders framed it differently. Not a disability—a gift. A superpower. I believed him. Maybe because I wanted to. Maybe because I needed to. He listed names: Tom Cruise, Muhammad Ali, Spielberg. But the one that changed everything?

Einstein.

He told me Einstein was dyslexic. That his brain didn’t fit the mold, and that was why he changed the world. From that day forward, I didn’t defend my intelligence—I weaponized it. “Yeah, I’m dyslexic. So was Albert Einstein.”

But it wasn’t just the diagnosis that saved me. It was the environment that followed. Dr. Saunders referred me to Jemicy, a school designed for kids like me. Small classes. Creative freedom. One-on-one support. There, I thrived. It wasn’t that I became smarter—it’s that I was finally being taught in a way that matched the way I thought.

Years later, as I sit surrounded by scripts, books, films, and philosophies, I realize the truth: it wasn’t the IQ test or the diagnosis that defined me. It was the belief. The refusal of my grandmother, the persistence of my parents, the insight of a quirky doctor, the structure of a specialized school—these were the forces that conspired to teach me how to fly.

Dyslexia didn’t limit me. It liberated me—from the narrow lanes of conventional thinking. It taught me to see the world sideways, to question everything, to build from pieces others overlook. Like Clark Kent, I had to stumble through confusion to discover my power. But once I did?

Gravity never stood a chance.