For as long as I can remember, I felt completely out of step with the world around me. Growing up in the 1970s, school felt like a slow, painful struggle. While my sisters and classmates easily handled reading and memorization, I found myself totally blocked by words on a page. I would constantly mix up simple words like "what" and "who." I could read a paragraph over and over and realize I had absolutely no idea what I just read. Because I couldn't learn the way traditional classrooms demanded, I secretly carried a heavy doubt for decades, always thinking that maybe I was just slow.
But there was another side to me that didn't fit that label at all. When we did science experiments, I didn't want to read the textbook. I wanted to physically hold the magnifying glass under the sun and watch the paper smoke. I excelled in the arts because it was about feeling and doing. Later in life, I found out I could wire complex sound systems simply by looking at the cables and tracking the logic of colors and signal flows. My brain just didn't think in paragraphs. It thought in pictures, deep emotions, and massive, big picture concepts.
When a heavy storm hit my family during my childhood and my parents separated, depression hit at just six years old, leaving me unable to eat or sleep. My grades dropped from being one of the best to completely struggling. But even in the middle of that darkness, my young soul was absorbing the world. I remember seeing a commercial on television about global unity and harmony. While other kids were just singing nursery rhymes, that vision of a diverse world singing together on top of a mountain locked itself deep inside my heart. I held onto that feeling for fifty years.
It wasn't until very recently, as I approached my 60th birthday, that the pieces of the puzzle finally came together. I learned about a concept called Twice Exceptional. It describes people who navigate a processing difference like my dyslexia while at the same time possessing a high capacity for creative, visual, or emotional intelligence. When you combine that with an INFJ personality type, you get a mind that processes the world in massive, high speed webs of imagery and deep feeling.
Suddenly, my entire life made sense. I was never slow. My brain was just running at lightspeed, trapped in a slow, text heavy world. Traditional school wanted me to be a typewriter, but my mind was built to be a director.
When Generative AI arrived, a lot of people my age felt intimidated or confused. But for me, it felt like a miracle. For the first time in my life, technology had finally caught up to the speed of my thoughts. It is like this massive, beautiful toy I waited fifty years to play with. I don't use AI to do the thinking for me. I use it to bypass the text barriers of my dyslexia. I throw my raw, lightspeed concepts and my deep childhood visions at the machine, and it handles the slow formatting so my heart and soul can just create.
Today, I express this creativity through two different channels that reflect the two sides of my soul. On my main channel, https://www.youtube.com/@sweet101ashley, I blend my original lyrics and short animated films with the timeless hits of the 70s through the 90s. It is my creative universe where music meets motion.
I also created a specialized musical hub for the next generation called https://www.youtube.com/@hersheybby6829. This is my Hershey Bby channel, where we believe rhythm and rhyme are the fastest ways to a child’s heart. From exploring space adventures to unboxing the alphabet, I use the power of music to make learning effortless and fun. I am finally writing the songs and directing the visuals I always saw in my head.
I’m sharing this not to brag or highlight myself, but to stand up for the quiet, sensitive children who are sitting in classrooms right now feeling like they don’t belong. If you are a hands on learner, if text frustrates you, or if you've been told you are too mature or too slow, please hang on. Your mind isn't broken. You might just be a future soul, waiting for the right tool to finally let your imagination fly..
