Dame Dr Maggie Aderin, a space scientist and CEO of Science Innovation Ltd., has a favourite piece of scientific equipment: the retrospectroscope. It exists only in her imagination, but it’s proven quite useful for analysing her life’s journey - which, she admits, has been a doozy.
Writing her memoir, Starchild: My Life Under the Night Sky, led her to reflect deeply on her dyslexia, formally diagnosed only last year. “Looking back, I can see that dyslexia was there all along, shaping the way I thought, solved problems, communicated, imagined and coped,” she writes. It was present in the child who struggled with words on the page but could tell great stories and see the bigger picture. It was there in the teenager often made to feel “nice but dim,” and in the young woman determined to build her own telescope rather than accept the world as handed to her.
Aderin points out that dyslexia is still described only in terms of what makes things difficult. Reading and writing remain a slog; processing information takes more brain power than she’d like; and her spelling remains “gloriously unreliable.” But difficulty, she insists, is not the whole story. “Not even close.”
Her childhood was full of upheaval - 13 schools in 12 years, custody battles, and reinvention. At six, she ran away from home clutching her little sister’s hand while wearing Wombles slippers and pyjamas. In class, she was the girl at the back with safety scissors and glue, stuck on simple red reading books while classmates progressed. The message she absorbed was that she was somehow lacking. That, she argues, is the danger of how we talk about dyslexia: children hear the diagnosis and absorb the lowered expectations, sensing when adults have quietly made up their minds. “It is a terrible thing to do to a child - to make them feel written off before they have had the chance to discover their own brilliance.”
Yet the same child who found school hard escaped into space. While others saw a girl with patchy spelling, inside her head she was reaching for the stars. The Clangers sparked her imagination; Neil Armstrong made her think, “Why not me?” Walking home across Hampstead Heath to a London council flat, she looked up, not down.
Her later diagnosis didn’t suddenly make her dyslexic - it explained how her brain works. But the emotional shift was powerful. After encountering the charity Made By Dyslexia, she realised she had the story wrong. The organisation identifies “dyslexic thinking” and how it adds value in work and life. “I realised I was not suffering from dyslexia; in many ways I was gifted with it,” she writes. Traits she thought of as random oddities - empathy, storytelling, curiosity, lateral thinking, resilience, love of communicating big ideas - started making sense. “There is something profoundly freeing about realising that the very traits you tried to hide are a fundamental part of your strength.”
Dyslexia did not stop her from becoming a scientist; it shaped the scientist she became - one who prefers the broad brush, looks at systems as a whole, and loves sharing science with as many people as possible. She points to dyslexic pioneers like Richard Branson, Isaac Newton, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking. “As dyslexics, we don’t just think outside the box - we often think off the planet and beyond.”
Reframing dyslexic thinking could be game-changing, she says - not just for dyslexic people but for the world, if we can harness the imagination, connection, and reasoning that come with it. Changing the narrative means telling better stories, celebrating creativity, communication, empathy, problem-solving, and resilience as forms of intelligence. “Most of all, we need to make sure that the next generation does not grow up feeling written off.”
Made By Dyslexia has launched a short film about one girl’s journey with diagnosis, aimed at newly diagnosed children or adults who have spent years misunderstanding themselves. Aderin hopes her own messy, funny, difficult, curious journey shows that dyslexia didn’t close doors - it gave her the resilience to keep going and the skills to look for the next door she needed.