When she was a child, Maddi Rivas (Hondarribia, 1997) always feared the moment when the teacher said her name and asked her to read aloud. She had a bad time. Very badly. So much so that the letters became intertwined and the words stopped making sense when they came out of her mouth. At first, she thought it was because of her nerves, but she soon realized that something was up. The same thing happened when writing. Her classmates laughed and neither her parents, nor her teachers, nor she herself understood why, despite dedicating many hours to studying, things were not working out. She didn’t get the answer until she was a teenager: she was dyslexic.
“Knowing it didn’t change anything about my day-to-day life but it was a relief to have a diagnosis. It freed me to find an explanation for what was happening,” she tells La Vanguardia from the Manga Barcelona salon, where she goes these days not only because she has become one of the most recognized manga and anime communicators in the Spanish-speaking world thanks to her YouTube Umaru-chan, but because he has just published his first book, When Fear Became Love (Editions B), in which he explains his story and brings this learning disorder closer to his readers. “They told me as a child that she was going to write a book and I wouldn’t have believed it,” she admits.
Asun, his English teacher, was the one who gave him the clue as to what could be happening. “His son is dyslexic and he asked me if I was too because we wrote the same way. I told him no, but from that moment on that noise stayed in my head, so I ended up doing some tests that came back positive.”
When that happened, Maddi had discovered for some time that, although she had a hard time at school, at home she could enjoy books like no other. “If they didn’t rush me or force me to say anything out loud, everything flowed. She would do it for me and if I didn’t understand a sentence, she would go back and reread it. It was simple. And I knew this thanks to manga, which taught me that reading could not be a punishment.”
He was nine years old when in the municipal library of his city, Hondarribia, he found a volume of Fruits Basket, the manga written by Natsuki Takaya. “It caught my attention that it was read backwards and that it was so visual. I started turning the pages and I liked the story, so I asked to borrow this and the following volumes. It was nothing like what we read in class. I am sure that if comics and manga were read in schools, more children would be interested in reading and would then be able to make the jump to other books and longer novels. If it happened to me, for whom reading was a real nightmare and extra effort, it can happen to everyone,” she reflects.
The manga not only made Maddi love what had made her suffer so much, but it also encouraged her to discover a new culture, the Japanese, and adopt a new aesthetic, the otaku, with which she felt identified, since the brought closer to the characters of those new stories that I was discovering.
“The problem is that children are cruel and adolescents even more so. And at school they began to make fun of me for having my own personality,” says Rivas, who regrets that bullying is still present in schools although, “luckily, it is talked about more and more and it is more accepted than it was years ago.” be from the crowd. In my time, being different was penalized, so I chose to blend in with the environment and become a gray person.”
Today he recognizes that he would have acted differently, “although it is easy to say when something has already happened. Although she would travel to the past and tell the Maddi of that time not to let herself be trampled on and to continue doing what she likes most and that today has brought her where she is. It’s not something she can do, but I do hope that my story inspires and reaches out to anyone who is going through it. The manga doesn’t sink. On the contrary, save,” she concludes.
