Sarah Ann Macklin
Sarah Ann Macklin is a nutritionist, researcher, and host of the Live Well Be Well podcast. She specialises in how diet impacts mental health, with a focus on supporting neurodiver...
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Who are you?
Hi, I am Sarah Macklin, and if you professionally, I'll see what I do. I would say I am the host of the Health Podcast Live. Well Be Well, and I'm also an author and nutritionist, but also I'm a seeker and I am a very curious individual about health and connecting people and allowing people to understand the importance of self-compassion.
Can you walk us through your journey of discovering you had dyslexia later in life?
So I was a late comer to the diagnosis of dyslexia, and I had left a international modelling career at the height of it, left New York, came back to London to enrol in nutritional science, and within my first six weeks, I had this huge feeling of overwhelm again, which I had at school. And I felt, actually, this isn't for me. Maybe this is not the right career path that I should have gone into. But I was seeking to go into human nutrition because my health ultimately wasn't at its peak, and I felt that I needed knowledge to understand how to get better. Anyway, I went to my professor, I said to her, I think I need to drop out. This isn't actually for me. And she looked at me with a little bit of confusion and she asked why. And ultimately I said, I'm not smart enough to do this course. To which she looked at me again with more confusion and said, I can't believe you said that you are smart. I think he might be neurodivergent. And she asked if I had ever been tested for dyslexia, and I'd never heard that term before I was 23. I would've gone through my whole schooling life without knowing what dyslexia was. So she asked if she could take me for a test to see if I was dyslexic. And a couple of weeks later it transpired that I did have dyslexia, and they gave me amazing tools to help, but they also showed me something that was really, really important. They showed me a huge amount of compassion and without judgement , and showed me that I wasn't stupid, that I wasn't smart, I indeed was intellectual. My brain just had a different way of working and understanding things. So that led me on a huge personal journey.
Thinking back to school life, how did it feel to see how teachers perceived your learning struggles?
I find school quite interesting. I think that we are curious human beings before we enter the schooling system. And then all of that curiosity and creativity has to become very centralised. And anything that's not on the curriculum is kind of pushed out the way. And I think being neurodivergent, you have quite a curious brain. I definitely had quite a curious brain, and I found it very, very hard to stick to a linear system. And so most of my school reports came back with Sarah as an incredibly frustrating child to teach. And it was interesting because I would sit there in class, I would daydream, I would be quite overwhelmed, I'd be very distracted. I would mix all the words up on the paper in front of me or on the whiteboard when it was being written. And so I essentially just zoned out. And I never really grasped a lot of my lessons unless there was something that I was really interested in, whether it was something like photography or art, or ironically parts of English and storytelling that was creative writing, which I loved. But for most of my school life, I felt very disconnected. I felt very alone, and I essentially felt quite lost. But I didn't have the communication style to explain how I felt. I just felt very, very different. And so I think my confidence over school actually became lower and lower and lower. And because I'm naturally extroverted, I don't think it was picked up as much as it should have been. But since leaving school, my confidence grew exponentially because I felt that I had the freedom to roam and discover things that I thought I was good at. But essentially what I felt like at school was I spent my entire schooling life covering up all of my weaknesses, and I never let any of my strengths.