Kintsugi Heroes
Jay Borthwick · 65 min
A man told to hide his dyslexia built a career connecting Australians across sixty languages — proving the very thing you're ashamed of can become your greatest strength.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Jay Borthwick grew up on Sydney's Northern Beaches with the ocean as his backyard, but at ten years old he was pulled from his regular class and placed in the special education room. Dyslexia meant he struggled to read and write, and the label stuck hard. Kids called him names. He learned to fight back, learned to survive the shame, and learned something else: if you cannot win in the classroom, you find wins everywhere else. He threw himself into sport, into connection, into doing things well.
Years later, Jay built a career at SBS helping Australians across more than sixty languages understand their new home. The irony is sharp and deliberate. A man who struggles with reading now spends his days connecting people through words. He does not do this by speaking other languages himself. Instead, he listens. He brings the right people into the room. He organises, he solves, he finds the human problem beneath the translation. At work and at home, he made a choice his younger self never had: to speak openly about his dyslexia rather than hide it, especially when his own daughter was diagnosed. He could not ask her to stay silent about something he had spent decades ashamed of.
This is a story about what happens when you stop running from the thing that breaks you and start building with it. Jay discovered that discipline and commitment matter more than natural talent, that the afternoon fog is real and can be managed, and that the small things done well create foundations strong enough for others to stand on after you step away.
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Kintsugi Heroes · Registered Australian not-for-profit · kintsugiheroes.com.au ↗