My awful week made me go public about my lifelong learning disorder.
RESERVOIR is not a place to show weakness. It's a place where some of the real working class live, so you have to be physically and mentally tough to hold your own.
I enjoyed growing up in Reservoir. But for me, going to school every day was a struggle. I was hopeless at English. I couldn't read out loud, I was a chronically bad speller and, to top it off, I also had a debilitating stutter.
I was so bad at reading I used to stall at every word. Kids would make fun of how I couldn't put two words together. It cut deep and left a lasting scar.
In the end, I tried to avoid English classes. I knew I wasn't a dummy, but people thought I sounded like one. I was very good at maths and couldn't understand how I could be so brilliant at one thing and not another.
Reading out loud is so public. People can see that you suck and see you as a loser. Some days I just wanted to go home and cry. But no one saw how good I was at maths, except my teachers.
As a kid, it's what the other kids thought that was important. I just wanted to be normal and string a sentence together.
Sport was my escape from ridicule. I played everything from soccer to squash; on the sporting field I was normal.
Despite only getting 29 for English, I managed to get high-90s for both pure and applied maths in year 12 and qualified for university. My engineering degree didn't come easy. I struggled through the reading. I was slow in taking notes and scared to ask for help because I didn't want to be ridiculed at uni as well. It meant that I had to work twice as hard. The experience taught me to process information more quickly because I knew it would take me longer to communicate it back.
After working for seven years, I did an MBA part-time while working full-time. This wasn't easy either. On a number of occasions I had use of a whiteboard. But this seemingly easy task was terrifying because I was afraid of spelling something incorrectly. I eventually solved the problem by using PowerPoint.
After years of long nights and hard work, I finished my MBA and went on to work in some senior positions. I still struggled talking in front of crowds but solved that by meeting people one on one.
The first six months in the Senate was tough: learning how to deal with the media, who were baying for blood, and making important speeches in Parliament. But I never once doubted my ability to get the job done and make the right the decisions for the Australian people. My biggest fear was that people wouldn't know the good work I was doing because I couldn't communicate it well enough. My other more secret fear was that I didn't want to humiliate my family by being labelled a loser again.
Then the inevitable happened. Last week I delivered a shocker of a speech in Parliament and the next day I struggled with pronouncing the word ''fiscal''. It came out ''physical''. I knew the difference but articulating them ended in disaster. I was left feeling as small as an ant. I didn't know what to do.
After talking with my wife, I decided to tell the country about my struggle with a specific learning disability. Some people want me to be more specific, but that's what it's been termed by the Australian Psychological Society. After doing a couple of interviews I was again in tears, reliving all the hurt and pain from long ago.
No words could describe how hard it was to speak out about the demon I had lived with for 48 years. It leaves no physical scars but mentally it eats away at you every day. For months I used to practice the phrase ''double dissolution'' but I still stuffed it up in front of the cameras. I laughed it off, but deep down it hurt because I knew people would think that I was a dummy.
Going public with my specific learning disability has left me feeling numb.
My staff have told me I have received hundreds of messages of support, which I appreciate. But I can't bring myself to read them just yet. I hope this very emotional and public ''outing'' means that others who struggle with a learning difficulty may not be laughed at quite so often.
And most of all I want people to understand that a learning difficulty doesn't have to restrict who you are - or what you can achieve.
Steve Fielding is a Victorian senator and leader of the Family First Party.
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