LITERATURE NARRATIVE

For a lot of people, their journey to learning how to read and write is most likely a linear path with a few obstacles that eventually leads them to gain the ability, but for me, the road was a lot more strenuous. I can recall my mother recounting some of my earlier experiences with reading. She vividly described the myriad of tricks I employed in order to mask my inability to read, one tool I often utilized involved memorizing the words giving to me rather than actually reading them, safe to say my game of deception didn’t fool her. My inability to read at the required level left me highly frustrated, I could not comprehend the reasoning behind my struggles especially since I was putting in the effort. Furthermore, the ability to read is a prerequisite to writing, so logically my poor performance in the former affected the latter. 

It’s safe to say remembering my experiences in my early English classes are a dreaded undertaking that I try my best to stray far away from. A paralyzing fear would engulf my body whenever the teacher read aloud knowing that they could very well call on me to continue on their behalf, that lingering fear made the whole process even more anxiety-inducing. Needing the teacher to come over and read to you or asking your classmates made my existence inside a classroom unbearable. It’s hard to feel adequate when everyone around you seems to easily master a skill that eluded me. Like any struggle we encounter in life, we try our best to cope with the situation, and that’s what I initially did, enough to scrape by to the next grade. But as you go up a grade, the requirements increase and your weakness becomes more glaring. 

I came to realize that one cannot forever run away from their problems, they will always be there, you can create a small gap but it will inevitably catch up to you. I took the initiative, asked my mother for a library card, put my head down, and started grinding away at it. It took lots of effort, discipline, and practice, but I had a burning desire to fuel me along the way. I learned that success isn’t earned without an input of concentrated clear effort. The end product of my being able to read at the same level as my peers. A losing battle finally overturned. However, my love of reading did not come until my school challenged the student to read ten books over the summer in exchange for a desirable prize. I took on the challenge for myself, and the prize of course. I ended up being so consumed and entrenched within the books I was reading that ten books did not suffice, I ended up reading 15. It was clear that the schools’ challenge was on the back foot and my new found love reading was made clear to me. Consequently my writing skills catapulted as well. 

In retrospect, I look back at my complicated relationships with literature as character building. I’ve only recently realized that I might have been too harsh on my self-evaluation, I hadn’t considered the fact that English was once an alien language to me and it just took me a while to acclimatize to it, even though my oral mastery of the language was perfect. The struggle of learning how to read has taught me how to persevere and face my fears head-on. It has also taught me that sometimes your current situation may be caused by circumstances beyond your control, but one must accept the situation for what it is and work vigorously to shape it in the form the which to see.  

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.