Literacy Narrative
As I sit down to write I am not scared; I am not discouraged that I will not live up to the challenge placed before me. It was only recently that I realized my ability, however. I used to think that my literacy as a writer was very limited, that I could only complete a piece of writing in certain genres, at certain lengths. As I trace my memory back to the time I learned to write, that’s not what I find. I have always embraced the assignment, no matter what was being asked of me, and I have never fallen short. I like that Bruffee discussed writing as an internal conversation being externalized because it reminded me that writing is a product of my mind, and my mind is the one thing that has never failed me.
I have tried to play countless sports; my coordination is nonexistent. I have tried to play video games; my fingers move, but the character on the screen wanders around aimlessly until he falls into a pit of lava even though I repeatedly told him to jump over it. I am good at math, but only until I reach calculus. I am good at science, but only biology and parts of chemistry, certainly not physics. I have a beautiful voice, but a small range to use it in. I think of literacy as the ability to perform, but also to improve and grow in a field. Different genres of writing may be unexplored by me, but they are not frightening.
I always thought my best kind of writing was the 5-paragraph essay, because that’s all I had practiced. In 8th grade English class, we were told to write a thank you poem to our parents. Some students spent days writing and editing; I spent ten minutes to get the words that immediately popped into my head down on paper and when I showed them to my teacher she was so impressed she picked me as one of three people in the school who got to read their poem aloud at 8th grade graduation. In high school, I thought all I could write was literary analysis papers about Shakespeare and Morrison’s Beloved, but I was wrong. Thinking back, I raised thousands of dollars by writing and performing a killer speech that I performed in front of hundreds of people, I wrote articles for the local newspaper, and I made my vice principal cry when I showed her my college admissions essay. The last few things I wrote in high school were my graduation speech, which was praised by all, my last debate, which crushed the other team, and my I-Search paper, which my writing center advisor wouldn’t get enough of.
I really did think about my literacy as a writer as being very limited, but I couldn’t answer why. Whichever genre I have tried to master I have, and those genres I have yet to take on, I know I can. My writing center and Humanities teacher, Ms. Welker, is the reason I can now admit that I am talented. She encouraged me to enter an essay contest- I won. She encouraged me to keep a journal and read through it. Her few comments read, “Wow” “Captivating” and “This right here shows me you are a writer in every way.” I don’t know yet how far I’ll carry my writing at this point. I plan on practicing law, but I have thought many times about writing a book detailing the last few years of my life. I have suffered a terrible mental disorder, borderline personality disorder, and I feel so far away from everyone else at times that I pick up a pen and write down the feelings inside. Other people can’t feel what I feel, but I feel like they might begin to understand if I can find a way to write it down. I currently keep a journal that details every borderline episode that plagues my day and if nothing else, that is the one piece of my writing I hope people will pick up and read.