The Determining

I was always a very studious person, more studious than the average kid. From a young age, I knew I wanted to be successful and have straight A’s.
My struggles with reading comprehension and writing would soon bring those dreams crashing down. When I was little, I always did horrible with Language Arts, but I loved it. I hated math and science, but it was definitely my strength. I always scored off the charts in state testing for math and average for English.
From the day I realized I struggled with English, I pushed myself even harder until I was good at it. That was when I started sucking at math, and I classify that as the best moment of my life. I knew my parents would no longer pressure me into doing anything math or science related.
I really didn’t realize my weakness in English until fifth grade. In my fifth grade class, we had these newspapers we had to read and do assignments with. One assignment was a creative writing thing where we had to create a new continent and describe the people that live there.
I spent forever writing this story and I was so incredibly proud of the piece I’d written. I called it “Hanterstein,” and everyone lived outdoors and raised Bengal Tigers. It focused around two people, Kirsa and Bryan, best friends working to save the tigers from evil hunters. I thought it was clever, original, creative, and was very proud of the piece I’d written.
Unfortunately, my teacher, Shirley Lee, did not feel the same way. I was expecting all of these congratulatory comments to fill the page. That didn’t happen. Instead, there was a big fat “C” on the top of the assignment.
She didn’t even give me any reasons why, there were no comments on the page or anything. I was offended.
It was the most painful feeling I’d felt in ten years. First of all, it was a “C” and second of all, I’d tried so super hard at this assignment.
That was the moment I decided I wanted to be a writer. I am usually one of those people who when you tell me I did something wrong, I never do that thing again. I give up. But with writing, it was a different story. I enjoyed it.
I struggled with it, getting lower scores in it than anything else, but I eventually pushed myself up to AP level English. I joined the newspaper at my school and got an internship at a local newspaper, getting an above the fold story before age 17. It was then that I crossed journalist off of my list. For a while I didn’t know where that left me standing as a writer. I still don’t necessarily know where I stand as a writer, but I am curious to see where I will go with my writings.
To this day, I don’t think I deserved to get a C. Maybe if I hadn’t, however, I wouldn’t have realized I wanted to be a writer and I wouldn’t have pushed myself so hard. Who knows? Maybe I would have accepted math and science as my strengths and pushed myself harder in those subjects.
So, in a way, I really have to be thankful to Shirley Lee for giving me that C on the assignment. Without it, I’m almost scared to know where I would be.
I still have the intentions of making my “continent” into a story. It’s a little different now, there are no tigers, for one, but I am still just as proud of my creativity as I was back then.