Nov 11, 2011

Learning to Read and Write

I believe that the unmoderated and instinctive behavior of children is the clearest window into someone's personality. Innocent and unashamed to be true to themselves, we can learn so much about ourselves just by analyzing our childhoods. For example, when my preschool class finished up our year, the teachers had us make these big paper folders to hold all the work we did and take home. They were already made for us, but we were able to decorate them with markers to our liking. I remember decorating mine with a random sort of print -- various letters (some of which were backwards) and numbers (only a few, since I didn't know how to write them all) in different colors. My friend was drawing fireworks, I think, and there were quite a few who'd just taken to scribbling different colors to cover the folder. "Um... I think you're doing it wrong," she said to me. I don't remember what I said in reply, since I still liked how it looked. I settled on adding some squiggles mixed in with the characters and was quite pleased with the result.

It only occurred to me this summer, actually, that this instance was among many examples of my fixation with letters. I flipped through some of the very first books I owned and saw that throughout nearly all of them I had gone through and filled in the holes in the o's and lowercase e's or a's, underlined the u's and marked over the dots on i's. I remember, very vaguely, doing this task with a book about a train filling with circus animals. I couldn't have been more than five since my brother wasn't born yet, so while I couldn't read, I could at least recognize the different characters. I had no idea I'd been picking out vowels -- they were just the ones that appeared most frequently, which meant more drawing for me.

I remember walking into my kindergarten class and having the teacher go through a stack of flashcards with me, asking me to read each one. I don't remember any of them except for "Tray," and only because I knew a boy named "Trey" and it didn't look quite right to me. I'm not sure what I actually said when it came up, either. But I remember my mom telling me that the teacher had been very impressed. I was incredibly proud of myself. I felt special. I committed myself to reading every chance I got.

The point of these memories, I think, is to expose the nature of my interest in English -- I am drawn to reading and writing aesthetically and obsessively, find great pride in mastery of it. The fact that later on it became my hobby, or that I was able to express the nightmares I had while learning to write stories in elementary school, or that it became the one way I was able to truly communicate with my parents in a voice that was not only confident but heard in its entirety, or that it became a coping mechanism for the uncontrollable spiral that they told me was anorexia nervosa and clinical depression -- secondary. They all originated from a love of words. How funny.

I am a reader. I am an author. I am a poet. I am a writer. I am me. I am a silly little girl decorating her paper bag with letters in awkward handwriting while everyone else used shapes or fill. A silly little girl, "doing it wrong."

I am me.

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