As a kid never saw myself writing or reading for fun. Instead, I remember sitting in the back of my grandma’s car while she called out words for me to spell back to her. The back of my throat would burn while tears welled in my eyes. I hated grammar and spelling, and it seemed like it hated me back. The words never became easier for me. Every time I saw her, she would torture me with words like “precise” and “announce”. Over and over, time and time again, I would fail. When she babysat me, I would stare outside while she reviewed my homework. Longing to leave the kitchen counter to go run and play with my neighbors until dusk.

 The words never magically clicked like all of the other kids in my class. Red marks still slashed across my page during spelling tests while my friends were moving forward. I was drawn to picture books and graphic novels while they were reading Nancy Drew and Goosebumps. It didn’t click in middle school or even high school. Not until I came to Wooster. Reading for my environmental classes didn’t seem like work. It was beautiful and engaging, and for the first time I read every single page. I wrote my thoughts down in the margins and absorbed every word. Writing papers became easy, even entertaining at times. Finally, I felt like was on pace with my classmates. Participating in discussion, asking questions. My exams and writing didn’t have red marker scribbled across the front. Writing and reading became part of my life, a part I had never connected with before. The deep sense of dread I use to feel in those car rides is replaced with a newfound perspective.

(Creative Approach)

  I could stare at numbers all day.

Their tiny structure ornately fills out the corner of every other page, except the title page, where it rests at the bottom. Unquestionably, my adolescent mind becomes synonymous with numbers. When my mother turned each page, I inherently understood I was the kind of person who didn’t want to take up space or cover the whole page in gaudy brush strokes. However, as with the nature of time, my eyes lingered on the stories whose words spoke louder than the images themselves. The writing was no longer scribbles on a page and rushed pen strokes: it was the unleashing of inner provocations, the words of the people, the passion for processing, the method of preserving a culture, and the study your parents believe is a dying profession. Where meaning finds itself in the spacing between the lines and through the curved paths of every brain.  

 For a long time, It felt as if everyone looked at my loose threads, mangled and uneven, stepping on the longest strands, watching bits of my being unravel.

My insides are on display for all to see, while others were protected by plastic encasings, free from Criticism, seemingly liberated. While I had become a quivering flame the world steadily blew on, I eventually found solace through my writing. It was peace of mind for all the thoughts to immerse themselves into a page. The stress became poems, and my social anxiety became free verses unshackling my irrational worries. I latch onto words because they are as tangible as emotion can be. Literature has no confinements in content, and the requirements to fit into the structure are limited. I pursue Literature because it is the structure of ever-evolving people like me representing the fractals of the American mosaic. 

My friendship with Reading did not have a notable start. It snuck up on me, worming its way into my life and becoming a part of me before I knew what was happening. By the time I was halfway through middle school, I was addicted, spending nights and summers tearing through book after book. My parents joked I had read half the books in our little hometown library while I checked out stack after stack. As I got older and life and school got more difficult, I felt myself drifting away from my little friend. I was off exploring other ideas, swapping letters and stories for numbers and facts. I began spending time with new ideas, leaving my little friend behind, our time together slipping away to make room for others. However, Reading never grew jealous nor tired, welcoming me back time and time again. I often found solace in their embrace, especially in hard times, spending evenings exploring new worlds within the pages of countless novels. It was as I grew that I learned the different sides of my childhood friend, Reading, discovering the complexities that make them up and their versatility. These ideas intrigued me, and I wished to learn more. My future will take me in many different directions, but I know that my relationship with Reading will help me in any situation, providing a solid foundation for all my future endeavors.

Literature is about us, humans, and the complexities of our life. However within this context, my definition of the classification has changed over time. At first, my brain goes to old libraries, classic novels, and well-known names like Shakespeare and Austen. I feel like what I was taught when I was younger—or what I myself assumed—was that literature was complex, full of meaning, and scholarly. Hamlet is literature. Sherlock Holmes is literature, but the Magic Tree House was not. However, as I got through more literature classes, I realized there don’t seem to be such clear classifications. A literary work doesn’t need to be old, well studied, or widely accepted as scholarly to be literature. Even the most basic stories—like the fairy tales we are reading in class —can contain so much more than the plot, revealing countless insights about us. Defining literature is not as important to me now, but instead, trying to get the most out of everything I read, whether it’s considered “literature” or not by others.