Letters from Her(#Scholarship2015)

Letter 1

To Whoever Finds This Letter,

If you are the lucky founder of this letter, then I congratulate you on your findings. I'm not sure if you would count this as a treasure, but I do hope that you treasure it as if it was. Because to me, everyone of my letters that I write is priceless.

Have you ever loathed something so much and then was forced to do it and after it was done fell in love with it? It was the bane of your existence and now it's the air you breathe?

I hope this story touches you in some way. You might appreciate it, then again you might not. But what's the risk without even trying, right? Anyways, here I go. Just promise to read it all before you throw this letter away.

It all started in fourth grade, I was told to do a project on a book Where the Red Fern Grows. I was supposed to recreate a scene or write an ending  that takes place after the book ends. A couple friends of mine decided to recreate their favorite scene from the book and I wanted to do the same. In my head, I had a glorious shoebox with a scene exactly how I pictured it in the book. There was a little toy figure of a boy sitting in a cave with two little dogs and a fire. The background would be made to look as authentic as can be and I would be sitting with a 100 in my hand from a job well done on my project. But a little voice in my head told me that whatever I create wouldn't look as nice as what they would have done. In retaliation, I told that voice to just shove it and let me be (in reality, I just really ignored it).

The teacher stressed that the project was going to be a big part of our grade for the nine weeks. Being a nine year old, I didn't want to do the project. I wanted to play outside, watch cartoons and do other things besides doing homework. So I did what any other kid would have done had they been in my shoes. I procrastinated. I procrastinated until two days before the project was due (in my defense I had other homework that was due the next day instead of a project that was due in two weeks).

When it was time to actually do the project, I was faced with a dilemma. My parents refused to take me to the store to buy the materials needed to recreate the scene from the book. Their words to me were, "You should've done your project as soon as you were assigned it." To me it felt like my dream of getting that 100 was slipping away faster than I could catch it. Being stuck with my other option, I was forced to write and epilogue to the book.

Let me just say this, I hate writing. I hated it with a fiery passion. I was never good at it and every time we had a writing test I would always score in the lower percentile. When we had to do those writing test, I would wish on all the stars in the sky in hopes that my parents wouldn't make me go to school. All in all, writing and I had a nonverbal agreement to avoid each other at all cost.

So after two days of tortuous hours on the computer and alternating my stares from the computer screen to the keyboard, I was able to put together two pages of an epilogue for my project. With a grimace, I brought it before my teacher where she had me read it in front of my class.

I wanted to fall in a hole.

Taking a deep breath and bringing my shaky hands in front of me I attempted to read what I had typed on the paper. When I was done, I was met with silence. When I looked up, I saw kids staring off in space or playing with their own project, which was understandable. Who would want to listen to another student read her project? The only person who made a big deal of the whole ordeal, was my teacher and her remarks is what changed my whole line of thinking.

She was absolutely mystified by what I had wrote. The analogies that I had used within my paper reminded her of the analogies that the author used in the book we just read. While talking about my paper, she said it gave her goosebumps because it was well written for a nine year old. The praise I was getting on a paper I had wrote within two days had me in shock.

There I was... a nine year old girl, who completely loathed the idea of writing, was getting praise for something she had wrote. Suddenly, I fell in love with the idea of writing. The thought of putting 26 letters in different combinations to create words and then rearranging those words in a certain order to bring an idea to life. To wield a world in which a person could get lost for hours in on an adventure of a life time.

I don't think I could ever thank that teacher enough for turning around my perspective on writing. Now, writing has become half of who I am. It changed me in a way that I didn't really know it would, both academically and personally. It helped me maintain those good grades that I've been struggling to maintain. It also helped that because of writing, I fell in love with reading. Now my imagination has expanded to worlds I never even knew existed. 

To me writing is a stress reliever. When the days get rough and I feel like no one truly understands how I feel at the moment, I turn to writing. I turn my emotions into words and create a world that no one can know about until I show them. Besides it being a stress reliever it gave me confidence. It gave me the confidence to create something and be proud of it. To know that it's worth isn't based on what it looks like but the effort put into it and the effects it has on others. Also because of writing, I was able to make friends that I wouldn't had made otherwise.

Well, now you know part of my story, a story that not many would find all that interesting or pleasing but a story that means the world to me. I trust that you will cherish it and I hope you caught the moral within the story. After all every story has something to say. Can you find it? 

From, Her