How Learning Has Impacted My Life

Frederick Douglass said, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” If you know how to read and write, the sky is the limit from there. It can help expand your mind, your critical thinking, and make you see the world from a different perspective. A lot of people take literacy for granted, and they have no idea how many other worlds you can create in your mind by just reading a book or writing in a journal. I have a few literacy experiences that helped shape who I am today.

I think most people in our generation were read “The Giving Tree” by our parents when we were young. This book was a huge part of my childhood because it was one of the only times I bonded with my dad. My parents divorced when I was a baby and my mom got primary custody, so I would only see my dad every other weekend. He and I would watch the little Mermaid every morning during breakfast, and at night he would read The Giving Tree to me. It was a paperback with a plastic cover. On the front of the cover, there was a drawing of a tree giving one of its apples to a little boy. The story of the little boy and the giving tree is pretty heartbreaking.

The boy, even as an old man, comes back to the tree every single day to take from it. After it has no more apples, he takes the leaves, the branches, and eventually the entire stump. The end is just the old man sitting on the stump with nothing left to take from it. Even as a child, I understood the moral of the story. There is a whole controversy on whether the book is about selfless love or an abusive relationship. In a way, it is both. The tree is showing selfless love by letting him take everything it has to make the boy happy and fulfilled in life. The book also shows the effects of an abusive relationship by perceiving the little boy as the abuser. He keeps taking and taking things from the tree until it’s just a stump that has nothing left. The boy takes it all for granted, and doesn’t realize what he had until it was gone. This book would eventually change how I view relationships. While selfless love is a wonderful thing, you can’t have a healthy relationship with someone if you both aren’t putting in that extra effort. I am so thankful to have had that book read to me as a child. It created a lot of fond memories with my dad, and taught me a lot about life.

I never really read for fun until I got to high school. I read quite a few books in high school because I had a lot of free time, but one in particular stands out to me. My best friend, Mikara, recommended I read Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. She had a copy of her own that she let me borrow. It was a hardback and the cover was grey and black like something out of a horror movie; I couldn’t wait to read it. The book is about a boy who, after a horrific family tragedy, follows clues that would take him to an abandoned orphanage on a Welsh island. This book really opened my mind to a lot of creativity and imagination, because it caused me to think about imagery more deeply than I normally would. There are a lot of diverse characters in the book, like a girl who can float, a boy with two heads, and a girl who can spout fire from her hands. Every time I opened up the book to read, it was like I dove into another world I created and left any spec of reality behind. I just remember the book really inspiring me and making an impact on my mind. I used to believe reading was boring and thought of it as chore, but when I was reading this book, I couldn’t put it down. It was like every time I had a spare minute I would be reading, and that never happened to me. It usually took me about a month just to read a book, but I finished it within a week. This experience would later make me appreciate literature more, and I’m grateful for that.

I was never big on writing, and to this day I’m still not, but I do have one fond memory of writing in middle school. My English class started a pen pal type of thing with another one of the middle schools in our county (Roanoke). Everyone was assigned a person to send letters to, getting to know each other and just talking about school and our hobbies. My pen pal was named Jillian Morganelli. She was super nice and sweet, and always complimented my handwriting whenever we exchanged letters. We would talk about our days, our families, if we had pets, and what we liked to do outside of school. Eventually, after about 8 letters back and forth, my English class went on a field trip to their school and we all had breakfast together. It was weird not having a face to put to the name, but when I finally found her it was an instant friendship. We clicked really well in person, and it was overall a fun experience for me. Even though this didn’t teach me how to write an essay or how to write in MLA format, it taught me how to communicate better with people and that’s something I needed at the time. I was always a very shy person and I didn’t make friends very well, and this taught me vital social skills that would later on in my life be really helpful.

I feel as if these three reading and writing experiences helped shaped who I am today. I’ve grown as a person, I’ve expanded my imagination and critical thinking, and it’s taught me essential life lessons. As I go through life and as I carry on through college, I will keep these literacy experiences in the back of my mind, reminding me to push my limits and think outside of the box. “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”