Literacy Narrative

There are not that many moments in my life that I remember in my life at all that have to do with me and a memorable moment that I had that had to do with reading or writing, yet the few that I can remember have really stuck with me. One thing that I remember from when I was very young was how my I, or my parents, would always read “Alexander’s Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day”. another moment in my life that I remember was when I opened the letter that I wrote to myself in 8th grade that I would open and read at the end of my senior year of high school. The last moment that I remember was during my senior year language arts class during a free write prompt. Even though I may not have a lot of memories that involve reading or writing.

Even though I have many early memories of literacy moments the most significant one and the one that has really stuck with me the most of them all was a creative writing prompt we were given during my Junior year of high school. We were to write a short paper based off of an excerpt from “The Things I carry”. I remember that my teacher gave it to us almost as busy work to fill up extra class time and that we would not go back and expand upon it at all. When the teacher originally gave us the prompt and told us that we would not be pursuing the piece any further I can distinctly remember myself thinking that I would only do the bare minimum for the assignment, which I did do, in the beginning.

Once we finished it in class I just closed the tab and didn’t think I would ever open or look at it again. But I was wrong. One day during my lunch period I was extremely bored and I saw the paper left in my folder so I decided to open it a reread it. As I read it I was surprised with how little I tried on it and there was something in the back of my head which kept telling me that I could do so much better if I really tried, even if it didn’t count for anything. So I decided that I would continue to write and see what would happen. As I began to write again I was shocked at how easily the topics and arguments were coming to me. The original prompt was to explain what you would carry on you if you were a soldier in war. So I answered the original prompt but I just kept writing and the more that I wrote the better I was doing and the more in-depth I went. As I continued to write I kept expanding from just tangible objects that I would carry to even ideas, and thoughts, and even burdens that I would carry in my head that would have also carried on me. I talked about how I would carry the things that I have done wrong in my life, the people that I had let down before, people who I would miss, and the people that would miss me.

By the time that I had finished everything that I had wanted to say in the paper and reread it, I was shocked at how deep I had went and the topics I had talked about. I had never thought I would be able to write anything in that much detail. Because before then I had always struggled with writing so I was looking forward and honestly was excited for the next writing prompt that I would receive in that class. The next time that I did receive another prompt I thought I would be able to breeze straight through it. However, that was not the case for that prompt, or any other prompts after that in any class. So I guess it was just a fluke that I was able to write like that. But it is frustrating because I now know I am capable of that but I have never been able to achieve that level of writing again.