Draft of Literary Narrative

A Form of Expressing

Throughout my life, I never really liked an English class. I was mostly just that guy that sits in the back row looking at his phone just to check the time. Though I never liked the classes I took, there was always one part of each class that got me very excited, the free writing time. We'd take our pencils, the teacher walking back and forth in front the class would wait until everyone was ready to write, and once the time comes, she would tell us to write. No time limit, just until she said stop, non-stop writing. I would write whatever that was on my mind and in my heart, because it was the only way I could express myself fully. I've always had that problem, ever since I was a kid. I was never the brightest kid, and probably never will be. English was a hard language being brought up in an immigrant family, where you would hear your native language from your parents but English from your friends. But through time I learned how the language of it, not the proper language, but the more slang type words. I was a shy kid, and still am, and I never really liked to talk to anyone outside of my house. I was picked on, bullied because I would always be the usual suspect, and whenever my parents would want to talk about it, I would stay silent. My mom told me the words that I would always say where "this", "I want that", "please", and so on. She got scared that I would be one of those slow kids so she put me in speech therapy where the teacher would take me out of my class to teach me how to speak, how to express myself to others. There were two other kids there, a boy my age and another kid who was a little older. We all tried to talk to each other as best as we can, but we were all slow at times. The teacher tried her best to get a word out of us, she was very patient. I began to talk like a regular kid, using more words to form sentences. But there was another problem. I didn't know how to write properly. My spelling and writing were fine, but it was the way I wrote the words. My parents would always come to parent-teacher conference, making me more scared than usual, and my teachers would always tell us that Josh wasn't doing good with writing specifically. My parents would always get mad at me, talking to me down as if I was the dumbest kid they ever knew.

As middle-school came in I began to finally improve on the challenges I had before. I began to get better at math, better at science, even better at history. But, there was that one class that I couldn't get better at, even if I tried. It was English class. I tried to get better, I even went to tutoring and everything, but it wasn't enough. My father would come to my conferences, and it would terrify me. Each time, after the meetings with the teacher, he would take me to the living room, sit me down on a chair right in front of him, and he would stare straight into my eyes, telling me what I have done wrong. He would always tell me that since I was growing up, I'd have to become more mature and face all the responsibilities I had. I couldn't really talk back because I was too afraid of him, afraid of what he would do. My speech was getting a little better, started to make friends out of my classes and hang out with them whenever I had the time. They would always talk about whatever happened to them, their personal trials and tribulations, but I couldn't talk about that type of stuff. I always thought that would embarrass my whole family, and they would look down upon me. I could never show my feelings, that would embarrass my family and me.

Then came high school, where I could become a new person like everyone else. My freshman year helped change my way of thinking and expressing myself. My teacher gave us a requirement to read the book Drown by Junot Diaz. I was very interested in that book mainly because of the form Diaz was writing the book. He wrote it in a way that it didn't need it to be proper, there was no real error for him. Later on, our teacher told us to write stories about personal issues, and it was at that point that I realized what I could do. I didn’t need to write it in a proper form, I didn't have to worry about any grammatical errors. All I needed to have when writing was just my inner thoughts and emotions, and put it on paper. My teacher came to me and told me that it was a great story and had a deeper understanding of who I was. I never felt more happier with my work in all my life. I felt as if I had a talent, and kept writing stories about myself. It helped me cope with all the troubles I went through growing up, helping me find what was wrong with myself. I then took a poetry class which helped me focus more on how to use my words in a meaningful way. My teacher even told me that my poem of mortality was one of the best of the class.

Is English now my most favorite class of them all? Not really. It's still one of my worst when writing essays and papers. Do I consider myself a writer or an author? Nope. I don't think I'll get better at this point, like I reached my writing peak, or something like that. For now, most of my forms of expressing is mainly drawings and through other means.