From grade school until my junior year of high school, my relationship with English was founded on the basis of hatred. It was rocky and horrific. It was hard for me to comprehend what the carefully-placed ink blots on the pages of short stories, of poetry collections, of textbooks, of novels were supposed to mean to me. Even worse, I detested writing. My sister had always been the writer, and I could never write a good paper on The Scarlet Ibis.
In my junior year, I decided to take an honors course for English 3 and my relationship with English became a loving relationship the minute I read, “You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.” In the summer bleeding into my junior year at Kent Island High School, I read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and fell deeply in love with the readings of her, as well as Hawthorne, Vonnegut, Dickens and Dickenson. My teacher allowed for much discussion on these works, and because of that, it was easier to understand why books written so long ago maintained everlasting relevance to me even today.
From then on, I bought books. I have stacks of them collecting real estate on my bookshelf back home from Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
During my freshman year at Florida State University, I further fell in love with writing. I had learned to be quite good at it… I think. Even now, I enjoy writing poetry to clear the clouded, the hurting, the jubilant mind. Even here, writing about my passion for writing has shed light on the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword.”
Courtesy: EdChoice
It was in my second semester here that I decided to swap majors. Psychology for English Education. I decided I wanted to be an English teacher, to provide public service for lost kids like me looking for something they’re passionate about at an age when everything is confusing. I wanted to help kids firsthand discover how to become themselves, and to enlighten them on the works of the past even if it meant making a notoriously low income—a notion likely to change in the coming years… hopefully.
You should know, reader, that since my parents’ separation in 2012, my family has lived a rather financially unstable life. Paycheck-to-paycheck I think they call it. And I am the youngest of four children, none of whom decided to attend a four-year college. All my life, a stigma was built around my person that I would do great things, that I was “the smart one” by my parents and eventually by my siblings, who I have always felt distant to, even hated for it. I am sorry to them for this now because while at the time I relished in the compliments my family afforded me for doing well in school, but now recognize how hurtful it must’ve been to constantly be compared to your younger sister. I am sorry I didn’t see it sooner.
Because of this, my mother always saw me as a future doctor or lawyer, and therefore when I told her I wanted to be a teacher to high school kids enrolled in another boring English class she discouraged my decision. Informing me of a teacher’s infamously low salary and the workload I would encounter to get paid. This didn’t hurt much as they were things I had thought about already.
What hurt was when I visited home over the summer, and at a family reunion, my grandma asked me what I wanted to do. I told her I wanted to teach English and went in-depth about why. This is when my mom peeled her eyes from her phone screen to say, “You know what you should do, Ky?” I waited, under the impression that she would inform me of opportunities in the English field that maybe I hadn’t already researched until she said, “You should be a biomedical engineer!” I had never once expressed an interest in the fields of biology, medicine or engineering in my life. I realized she said this because biomedical engineers make up to $154K a year. It hurt because my mother, who had always supported every decision I made, had not only disapproved of what I wanted to do for the rest of my life but showed my entire family that she did so. She went on to say that I was “too smart” to be a teacher.
Mom, I wish more than anything that I wanted to do anything else. I wish more than anything that I wanted to save lives or be working in a courtroom, but the sad truth is, I don’t want to devote my life to any of that, and I’m sorry that now you know I will not live up to everything you had hoped I would. I know that I will likely live paycheck-to-paycheck. That I will struggle to pay off my student loans on the salary I will receive. That I will get up early in the morning and go to sleep late. I know all of this, and still, I cannot see myself doing anything else.
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