By: Ellie Greenberger
When I was little, I struggled with reading. It was something that I just didn’t seem to grasp as well as my other classmates. I noticed it, my teachers noticed it, my parents noticed it, and the school noticed it.
The school told my mom that they thought that I was ADD and needed to be medicated. My mom said no and took me to the doctor. The school was wrong. I had some processing issues, and that is why I struggled to read.
My mom sent me to summer school that year. I have heard that I was very upset at her for it. It was a summer school that specialized in students who were struggling with reading. I don’t remember much of it, but after I went, reading got easier.
As I started to get older, I realized I could impress my grandparents with the little short stories that I would write, the kind that would be embarrassing if my friends found them now. Then I found books that I loved. I found books that I wanted to be in because I loved them that much. I found Harry Potter and Percy Jackson and John Grisham books.
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I started writing for real then. I started writing terribly. I wrote horrible stories and some horrible long stories. I wrote about whatever came into my mind. I wrote them all down in a scattered series of notebooks. They have all been long unopened and stored under my bed.
Soon, I started writing as an outlet. I wanted my voice to mean something. I wanted my voice to be heard. It was a sort of therapy.
I started writing because I loved the way that I felt when I saw my words written on a page and the sound of them as I read them back in my head.
And right now, I have had so many people ask me what am I going to do with my life.
The answer is that I am a junior in college, and I still don’t know.
I know what I love to do, and I know what I don’t. I struggle sometimes because I love writing, yet it is not some natural talent that I was born with. I started out struggling just to read. It would be easier to absorb and regurgitate facts. It would be easier to pick something that had a clear path.
But I didn’t.
I picked something that is subjective and frustrating and hard, but something that brings along a kind of joy that I hadn’t ever experienced before.
I don’t know what I am going to do. I don’t have my life planned out. I stress about that fact because I am getting towards the end of my college career. What is it that I want to do with my life. The only certainty that I have is not that I will have a job, money or career but that I will find something that I love doing and, hopefully, that will be enough.