Ever since I was little, I was fascinated with literature. To me, there was no fantasy greater than one you could create yourself. One could say that creative writing runs in the family, being that my Dad is a writer.
When I was much younger, he had several rough drafts kept in assorted binders and spiral bound college notebooks. In fact, I can remember in near perfect detail a small handful of events when I was very little. One was my Dad working in my parents bedroom with stacks of binders and notebooks, writing and rewriting his ideas and stories. I also remember Dad trying to learn Microsoft 95 and having to use AOL while doing so. But above all of those, I remember who taught me to read and write: my Mom. We would sit, for what felt like hours, with a bright colored box called "Hooked on Phonics".
Because I was mostly home-schooled my entire life, me and my mom would sit there daily and I would learn how to read and write. I thought it was difficult, and at first I wasn't very good. Fortunately, my Mom can be a bit of a "type A" personality and refused to let me give up. It felt like we were burning through a box every couple days and I was doing great. But then we had our first run in with tragedy. I don't feel comfortable talking about it, but the loss my family suffered resulted in my Mom shutting down and turning off for nearly a year. I had my Dad and my grandparents, but I had lost my Mom. In fact, even to this day, a near 15 years later, we still haven't rekindled our relationship.
It all happened so fast, months of happiness and excitement and then one or two things go wrong. In all honesty, I don't remember much of what happened. I remember that we moved in with my maternal grandparents, and later my paternal grandfather moved in with us. That was a bad time for me, I was learning to ride a bike, but to this day I don't know how. I was on a soccer team and now, all of a sudden, I wasn't. The world had stopped for all of us. My Mom was in and out of counseling while my Dad had to keep working. I had built in babysitters, but they didn't know how to to teach me things. In all of my time with my Grandma, I watched Touched by an Angel and Little House on the Prairie and became in touch with my feminine side. A little more than a year after what happened, my little sister was born. Christa, my little sister, was born with a blood disorder that caused her physical pain from when she was 6 weeks old until May 2013.
I was still going in and out of public schools and home school for a long time. A little after my sister was born, we all moved to our house current house. During the move, I found a colorful box called Hooked on Phonics and picked up where I left off 2 years prior. I worked independently and began reading books. By the time I was in 4th grade, I was reading at an 8th grade level. By 5th grade, I was reading at an 11th grade level. I even participated in the Duke TIP program and had a higher score in my reading and writing than any other student in the district. I would have joined the program, but all our time and money was going to hospital bills for Christa. School wasn't easy because I didn't know how to socialize, so I found refuge in TV and Video Games. I had been playing video games since before Hooked on Phonics, but I played them more now that I was in school. One day, I realized that the fantasy's being presented were not fulfilling enough to me, and so I decided to begin writing my own. To run away from the pain and sadness, I created my own worlds and stories.
This is how and why I learned to read and write.