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Dimpal Patel Mrs. Eaker ENGL 1101-017 20 October 2013 Writing, why it is a struggle for me: A Personal Literacy Narrative Growing up I have always had trouble walking. I knew I was different from all the other kids. When I was five, I was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. The doctors have yet to figure out what type of muscular dystrophy I have. The doctors have done so much testing on me yet all the results come back negative. I have had four nerve tests, and I cant even count how much blood work they have done to try to find a diagnoses. At first, we were optimistic when we got the results my parents would say Maybe this is it; we will finally know. Eventually, after test after test it led to comments like Well here goes nothing as we opened the envelope which held the results. As I got older, I completely gave up hope on finding a diagnoses. I was still optimistic that I wouldnt get worse but at least stay stable. When I was younger I could walk. As I got older my body got weaker and weaker. In kindergarten, when I was five, I could walk by myself. In first and second grade, when I was six and seven, I had to use a walker to walk. In third grade, when I was eight, I started using a manual wheelchair. When I started middle school, in 2006, I had to start using a power wheelchair. About four years ago, in 2009, I was hospitalized with respiratory failure. I was rushed to Levine childrens hospital. I was in the intensive care unit for two weeks. I was in the rehabilitation floor for four weeks. I had to have surgery to insert a tracheotomy tube, which would open up my air way. After this life changing event my body became significantly weaker. I now require assistance with everything.

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Due to my disability I always had weakness in my hands. Whenever I had to write anything after about five minutes my hand would get tired. The other kids it seemed like could write for hours without getting tired but me on the other hand required breaks after about five minutes. Whenever we had assignments that required us to write for fifteen minutes to write down our thoughts after five minutes I would have to raise my hand and say I needed a break. As I raised my hands I could feel all the other students staring at me I could hear them whisper, Whats wrong with her? Why cant she write? Shes probably just faking so she wont have to write. I just wanted to crawl into a hole and hide when this happened. I hated writing in class because it was one of those things that made me different from all the other kids. When I was younger, like in elementary school, I saw other kids running around playing this game where they would draw a grid with chalk and then toss a rock and hop to that point where the rock had landed, they called it hopscotch. There would be a group of boys playing a game where they would run from balls trying to not get hit, they called it dodge ball. I would wonder to myself why did god make me different? As I grew older I learned to have a positive outlook on life. I always try to remember there is always someone worse off than me. Growing up in the environment I grew up in taught me to always be thankful for what I did have. When my mom and dad came to America they had nothing. My parents were born and raised in Gujarat, India. My mom came to America first in 1981. After she got married, to my dad in India, he moved here in 1990. When they first got here they worked in cotton mills and lived in the government paid for mill houses. I still hear stories about how you would turn the lights on you would hear the cockroaches scrambling back into the cracks of the walls. All of my

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aunts, uncles, and cousins pretty much lived together in the tightly knit mill houses. It was not until the mill houses closed down and we were forced to move and go our separate ways. Whenever I was born, in 1994, my parents had just moved into our first apartment. Neither my mom nor my dad spoke much English then because they had had no need to since they were only working at the mill houses prior. Growing up we hardly ever spoke any English in the house. After I was born my dad had to learn to speak English better because of my disability which led to many doctor visits. In the house my dad would say in Gujarati (our native language) It feels good not to have to speak English here. At home I was always surrounded by people speaking Gujarati (my parents and my grandparents). Considering the fact that my grandma practically raised me, because my parents were always working, I really didnt know any English when I started school. Over time my parents began to speak English more frequently. My mom still has trouble with her nouns. She still says me instead of I, for example she will say Me no like it instead of I dont like it. My dad speaks English more accurately now. When it comes to writing its a different story. My dad can write if he has to but still struggles when it comes to writing letters. My dad was always the person who would be filling out the paperwork at the doctors office. I could feel his mind racing as he would pull out his glasses from my moms purse. I could feel his tension as he looked at the stack of twenty papers he had to fill out. It would take him practically the whole appointment to finish filling out all the papers. Now when it comes to filling out forms at my doctors appointments he will say Your old enough fill out this form and he will hand it to me.

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I guess you have done it long enough and it is my turn now. Id say reaching for the huge stack of papers. Now that I am older I always help my parents when they have to write anything. My mom struggles more with writing in English, the only thing she can write is her name. I think my mom has more trouble because she has never had to do any writing because my cousins who were born here always helped her with everything. My mom and I would get in many arguments over her learning to do things for herself. My mom always says I never had to learn and now I am too old to learn. I would say You are never too old to learn! Yes I am I have no need to learn it now I have you to help me. I would just get madder and have to leave the room. In my head I was thinking well if you would have learned something when you got here then I would not have to struggle in writing. I was never taught how to write until I started school. I always felt behind because of my lack of help at home. Anytime I got any assignments in elementary school I would ask Mom can you help me with this paper? Her response would always be the same I dont even know what you are supposed to be doing. I could never ask my dad because he was always working. My dad would not get home until after midnight. On weekends when I asked him for help I would get the same response from him as I did with my mom. It was really hard when I was younger because all the other kids got help from their parents and I felt left out. I had no one to look over my essays when I got to middle school. I would feel like a lost dog when it came to doing any writing assignments at home on my own. I always felt confused when I had to do any type of writing. My parents never enforced reading and writing. In India math and science are the most important. Math and science are always put on higher standards then language arts and social

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studies are. Almost everybody who wants to be anybody in the future majors in a math or science department like engineering or pharmacy. Growing up I loved reading books. One of my favorite books were the Harry Potter series because it involved an out of the norm situation. I loved reading about the magical wizard world of Hogwarts. My other favorite series was the Magic Treehouse series. In these books this brother and sister had a magic treehouse which would take them to different parts of the world. Each book was about a new place they visited. I would read any chance I got. I loved these two series because they involved a whole new world with magic. My parents would often say Reading is such a waste of time. I however have always enjoyed reading because it was something I was good at. Reading is something I can do the same way other kids can. While reading I could escape the world I was in and think about something else. When it came to papers for school it would always take me longer to write them. When I would be working intensely on my creative writing assignment for school it would take me hours. Stop wasting your time doing that paper you need to start studying for your math test. My dad would say. So I would end up slopping some words together and start studying for my math test. I always hated writing because I grew up thinking it was a waste of time. When it came to my writing assignments I would always wait until the last minute. I had no one to enforce me to get my work done earlier. I never had support to encourage me to continue working on a paper to make it better. I have always had self-esteem issues. I think it is because I am in a wheelchair and my voice sounds different. In fourth grade, when I was ten, we had to write an essay which was required by North Carolina. This was the first year any of us ever had to write an essay so my school held a writing camp for one week. We would do all sorts of activities to help us learn

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how to be a more creative writer. One of these activities included singing a writing song. I will never forget this day, we were all singing the writing song and I got a note on my desk. I was excited I had never gotten a note from another student before. I hurriedly opened it and read it. Immediately I starting crying. On the paper another student, Devon had written You suck at singing please stop. Ms. Neely took me outside in the hall and asked Whats wrong sweat heart? Devon gave me this note, I said still crying. She went back in the classroom and brought Devon out in the hall. Ms. Neely told him what he did was wrong and that he needs to apologize to me. Devon turned and looked at me and said Im sorry. I said, Why are you so mean to me? I think youre a bad singer, sorry. After that incident I never sang the writing song again. I started feeling self- conscious about everything so I stopped participating in the writing camp activities. I feel like this hindered my learning skills. Since I did not participate I feel like I missed the fundamentals of writing a good paper. Even when working on this paper I struggled with putting my ideas in perspective. I always have all these ideas on what I want to say but have trouble organizing them. On this assignment when the professor said to come up with a statement that we could relate to our writing experiences I started thinking of like ten experiences I could have used. I didnt know how to organize my ideas to come up with four distinct experiences. After working for hours I finally figured out how I could combine some of my experiences to create only four experiences. Now the next task was to relate them all to my statement. I found several ways to do this in my

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head but when I tried to write them down none of it made sense. I would keep having to erase after every sentence. After several hours and help from other students and the teacher I finally figured out how to write it down so it would make sense. I have never had any help with my homework. Especially when it came to writing or vocabulary I never had any help at home. My parents never enforced me to write better. They shaped my mind into thinking writing was a waste of time. I was humiliated in the fourth grade so I always associated writing with bad experiences. All these childhood experiences have played a role in my feelings of hatred towards writing and literacy in general. Whenever I look at a paper nowmy mind races with ideas, yet I stare at a blank page. Since I didnt have a good writing background I dont know how to formulate my ideas.