WR115 INTRODUCTION TO WRITING



1 WR115

Essay One April 27, 2011

875 words

Through the Darkness

When I was twenty years old living in Los Angeles on my own, I found inspiration in James Frey's A

Million Little Pieces. Growing up I never had much exposure to reading. By the time I had graduated high

school, I had read two books. One of them was for school. I think it was To Kill a Mockingbird. The second

book I read was earlier in my life when I was in grade school. I never liked to read. It has always been a struggle to get captivated by a book. I can remember I would read the first few pages of a book, find I was bored and put it down. This is how my reading would continue until I picked up A Million Little Pieces.

Four years ago I moved down to southern California to escape the self destructive life I was living. With addiction running very deep in my bloodline, I had fallen. I felt very alone and lost. I needed something or somebody to tell me it was ok. One day, while on a lunch break at work I walked into a Walden's bookstore. I entered this store just to walk around and kill time. As I walked around, a book caught my eye. Books do not catch my eye. As I walked towards the shelf, I felt this urge to pick up this book. On the cover was a hand made of tiny little dots and the title read A Million Little Pieces.

I opened the first page and started to read it. I remind you this is not something I would normally do.

As I read the first page, the author describes himself in a situation he cannot recall getting into. He is on a plane with vomit and his own blood all over himself, including a big hole in his cheek and a splitting headache. As the page ends you find out the author is addicted to doing drugs, any drugs. He explains the self‐hatred that he has felt his whole life. Being a sufferer of addiction myself, I connect to what he was saying. The emptiness that one feels, the pain that is constant, and the life that is dying.

I can remember reading the book and feeling like Frey knew exactly how I felt. For once in my life I knew I was not alone. The type of alone that is not subsided by the company of another person, the alone that stems from the confusion as to why I do what I do. To me there is a big misconception that drug addicted people are enjoying their addiction, that they make these poor choices to do what they want regardless of

the bad that may follow just to do what they want. This is not the truth. In reality it hurts a tremendous degree when an addicted person again is beaten down by their addictions. The pain is all over your body and to make things worse it crushed your soul. This is a vicious cycle that yields no pleasure, no satisfaction, just pain. The cycle must be broken.

The book continued to follow the author through his addiction and eventually in to a rehabilitation

center. As the story goes on Frey has several encounters with his parents. You read the conversations between him and his parents and you feel the pain and regret he feels. His parents are ashamed. He is even more ashamed. I understood to the fullest extent what this meant. I can remember countless nights trying to explain or find reason to give my parents for the things I had done. For the loved ones of an addicted person the pain is one‐dimensional. They feel bad for you and are disappointed. For the addicted person the pain is multifaceted. Not only do you feel the hurt you have inadvertently placed on your loved ones; then you feel the confusion, regret, and self‐hate. A large part of my life I have been wondering why? Why do I do the things I do? "I love my family" This is the pain I live with.

I understood, I felt, I connected, I was no longer alone. I was still by myself, but I was no longer alone. I needed this book. As the story carried on, so did I. As long as the author kept pushing, I would as well. He was my inspiration, my motivation, he was me. This book, this life, would be my new drug.

I recall my everyday like this. I would work from six in the morning until four in the afternoon. For

these nine hours, my addictions and urges would build, each hour getting worse. By lunchtime my skin was crawling. I would get weaker and weaker as the day went on. Eventually it would become a mental battle. I would literally be having a two‐way conversation with myself trying to convince me to break down. "Come on why not?” NO!" When work would get over, I would go straight home and grab the book. It's a good thing I read slowly. This calmed my nerves, like a stiff drink. I stayed strong and so did he. We were making it. We were proud.

Steve Hlavinka WR115

Essay One

April 27, 2011 (768 words)

“Sink or Swim”

Formative years are a critical stage in the development of good reading and writing skills. Good reading and writing skills, in turn, lead to better communication, learning skills, and self esteem. It is through reading and writing that we discover, explore, and interpret the world around us.

I felt so alone, yet fully aware that all eyes focused on me…judging me. I tried to concentrate intently on every stone as I stumbled along, completely oblivious of the path, hopeful that the journey would end even before it started. As I painfully crawled over each rock, the agony I felt was compounded by the pain I knew I was inflicting on those around me. My earliest recollections of learning to read bring to mind faint memories of Dick, Jane, Sally, Spot, and Puff and, vivid memories of the terror I felt reading in front of the class.

The only other time I can recall feeling as helpless as I felt when I read before the class was on a beautiful summer day when I was about ten. Temperatures were expected to get into the nineties so my father decided to take us to the lake with some friends. Not knowing how to swim, my area of adventure was restricted to the shallows where I could still get some relief from the heat. The water was a pleasant temperature, just right in fact and the sand felt fantastic on my feet. Eventually, I decided to lounge in one of the inner tubes and float just off shore. A friend offered to tow me along the shoreline for a tour of the lake and I took him up on it. As we maneuvered around a fallen tree, something suddenly brushed my butt. I leapt off the inner tube like I was shot from a cannon. The bright sunny day immediately disappeared in complete and total darkness, as I entered the water, too afraid to look upon the monster. The water now seemed so very cold. Gone was the comforting feeling of the sand experienced earlier in the day. It was replaced by mud and silt that seemed to be grabbing and clawing at my feet. I recall thinking that the water couldn’t be too far over my head. I felt that if I just raised my hand and jumped up my friend could grab me and pull me to safety. The next thing I remember is struggling violently to get out of the arms of a neighbor as he waded ashore. I was told later that I

had come to the surface thrashing and began swimming farther from shore. The neighbor had rescued me and carried me to the shoreline.

Yes, that day felt a lot like reading in front of the class, the sense of fear, the struggle for the surface, the search for a life line, and the longing to be safely back on shore. I thought some of my teachers exceedingly cruel to force me to endure those daily immersions.

My early experience had given me a negative attitude towards reading in general. Fortunately, I found a few lifelines along the way. The first came in the form of comic books. All my friends collected and traded comics, so naturally I had to. As an added bonus, up until the time comics became imprisoned in plastic, most drug stores and supermarkets allowed kids to sit and read through the comics while their parents shopped. Comic books could hold my attention for the fraction of a second that it took to convey their meaning. More importantly, they kept me reading.

Another life line came in the form of second hobby. It started with a 20 gallon aquarium and developed into a fascination with raising freshwater tropical fish. I read every book on the subject I could lay my hands on and I seemed to comprehend the information they contained, even some of the more scientific information on such issues as genetics.

In school, I enjoyed science, history, and math and eventually, reading in front of the class became easier. Over the years, I’ve developed many interests but without reading and writing I would have never discovered most of them. Today I’ve come to understand how my early struggles with reading related to my low self esteem and fear of failure, how the life lines I found along the way helped me overcome and continue to learn, and that the teachers I thought so cruel for not pulling me to shore were only trying to teach me to swim.

Duncan Farver WR115

Essay One May 2nd 2012

793 Words

To Destroy Fear

My early experiences in writing were similar to a Quail egg with a two ton lead weight resting atop it, my confidence and the enjoyment I felt when writing encompassed within the thin shell of the egg, the very molecules of the lead weight composed of the fear and dread I felt when someone would read my writing or I would be asked to read it for a class. Until recently that weight was always present, always ready in a moment to smash the shell of the egg, destroy my confidence, and erase any trace of enjoyment I had felt during the writing experience.

I never hated writing, in fact I loved it, and the complicated yet simple process of putting words on paper was fun to me. I did find it a challenge, it never came easy, but it was a welcome challenge, and instead of feeling overwhelmed by a project I always felt relaxed when writing. This aspect has never changed for me, and even with writing deadlines looming I feel relaxed. Writing, to me, is an escape from reality a time when I no longer focus on the hardships of everyday life such as the balance of my checking account when compared to the cost of rent and credit card bills.

The thing that always held me captive was the fear I felt when I was about to turn in a piece that I had composed, I can’t attribute this fear to any particular moment or event in my life, nor can I place blame on any teacher in any writing class, or any particular project or assignment on which I received a poor grade. I can, however, tell you that the fear was always present, dread always looming in my subconscious mind, and each time I turned in my work for evaluation by my instructor the thin shell of that egg was smashed and I was crushed by that lead weight unable to lift its weight from my shoulders.

Recently, however, I began attending college classes. Until this point my life had been devoid of writing in any form, for more than ten years it just seemed like I never had time to sit down and write, no time to put my thoughts on paper. I had been too busy with work and time spent in the Army to just sit down and have a go with a piece of paper and a pencil. This was all

changing now as I found the time I needed after school, at lunch and during the two hour break between my morning and afternoon classes.

In my first college writing class we were given an assignment, a formal essay, and the topic selections were liberal. I settled on a topic which allowed me to put on paper an account of the pride and accomplishment I felt after graduating from the U.S. Army Sniper School. I wrote a detailed narrative describing every moment of the final test leaving out no detail, and as was normal for me I enjoyed every moment of the process of composition right down to punctuating the sentences to get the most out of each word. But this time something was different, as I handed in my finished draft for evaluation the fear no longer hung over me like a spring thunderstorm. The composition of that tiny quail egg had changed. The egg was still there, but after all I had experienced in the years since handing in my last school paper something was drastically different.

What was the difference? This question is as much a mystery as what sparked my initial fear of handing in my writings. I have spent countless hours trying to pinpoint a particular event or some series of events in the past years that could be the reason for my new found confidence, but the explanation I have sought has proven elusive. My new writing style is free, a style of writing missing only one thing; it lacks only the grim thoughts that once lurked deep in my subconscious.

To me at the moment I turned in that first college essay and every moment since I have hunted those seconds and minutes, those little chances to hold captive for a moment the mind of those people whose judgments I once feared. With its new composition of pride and confidence, I have forged in my mind a new tool. I have transformed a lead weight into steel, and created the mighty hammer that I now wield with precision, smashing without mercy the egg now encompassing fear and dread and erasing from existence any trace of those thoughts that once held me captive.

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