Literacy Narrative

Shamefully holding up a fake smile just to point out that “I’m not hurt,” to show everyone else that having a lisp wasn’t really a problem and that their jokes and laughs didn’t affect me, but it did. Growing up I felt different wanting to interact with people and always answering the teachers questions, but still somehow always quiet.I felt like I wanted to be alone but part of me wanted to open out more, creating strong friendships and short and unwelcome friendships that impacted my life drastically. It was one day in class which I was participating like there was no tomorrow not caring whether I got questions right or wrong. Throughout the day my teacher wanted everyone in the class to take turns reading, and since everyone had assigned seats based off their last name I happened to be the last person reading. There was only 2 pages remaining so I didn’t feel pressured at all until the moment I had to pronounce words such as “Ship,Time,Thought and Choose.” Hearing laughter after one mistake push shivers down my back and caused my hands to shake, having eyes glued to my face forced me to lose my train of thought, causing more and more mistakes.
This experience had a negative impact on me at first, it never crossed my mind that my lisp was that strong because in my household I was never addressed for my strong lisp, talking to my friends never was a problem which goes back to what I said on having strong friendships. But the moment that everything went “downhill”, it changed me. I told my mother when I got home and the day after I went to a speech impediment class and worked on my lisp for around a month and a half. I didn’t want to be in the class because I felt I was only there because I was made fun of in class. I had to leave class during certain hours to go and work on my lisp with the speech impediment teacher, I began to feel like I was a burden on both my teacher and myself. It came to the point that I felt that my lisp was attached to me, it even crossed my mind that “Lisp” would be on my gravestone. Week after week there was no improvement whatsoever, I still couldn’t sound the difference between “Ship” and “Chip”. After a month my strong lisp started to go down, it was still visible but not as strong as it was a few weeks ago. I began to be more anti-social in class because I didn’t want to be made fun of again because of my lisp. The moment I went home from school that same day I went straight to sleep without talking to anyone at all, the burden “on my shoulders” kept me mentally stuck not knowing what to do, having both anger and sadness built up inside of me like a water balloon waiting to be thrown to “pop” and release everything built up inside of it. I was rushing to have my lisp go away, it gave me nothing but negative energy to me, my family and my classmates. And after one more week in the speech impediment class I didn’t have to go to work on my lisp anymore. Looking back at how the personal experience shaped my relationship with reading and writing it had both a negative impact and a positive one. The reason why I said it was negative one was because being made fun of made me more anti-social for 2 to 3 years ruining some relationships I had with teachers and friends, but the reason why I would say it had a positive impact on me is because since I was alone, I had no distractions and had more time for myself in class. I wasn’t doing so well in the class but the moment that incident with my lisp happened I had the urge to do better in all of my classes all of a sudden, I had the urge to become a better reader so I wouldn’t make anymore mistakes and improved on my reading by reading books at a different grade level than what I was at. In general aspect of having a lisp was a strain on me mentally but after looking back from the position I am at now, it made me into who I am.