How Literacy Was My Outlet

Characters Kept Me Company: How Literacy Was My Outlet
Reading and writing are significant in my life because they have given me a way to express myself and hide from my everyday life, even though I don’t read or write as often as I once did. Literacy provided me a way to understand and communicate with others. Societally, literacy is important to comprehension and education. We as humans are taught from the moment we are born to speak, read, and write. It is our most basic form of communication. We all start out with learning a few basic words, then develop more skill through practice and repetition.
“Yellow,” I shouted from across the kitchen table. I analyzed the bright card my father held in his tired hands. “That one is water, Daddy!” I practiced these ‘sight words’ with my father almost daily in preschool and kindergarten. This is my first memory of learning English and learning to read. The basic requirements graduating kindergarten were tying shoes, standing in line, zipping a jacket, writing and recognizing your name, and recognizing sight words. My father came home from working twelve hours everyday to an excited six year old waiting to practice this list of simple nouns and adjectives.
He continued to work long shifts to support his two daughters, while I went through all the stages of childhood and adolescence at once and by myself. I went from tracing cursive letters on lined primary paper and reading Charlotte's Web and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, to writing poetry and reading Twilight and The Hunger Games. My father divorced my mother at a young age, I had visitation with her for many years after that. During this time, I was struggling to cope with the constant abuse coming from my