This year I’m taking part in Tanya Shadrick’s The Cure for Sleep writing project. Each month she offers up a new writing prompt based on the themes of her book of the same name. The response must be no longer than 300 words and centered on your own experience. I’m working on another post that talks about how I got to the point where I feel comfortable sharing my work like this - both on my own Substack and with a larger audience. It should post in another few days.
I might add on to this post at some point to develop some of these ideas further, but the challenge of keeping it within 300 words made it feel accessible at this stage in my writing.
Here is January’s prompt and my response.
From The Cure for Sleep:
Season 4, 001: What stories - from books, family, church, school - formed your early view of the world and your place in it?
First day of public school. Tears, crying, hysterical in the familiar way of a child in the face of forced separation. My experience in a Montessori preschool: gentle, quiet and slow, had given way to a public school 1st Grade classroom of 25 children, a teacher who yelled and constant stomachaches. “She’s gifted” they said. We’ve moved her into Second Grade.” My mother could only pretend to give approval of a decision already made, a change already executed. And with those first days in the new classroom began my new life labeled “gifted.”
Life was a conveyor belt, moved forward by the engine of school. Elementary gave way to middle gave way to high school. The grades became important, the label became a burden. “You’re supposed to be gifted, but I got a higher score?!?” the girl with long black hair exclaimed. Her name is lost to my memory, but the emotion of being compared and coming up short has not. Teachers always encouraging harder classes, more involvement when really all I wanted was to curl up and read.
High school graduation led to college, led to “You’re too smart not to go to grad school.” All the while feeling that the conveyor belt of schooling was about to end, and I didn’t know what came after. There had been no time to develop passion, to develop ME. Always another assignment, another class, another thing to check off someone else’s list of what makes an education.
And now I’ve been declared educated. I have the diplomas to prove it. But this story ended on a cliffhanger. The plot unresolved, our heroine left adrift. Because there’s one more thing to learn, one research question left. The one thing I have yet to learn: WHO AM I? Finally a subject worth pursuing.