English. The language that is not my mother tongue yet feels like it is, its words rolling off my tongue after jumbling around in my brain, its letters finding a million combinations in my thoughts, like scrabble tiles on cocaine. In a time before the idea of not ‘having time’ was close to non-existent, books helped me fill up certain vacancies. I would say that I was a lonely child, contempt in my solitude, but also denying the crevice in my heart left empty by lack of social acceptance and interaction. Much like adults drink away their pain, or teenagers lose themselves in video games, I coped with books, as distracting myself was a route much easier to take as compared to confronting my afflictions. I travelled to worlds constructed on tiny alphabetic building blocks, such as Enid Blyton’s expansive collection when I was small, before progressing to a mixture of unique standalone books whose names I can no longer recollect, and socio-normative series titles such as ‘Percy Jackson’, ‘Tintin’, ‘Harry Potter’ e.t.c. As life got hectic, and books slowly lost their place as the stitches tying the crevice inside me together, I lost touch with my passion for reading, slowing down from my 200 words a day pace, and eventually struggling to read at all. So this, in some ways, is an opportunity to redeem myself. To see if I can break away from the web I’m caught in, slowly being consumed by the generation wide need for instant gratification. I want to see if I can reunite with my grassroots
Having switched from HL Lang-lit to Lit I missed one class of HL Lit. However, the very first activities we did, i.e deciphering the LeNormand cards, and looking through different introductions caught my attention immediately, and I found them extremely captivating. As I am quite an introspective person, I found it quite refreshing, and interpreting the meaning of the cards and applying it to my life was extremely engaging.