A Link Between Literacy Learning and a System of Opportunity and Access

 

The enormity of the brick walls, the towering ceiling they held up, shrunk me. I was in a warehouse, the subject of some kind of experiment. I felt it was by accident that I had gotten there and the knowledge that I had not been nominated for the test compressed me. Someone had thought my little brother was “highly capable,” and so I had a right to be tested, too—to be skipped over for the plays, the writing workshops and speaking events, too. Across the table from me was my cousin Kelly and three of her friends. They had all received their own nominations, as my cousin reminded me, and felt that they deserved to be there. I was too spacey, too forgetful. I was a mouse wearing a human disguise.

Most of the test was what I had expected. There were problems we needed to solve, some math, some thought. I weaved my pencil through the puzzles. I twisted strands of hair through the fingers of my left hand. I bounced my right knee until I noticed and could stop. If I could only concentrate… But then each of the ten of us were handed sheets of paper, a grid with one-inch squares. We were told to use our pencils to draw whatever we wanted, filling as much of the page as we could.

The grid lines fell away. I pictured a tree in the foreground, taking up the left side of my view so that it expanded past the limits of the page. Slightly behind it would be a fence and just past that, a neighbor’s house. Above the fence and house, the sky would be cut by a telephone cable and the flight of a small, black bird. I glanced, guilty, toward some of my test-mates’ papers. I could make out that they were drawing individual pictures to fill each box. I thought they were probably right, that those had been the instructions. I felt the tension in my jaw as I chewed over the problem—to trust the other students or my own creative intuition?

“I am unique,” I told myself, not because I knew it but because I had so often been told.

So, I drew my picture filling the whole page. I textured the leaves, the wood of the fence, the shingles of the house. I shaded where I thought shadows would fall. It was just me and my art.

Time was up; it had been the last section of the test. I placed my hands on top of the old, poorly finished desk. Stains of indigo, peach, and green here and there made me think it must have been used for an art class. I thought it was perfect. Looking around, I noticed the windows were grand but not looming. The brick was wise but not decrepit. And a rare, bright Bellingham sun fell across the art tables, their navy blue plastic chairs, and me.

Determining the Worldly Worth of Literacy

 

 

No one in my family had been to college, and at least one of my siblings didn’t graduate from high school, so they were very skeptical of universities and they are to this day. Before I left for college I remember there was a lot of emphasis on “getting my money’s worth” as my dad called it. He had a handful of ideas of what I should study to get the highest paying or “best” job possible upon graduating. It was a few weeks into my first winter quarter at WWU. I thought I wanted to teach high school English and I was enrolled in a Pacific Islands Literature Course and an Early American Literature Course.

I called my mom and asked “Do you know about bikini atoll?” She did not. I told her everything I’d learned. About the documentary we had watched in class where American military personnel smiled, explaining their justification for testing bombs in someone else’s home. I told her the Marshallese people had to invent words to describe the deformities their children were born with as a result of this bomb. America never admitted to being at fault for these atrocities but mysteriously volunteered to cover the cost of Marshallese healthcare. My Professor had explained to us that she herself had seen homeless Marshallese all over Hawaii seeking healthcare, because while the American government paid for their healthcare, it would not pay for them to have a place to stay. My mother insisted it couldn’t be as bad as I said and that I should be careful what I believe. She asked me who was telling me this nonsense. “Mom I saw it myself! The American government filmed themselves doing all this!” I had replied.  I remember feeling so mad at her for her fear. Mad that she didn’t question things she wanted to believe in. I felt she had raised me to be stupid. She was raised to believe that patriotism to her country, even blind patriotism was honorable.  I told her that American missionaries convinced Marshallese women that their stillborn children were a result of infidelity and so they’d better bury their children in secret. I hated everything I was learning because it separated me further from my parents and further from the comfort of mine and my family’s complacency. But still, I needed all of this information to understand that I was fed misinformation before. Why hadn’t I learned this in high school? In the history books we read? Why had no one ever suggested to me that America was not more important than other countries? Why would religious people try to convince people that their own depravity was the reason for their misfortune? I started questioning everything after this, all the things my mother wouldn’t question because they were too fundamental to her existence to risk, all the things I had been told to believe in and be confident in I began to question, unpack, and reevaluate. This process took years and was the beginning of a lot of family conflict but also a lot of self-growth. The literacy I have gained from English classes is one my family has never valued, and has even avoided. Understanding too much about things you are told to believe in can cause problems. But for me gaining this literacy has shifted so many things about me for the better and I can’t put a price on this literacy.

The Most Notorious Impositions and Deprivations

What better way to begin than with the bones.  The dinosaur bones embossed on the cover of Jurassic Park, to be precise, a book my sixth grade teacher banned on sight for nebulous reasons. The Catholic school distributed a dusty list of proper books for children to read, but I had breezed through all the boy-dog-death books I could stand. I refused to fetch another from the school library. And so I found myself hiding in the empty church hall, secretly reading the suppressed sci-fi novel – an outlaw with malicious intent to read all the popular genre fiction I could dig up. For all the Catholic Church’s ability to psychologically transmit thousands of years of guilt upon their subjects, they were less adept at understanding the simple art of reverse psychology. The nuns and priests who grimly forbade even the slightest subversive pleasure or vice became my accomplices in a literary journey to the world of drugs, sex, murder, and irresponsible genetic engineering of long extinct reptiles.

To fully understand the scene, one must go back to the year 1992. It was a topsy turvy year – Kriss Kross wore their clothes backwards, Right Said Fred’s shirt had been deemed not sexy enough, and Sir Mix-a-Lot finally revealed the truth about the size of backside he preferred. The Soviet Union collapsed. At a Catholic grammar school in Napa, California, I entered the sixth grade as a straight A student and left with all C’s. I started the year in the good graces of the teacher, a dogmatic former nun who spent her weekends protesting in a lawn chair outside Planned Parenthood. Our relationship took a hit when I threw a Warriner’s grammar book at her after she kicked me out of class for chewing gum (allegedly). Even though the book missed her by a wide margin (poor throwing ability landed me a position switch from third to first base that year) she really took it personally that I would intend her harm. After that I couldn’t stay out of trouble. I got into a fight with the class bully and served a two day suspension. I called my math teacher an asshole (accurate) and got permanently removed from the gifted program. I became just the sort of at-risk pre-teen youth who would dump Old Dan and Little Ann for the decadent pop-sci pleasures of Dr. Ian Malcolm. My uncle read the book and gave it to me because “boys love dinosaurs.” I really didn’t see the glamour in reading about Chaos Theory and gender-bending frog DNA – that is until such ideas became illicit.

My literacy sponsors at home supported my newfound quest for all the Crichton and Grisham and King and Clancy I could stomach. My literary sponsors at school viewed a gaudy pocket paperback as the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes rolled into a shirt sleeve. Their attempts at suppression only hastened the desire for more banned books. They tried taking them away and donating them to the library, but my mom worked there and snagged them on their way back. They tried detentions after school, rosary readings during lunch, and early morning cleaning duty. None of it worked. None of it sated my newfound desire to see Muldoon’s naive raptor hunt or Dennis Nedry’s sweet, slimy demise. Most of all, I needed more of Dr. Ian Malcolm’s crackpot theories and graphs that flattered my intelligence. The school sponsors of literacy did everything in their power to destroy it, but the book found a way. They tried so hard to see if they could prevent me reading that they never wondered if they should.

Accumulated Layers: Literacy shaped out of struggle and the past

Accumulated Layers: Literacy shaped out of struggle and the past

 

I’m expecting a fight.

“Give me a second,” she starts, eyes down, focused.

My writing lies like a freshly fallen carcass, splayed across her desk. Professor Trueblood just sits there, pen in hand, inspecting it. I wait for the conference to begin, and I try to find a comfortable position on the lumpy office chair. There’s no way to find my balance on the damn thing, and I start to suspect that might be on purpose. It feels like an uneven meadow, like the meadows I trekked as a kid quail hunting.

You’d better come correct with Kate. She’ll fire questions at random, target anything. Her style is scattered — birdshot ammunition. Books overflow on the office shelves, press in from every conceivable angle, and her desk looks just as cluttered as my thoughts. Papers, pens, an empty granola bar wrapper, and an old Mac laptop that hums and chirps litter the top. I puff up my lungs with a passing draft of wind that trails through her open window and out of the cracked door behind me — I smell a million fir needles, and all of the leaves on the other side of the window shake like tambourines.

“It’s a good start,” she begins, “the way you zoom in, anchor us in detail.”

“Thank you.”

“You need to suspend it more, stretch out the scene. I can see the brewery, the bartender, the journal, and, then, out of nowhere, the scene just ends, moves on.”

I feel my blood circulate, pump, rush disproportionately to my face. I try to focus on her critiques, but all I can see are the blue marks that leech like blood through my wounded paper. Words fly in every direction — it’s as if she let a hunting dog loose amongst the prose. It’s forced out all of the misspellings, the improper quotes, the poorly formed sentences. I watch issues burst from that worded underbrush towards the sky. Each ones movement vies for my attention, and images of Kita, my friend’s wire-haired pointer, carrying a lifeless quail in her mouth flash through my consciousness. My hands clam up like they would before I’d pull the trigger hunting; my palms feel like they’re speckled with dew drops, condensation, and my heart seems to be trying to flee down its own trail, out of my chest.

“I’m sorry,” I begin, my voice tripping over itself.

“That’s okay, that’s okay,” she says, “this is why we have rough drafts. This is your first real attempt at fiction, right?”

I nod and wonder what she means by “real”.

“You obviously have a story that you need to get out, you need to write. If you can take these concepts and use them throughout your writing, I think you’ll have a better time conveying your message.”

“Absolutely,” I reply, as she hands the draft copy back to me.

“We’ll have more conferences, so, don’t worry, there’s plenty of time. You are always welcome here if you have more questions.”

“Thanks,” I reply, quietly, still lost amongst the fog of the conference.

I get up and leave, brush past the next student as she enters, the smell of her perfume trailing into my nose. The writing feels dead in my hands. I remember all those little quails and all the little pellets in their breasts. My boots click down the hallway, and Trueblood’s encouragement continues to ring, grow steadily, in my ears.

After the hunt we’d defeather quail, clean them, and roast them in the oven. The act of killing gave way to a lovely meal, the carcass transmogrified. As I step out of the Humanities building, I resign myself to this process. I need to hunt my story. I want the courage to kill it, clean it. Next time, instead of a carcass, I’ll bring her a lovely meal. I’ll bring her nourishment.

 

By: Ivan Murphy-Dlouhy

 

Multiple Identities Contribute to the Ideologically Hybrid Character of these Literacy Formations

“Can we really have a character in this play called Cock Man?” he asked without preamble—without so much as a salutation. Drowning in a 17-credit quarter and fresh out of four mind-numbing hours of biology and organic chemistry lectures, I was certain I must have missed an email from him. Surely, he wasn’t talking about the play we had been working on all quarter, the stage adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. I fumbled to get my scarf off and to stuff my bag in to a corner as we commenced our weekly shuffle around his comically small office to take our seats across his desk. “Mmm, let’s see. Maybe something like Wentworth…or Ainsley…something vaguely British.” Well, Jude is a British novel, so maybe we were still on track. And there! in his hand was his weathered copy, his thumb tucked between the pages as if to mark the scene of the character in question. But I had read that book front-to-back and was absolutely sure I would have noticed a Cock Man. While he brainstormed, I tried subtly to catch sight of a page number. “But I do want to keep that sentiment alive, you know?” he continued. “He’s such a dick. Maybe Shaft…Shaft-something. Shaftsburn, Shaftsbury—SHAFTSBURY! That’s it! Write that down.” Dumbfounded, I mechanically obeyed:

SHAFTSBURY:

As I waited for further instructions, I opened my own book to what I estimated to be the same general area, hoping to appear to be following competently along. He continued to blithely dictate dialogue and scene-setting to me and as I typed I finally recognized the chapter—I had even marked it in my book! Foolishly, I had been thinking of it as the bit where Jude runs in to his estranged wife at a bar. As I feverishly flipped through the pages, I spotted him, there in black and white: Mr. Cockman, “a handsome, dissipated young fellow, possibly an undergraduate.” That blasted, useless undergraduate who flirts with Jude’s wife for two paragraphs and then disappears forever—how could I have forgotten him!

While most days I primarily think of that moment as simply my favorite thing any supervisor has ever said to me in my life, it was also a microcosm of a greater moment in my academic development that working with that particular professor was facilitating. I was miserable as a Biology student. I was lost in the sea of 700-student lectures and crumbling under the pressure of increasingly convoluted lab work. I had taken an internship with my Shakespeare professor for a change of scenery and a new experience, but it opened my eyes to a very different kind of academic experience. He published a paper about religious iconography present in Pirates of the Caribbean. He was in a scholarly organization devoted to the works of (my favorite author) C.S. Lewis. He spent his summers drinking espresso and teaching undergrads about poetry in Rome. And he was getting money for it! He was supporting himself on work he enjoyed, work that allowed him outlet for his thoughts and creativity and insight.

Besides idolizing his life, I had also experienced new satisfaction in my own work under his direction. Watching The Lion King every night for a week “to prepare for an essay on Hamlet” was totally awesome—but more than that, I was learning to find the voice to validate the things that I loved and the reasons they were important. Reminiscing on paper about the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2008 production of Macbeth was a delight, but I was also learning to make my thoughts known clearly and concisely not only to my audience, but to myself. Practicing the study of literature gave me an opportunity to make myself known in my work in a way that test tubes and lab reports never could. I ultimately withdrew from all my classes at the end of that quarter and abandoned my pre-med trajectory to start fresh as an English major in the spring. I only wish someone had told me sooner that I could spend my years in the hallowed halls of higher education making dirty jokes in the name of professional academia. It was a perfectly legitimate pursuit, too: I would later sit in at the table reading where an actor from the celebrated Book-It Repertory Theater read dear Mr. Shaftsbury’s meager dialogue. Now, pursuing an eventual PhD in literature, I aspire to bring an entry of my own in to the academic discourse as rich as Cock Man.

Formative Roles at the Scenes of Literacy Learning

 

“Alright, everyone to The Chair”, declared my mom. The Chair was the wide red-plaid reading chair in our living room. “I have a new bedtime story for you three. It’s about a boy who’s a wizard. His name, is Harry Potter”. On that night, at the age of four, during our Before-bed Reading Time, my mother introduced to me the world of fantasy.  

Since the day my brothers and I were brought home from the hospital, we were read to at night. Before-bed Reading Time is one of my earliest memories, but the night my mom decided to read us Harry Potter was my first exposure to the fantasy genre. I heard plenty of times Good Night Moon, and I recognized a wide array of Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes, but Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone was different. It was a story that existed entirely on its own. Harry Potter was its own universe, and not an isolated nursery rhyme.  That night as I sat at my mom’s feet with my stubby four-year-old legs curled underneath me, I was enveloped by the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

Even as early as the age of four, it was clear that I was a highly anxious and competitive child. In my kindergarten class I strove to be the best hopscotch-er, know my alphabet before the others, color the prettiest pictures, and be the teacher’s favorite. I wanted to be The Best Good Kid. I was, even then, high strung and unfocussed. Becoming The Best Good Kid was all I thought about until that night around The Chair. That need to be the best , that ceaseless competitive drive fell away while my mom read us Harry Potter. A calm fell over me. During the day I was The Best Good Student, but that night I escaped to Hogwarts. I did not need to be perfect in that world. I did not need to shine the brightest while my mom read to us. I just needed to be.

The night my mother showed me that story, I began to view the genre of fantasy as  a form of escapism. In books, I could find solace from the pressures of reality. Mom’s nightly routine of reading Harry Potter to us taught me how to view stories. Harry Potter made me feel at ease with myself, but also gave me the craving to dive deeper into the fantasy genre. I learned to lean into the fantasy genre when my daily life became too chaotic. As I struggled with the overpowering desire to be perfect, I used reading fantasy to slip away from noise for a few minutes or hours. What started as my mom insisting on Before-bed Story Time lead to an early childhood filled with trips to the library to check out the latest fantasy novel. My mom showed me the genre of fantasy, but Harry Potter taught me the power a story has to influence one’s reality by offering an alternative reality.

“Accumulating layers of sponsoring influencing—in families, workplaces, schools, memory—carry forms of literacy that have been shaped out of ideological and economical struggles of the past” (178)

Getting a library card at Hawaii Kai Public library was a big deal. It was how I knew I was going to be a big girl. A grown girl. To get one, I had to learn how to write my name clearly and neatly with equal spaces that fit on the dotted line. I had to write in pen too, so I couldn’t make any mistakes. In the evenings prior to our appointment at the library, I practiced with one of my mother’s ball point pens at the kitchen table. I traced my J slowly and shakily, trying to get it’s curve perfectly. I wrote a lopsided O and had to start again. When our appointment at the library finally came, I was given a sharpie to write my name. As my O turned into a defeated sideways oval, I felt my mothers hand over mine, guiding me over the top of the O, down the little A, N, another N, and finally one last little A. I looked up at the kind librarian to make sure that she had seen me do it, that it still counted even if Mom helped me. She smiled back down at me and proceeded to check out a picture book with my freshly minted library card. The librarian handed the card back to me and said, “congratulations,” as I put the card in a glitter encrusted wallet we had bought for the occasion. She said it like I had accomplished something really special.

It was the beginning of the summer when I first got my library card. My sister Claire and I were attending summer school at a different elementary school, Kamiloiki Elementary, because we had just moved into the Kalama Valley school district. During recess and lunch Claire picked me up at my classroom and we held hands all the way to the playground. We needed the reassurance from each others hands, a “yes I’m still here” promise as we entered the daunting and intense social pyramid of our new school. In the afternoons we walked across a series of soccer fields to get home and did homework until our mom finished her interviews and new stories for the day. The best afternoons were the ones we went to the library afterschool.

The library was a special place to me. It had rainbow linoleum tiles that led to the children’s book section and pungent smell of must and old books that lingered all the way into the parking lot. Inside there were koinobori fish flags that hung from the slanted ceilings with long tail strands that tickled the top of your head as you passed under it, fluttering from cold blasts of the air conditioner. Claire and I roamed each shelf of the children’s section, crawling on our knees and craning our necks to see each of the titles. My mom often lefts us there for hours at a time while she was working and the librarians would watch over us from behind the circulation desk. We’d do our homework and then curl up in one of the carrel desks to read a stack of books.

It continued in this way all summer and into the school year. The library became the middle space between school and home, between mom and teacher, between reading and entertainment. We waited for her till closing time, the lights glowing dimmer and dimmer until she could pick us up, 2pm stretching endlessly till 5, time stretching standstill as we tried to finish our homework. Always waiting for mom. If I think about sponsorship, I think about influence. Our family’s commitment to the library is how I remember our values, our passion for reading, to story-telling, community involvement, and social change.

“Literacy practices are operating in differential economies” — David Beaumier

The first day I rode on a plane, I caught three flights over a 24 hour period to Buenos Aires, Argentina (the country chosen because of my obsession with tango dancing). The skies were clear, and I felt surprised noticing the patchwork snow on mountaintops more than the quilted land everyone mentions when they’re up in the air. Arriving, I searched with rising desperation for someone in my program who spoke Spanish better than I did, or who had already traveled abroad—someone literate in being abroad internationally. Exhausted, anxious, and nervous, I found two other people, neither of whom spoke much of any Spanish. Everyone I managed to ask for help in finding our other student group laughed at me. Eventually, a facilitator found us and shepherded us to join the rest of our group. The first days in the city, I was shocked to learn that my Spanish was as good as the best speakers in my study group. I figured this would give me a position of sponsorship, able to make friends easily as people would need my assistance to accomplish basic tasks. This was not the case. Everyone else already had the confidence to navigate this new world of impenetrable bus systems and subways, while I struggled to find a better balance well outside of my comfort zone.

My roommate, John/Juan in Buenos Aires already spoke Spanish so well that I thought he was our host mom’s grandson. While his abuela does speak Spanish, she’s from Spain and, he grew up in Texas. He already had spent plenty of time in the country, and made a group of friends he went out with regularly. Since I could speak some Spanish, he started to bring me out to eat with his friend Gabriel, a Swiss-German man who was studying in the city his porteño father was from. In a restaurant brimming with warm light, over copious glasses of wine Gabriel moved our conversation to the question of why we wall spoke in English. Neither Juan nor I spoke German, but all of us spoke Spanish. We offered to shift the language to Spanish, but Gabriel’s frustration didn’t come from the fact that we shared two languages, but that somehow the group, him included, assumed that we would use English as a lingua franca. This push helped me be more aware of the language and even the jargon I used in conversation to make sure everyone felt included and that I wasn’t help block someone from participating in a conversation.

The journey to Argentina, which started as a way to dance tango and master Spanish, evolved into a desire to attend Woodring Educational School. I came back to Western to become certified in teaching Spanish and English at the secondary level. This required several education classes that focused on helping students learn rather than forcing information down their throat. By this point, I’d been teaching Argentine tango for about 6 years, often following the class style of workshops or other instructors I had personally attended and found helpful. The idea that there isn’t a specific “right” way to dance, now was beginning to apply to language acquisition and English grammar, which opened up my eyes to all sorts of prejudices in language I’m embarrassed to admit I’m still learning about. Around this time, one of my students in his seventies needed to learn how to communicate what he wanted from his partner—not just rote moves in the dance. Being able to communicate your needs effectively (move over here, help me with this), is more important that communicating it in a rigid, inflexible way that some people might deem is the most correct. There is a point where people can’t understand each other between a language gap or dance experience gap, but those gaps are smaller than we think, certainly smaller than I thought when I studied abroad. The more people can let go of an arbitrarily correct way to speak to each other, or arbitrary sequences in dance that are used for instruction, the more smooth and flawless their communication becomes.

The idea of seeking solutions that worked was reinforced by Professor Shaw Gynan, who taught the introduction to teaching world languages classes at Western. His area of study was in Paraguay, right next to Argentina in South America, where a study was being done on the benefits of full immersion Spanish courses. The education system in Paraguay is special because they recognize two official languages in the country, Spanish and Guarani. Guarani is the first language of the indigenous people who live across the border of Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina. Professor Gynan’s studies found that students who spoke Guarani at home, but attended a Spanish immersion school, spoke Spanish with less proficiency than students from similar backgrounds who took Spanish classes at a Guarani speaking school. This brings up many questions in the way we teach predominantly English immersion classes across our country, which means we are not giving the best sponsorship to 4.8 million students[1] across the nation.

 

[1] National Center for Education Statistics https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cgf.asp

 

“At our most worthy, perhaps, we show the sellers how to beware and try to make sure these exchanges will be a little fairer, maybe, potentially, a little more mutually rewarding.”

 

When my pink leather boxing gloves meet the mits of my holder, they make a light drumming noise—pow, pow—and I was sold on the idea of boxing long before I felt the rush of that rhythm. Sunlight filled the room for the skylights and reflected up off of the light wooden floor the first class I went to, and the entire class welcomed me in so much, I knew there was room for me to continue to grow in the program. Then, when I was trying and trying to be a boxing instructor, I was constantly preparing for everything. I was trying to do everything “correctly,” because I knew that I could do it, and the people who had mentored me before were always super supportive, so I knew what I was getting into.

I tried hard, and I was always questioning why the process was taking so long to figure out. I was always trying to get at the heart of exactly what was going on, logistically speaking. I wanted to know why the work I was doing wasn’t good enough, and for me this transferred into me asking why I wasn’t good enough. Everyone else in the instructor group was welcomed openly—but not me. My friend who started after me was given so many opportunities, and I always tried to piggyback on them, and the group exercise direct just kept telling me no. Being denied these opportunities always felt like my fault—like I had done something wrong. And by trying to push myself and get involved with boxing, this thing that was once a centerpiece of how I found confidence in a context that I otherwise never would’ve felt confident in (exercise spaces as a whole) seemed to destabilize. I became so uncomfortable with myself that I started constantly trying to look to others for reassurance and confirmation that if I was taking all of the steps in the order I was supposed to, then I would get out of it what I put into it. It is this deeply internalized fear that shakes my confidence. The fear frustrates me so much, and I carry it into my life now, currently aware that I’ve failed before in a context that I was supposed to be empowering. And that feeling of failure really sucks because it is certainly going to happen again.

Eventually, I was finally accepted as an instructor, but never with the reward of the others. I was accepted out of my perseverance. This has been the constant in my life—my drive to do as well as I possibly can. Sometimes it’s harder than others, but it’s always in the back of my mind. That even when I reached my goals, I wasn’t quite good enough. I need to embrace that discomfort because the uncomfortable want to do better than I have been doing, to get what I’m searching for and wanting, has always been there for me. It’s always turned out alright in the end, so it hurts more to think that it might not do well. I know failure makes me better and makes me realize that I can go beyond what others expect of me, what I expect of myself—even when it’s super frustrating.