Journal #1

When i was a little girl I loved make up, playing with barbies, and dancing around my house, I was your typical little girly girl. I even remember how I loved picking out my own outfits in the morning and by outfits i mean tights, a shirt, two dresses over that and a coat. I guess you could say I was a little indecisive and still am only now i have better fashion sense. I was also obsessed with the movie "The little Rascals" I so badly wanted to be Darla and thought i was going to be a famous actress. Like the little actress I so desperately want to be, I often went to the school nurse and would act like I was sick to go home early. You could say school wasn't on my mind at five I was to busy dreaming of the bright lights and a pink limo.

Well as years went on i became less of a girly girl and more of girl with a million dreams. I remember pretty clearly when i was in fourth grade I wanted to be chef, a massage therapist, an accountant, journalist, and a math teacher. It was this year i became intrigued in learning and realized i could do anything i put my mind to. My inspiration came from my teacher, she gave me the confidence to believe in myself.

Fourth grade I learned to follow my dreams and work hard. I remember that year like it was yesterday, learning a new poem every week, doing math every morning, having reading parties and having a teacher that believed in you before you believed in yourself. I remember I knew I would like the class after we learned our first poem "yellow bus". Poetry was something so new to me yet i fell in love with it so easily and the same thing happened with math. I use to be horrible at it but everyday we would have a number on a piece of paper and we had to come up with equations to equal that number. I was so eager to to come up with as many as I could and hope my name would be called at the end to get the paper, I won four times. Learning what I was good at and passionate about made me want to further my education which meant I needed to get good grades if I ever wanted to follow my dreams. This is when I realized what hard work was and became a determined person.




Coming back to my story
For me it was hard to decide what I should write, trying to think of one specific time that changed me was just difficult because I have always just thought I changed over time and never really considered the moments themselves. Other than that I found after I wrote it that I did similar things to Hampl, such as fictionalizing certain facts. I really don't know the exact name of the poem from the first day of fourth grade I just remember that "Yellow bus" was one of the first ones I learned and I don't think I really won the math paper four times I think it was three but i'm still not sure. I also don't remember picking out my crazy outfits when I was younger my parents have just always told me about it and how I cut my own hair one time and show me pictures of how funny I looked. The thing is I didn't really think about it while I was writing, I wasn't distinguishing what I remembered from what I was told or what was fact. But in the end I like my story it's not the way I see it in my head but it's still the truth of how I changed.