I knew I needed to be a part of the fight to eradicate illiteracy and support educational advocacy.

Throughout most of my elementary education, many teachers didn’t understand me. And though no one had ever blatantly told me I was “stupid” or an “idiot,” at least not the teachers, there remains a sense and knowing when they had given up on you– a frustration. I remember in the first grade my teacher had made all the students stand in a circle, each having to count by twos. “Two…” a student would sound “…four,” said the next. This continued until it got to me. After eight, I didn’t know the number and had to count on my fingers. The circle of children then had to restart and count again because of me, repeatedly, because I couldn’t count by twos. I remember my teacher grabbing my wrist and pulling me aside to sit, a sigh accompanying it. “She doesn’t have to tell me,” I thought, “I know I’m stupid.” Afterward, when my father picked me up from school, my teacher told him that I was years behind in math which worried him greatly, and I only felt inferior. Later on, in a different school, It was suggested that I should repeat the second grade. I moved schools again.

Though in little ways my story relates to illiteracy, those who struggle to read and write are exactly like me. People don’t know what it’s like to feel completely and wholly stupid, a feeling that affects the psyche so much. Hence, it discourages them from even learning or, in drastic difference, as motivation for personal growth but at the expense of learning out of happiness or genuine desire– only to grapple out of a rut for external affirmation.

I’m in my tenth school for continually having bad experiences with education, bullying, and lack of general friendship with peers. Each time I moved, I hoped there would be a better alternative, an understanding of others and teachers for my questions, my curiosity, and not the general disregard that I was “stupid.” And now, after searching and months of studying in isolation, I have come to a place where I can happily say I am accepted and encouraged intellectually. However, I will never forget how hard I had to fight for my place in the educational scheme and even to be deemed “smart.” My challenge for intelligence and filling in my gaps in learning has been integral to my identity, but it’s something that many don’t want to hear. Not only because people I have known for a little while don’t believe me, but as a society, we reject stories that discuss struggles on an issue we think is efficiently transformative. We are often given the metaphor as children that we are a sponge, constantly absorbing and consuming knowledge. But, just because another is psychologically wired to process information differently doesn’t make them inferior, yet we deem these people “slow.” Not all of us are sponges; not all of us can be. And, even among this scheme, in places that don’t have the funding to teach, and lack of knowledge lacking intellect has put swathes of people on the bottom end. Education, we also often hear, is a way out of poverty and class struggle.