The time when I fully acknowledged the concept of the world of language as my inspiration and part of my life was somewhere during my time in middle school. Before that happened, I was not so interested. I thought books to be meaningless as my first impression. Like what would a compact load of words gathered in a page benefit me? How does it entertain me? Words are just words. I used to have that mindset a long time ago as I thought reading didn’t seem to be important to me nor it will contribute to my future.

So, throughout my years of education in school, I had to pretend to read to meet the expectations of teachers and for my grades that I didn’t deserve to earn. Years later, I had this nihility inside me, that I was so very bored. Anything that entertained me didn’t fulfill my satisfaction or expectations. It was when I decided, with aimless direction, to grab a grab a book from one of the school shelves and read it seriously for the first time. I forgot what book I read since it was school property and that I don’t own it, but the first few pages have already delved into my interests. The more I read, the more I became invested. The more I became invested, the more I realized how wrong I was all along. Every word between the lines had meaning. For every word, images manifest in my mind, but more like a scene playing in real time as I read on. It was almost like the book came alive except everything only happened in my head. Not only that, but I also felt like I had a deep relationship with the author, who had written it with passion, skill, and the knowledge who seems to have experienced almost everything in the world, as if I understood at first glance their purpose and the messages that they wanted readers like me to know.

To this day, reading has become an important part of my life and played a role in my perspective of seeing the world around me. I was ashamed of myself for not reading something so entertaining sooner, otherwise I would have not lit a spark of open-mindedness and I might have stayed ignorant my whole life not knowing the joy. But I was also grateful because it has helped me so much with my grammar to be a lot better when I needed to be erudite at times, like written essays or when I had to help my parents communicate with other people. After my life-changing encounter, I have read a lot of books, but mostly online for free since they are more tangible and convenient. For every book I read, the knowledge that I have accumulated expanded my mind so much at almost a universal level. It was as if I understood everything about the world. Like feelings, human behavior, the meaning to live, and other abstract things that perhaps nobody thinks about every day. After knowing how much reading means a lot to me, it was about to be the same for writing. If writers write a book, then it would require a vast and vivid imagination, and experience to propel as knowledge and a message to readers.

I was inspired to take up on writing my own novel. But for time, it was hard. The only things I could at least succeed in were only short novels. If it were for longer ones, I would get stuck the longer I take writing it and eventually get lost because of doubts about my skills in writing. One short story I made that I thought to be great was a fanfiction story of Macbeth from William Shakespeare’s plays. Because of my confidence in what I’m capable of in mind when it comes to reading and writing, I took the initiative to enroll myself in English classes like Creative Writing in my high school and hoped I could learn something to improve my writing. One thing I remembered learning from it was something called an Epigraph which is like quotation that usually begins at the beginning in a piece of writing to give a reader an idea. And now that I’m learning another English today, I hope I can learn anything from it and someday prove myself and be proud of my own masterpiece of writing.