4 A Literacy Redemption Story – Marissa Trieb
Marissa Trieb is a sophomore majoring in Psychology, with an undergraduate certificate in Drug & Alcohol Abuse Counseling. She is from Indianapolis, IN, and she was a freshman at the time this narrative was written. This paper is a literacy narrative Marissa wrote for English W131 in the Spring of 2021. Marissa’s professor Dr. Kim Neufelder, admired her narrative and said, “Marissa’s work shows her remarkable perseverance.”
A Literacy Redemption Story
Literacy is something I very much took for granted until I was in my mid-twenties. To be completely honest, this is the first time in my life that I have ever given it any real significant thought or reflection, and I am thirty-one years old. I adopted the belief that literacy came naturally to me at an early age, however, reading Deborah Brandt’s “Sponsors of Literacy” made it abundantly clear that my supposed natural literacy abilities had much more to do with my early literacy sponsors than my own innate abilities. As Brandt stated, “The concept of sponsors helps to explain, then, a range of human relationships and ideological pressures that turn up at the scenes of literacy learning” (as cited in Wardle & Downs, 2017, p. 249). Just as my early literacy sponsors played an important role in my early literacy experiences, so would new sponsors in my not-so-distant past and present life, during what I now refer to as my literacy redemption. My early adoption of the belief that I was a naturally literate person had simply been the result of the significant influence my early literacy sponsors had on my beliefs.
Born in 1915, my paternal grandmother was my childhood hero and likely my most important literacy sponsor to date. A well-spoken, poised ballroom dance and cotillion instructor, she was the epitome of a classy woman. She served as a nurse in World War II, where she met the love of her life, my grandfather, who would unfortunately succumb to stage four skin cancer almost a decade before I was born. She was a resilient woman who gallantly and gracefully walked through life despite her pain and hardships, and there was no one I respected more than her. It is no surprise then that I would quickly come to place the same importance on learning to read and write as she did. Before I was even old enough to attend elementary school, I had such a desperate desire to be able to read that my mother said I actually convinced her I was able to do so by memorizing one of my Dr. Suess books. The truth is that the desire to read was not truly my own at that time, but rather it stemmed from my desire to be like my role model, my grandmother, and she read every single day. Her biggest annoyances were improper English and grammar, and she would sternly correct anyone around her, children included, who did not speak or write correctly. She deemed proper English of the highest importance.
After entering the school system, I picked reading and writing up very quickly. By that point, I had realized and truly understood that I could not fake my way through reading, or writing for that matter, so I practiced all the time. My parents bought me workbooks to practice writing, which I used daily at the beginning of my school experience. I had books to read at home and at my grandmother’s, a library card that I utilized often, and by the time I reached fourth or fifth grade, I had the JumpStart Phonics computer program to aid my literacy learning. Upon the conclusion of the third grade, I finished reading my longest book yet, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. It was a book I had chosen to read after watching the motion picture film with my grandmother, and a book that awarded me much praise from her as well as from my parents for reading it. This sparked an inclination in me to read things and write in ways that would gain the praise of my respected elders or special recognition from my teachers, which I received frequently prior to reaching high school. A quote from Brandt’s article, “Obligations toward one’s sponsors run deep, affecting what, why, and how people write and read” (as cited in Wardle & Downs, 2017, p. 248), perfectly explains that phenomenon.
Things changed in the ninth grade when I encountered my first English teacher who only cared about following the rules when it came to writing. My assignments were always returned to me covered in red pen marks showing everything that I had done wrong, but there were never any comments regarding ideas or things that had been done well. This was a tough new experience for me, and a very different learning experience than I had previously had with my grandmother and my parents. I went from constantly receiving positive feedback and praise for my work to constantly being criticized no matter how hard I worked, and for the first time, I began to doubt my capabilities. Deborah Brandt said in her essay, “where one’s sponsors are multiple or even at odds, they can make writing maddening” (as cited in Wardle & Downs, 2017, p. 263). This statement could not be truer.
That year was also the first time many of us students would be reading more advanced literature and not have any choice regarding what we read at any point during the year. My teacher often berated our generation and belittled our reading comprehension skills. I struggled through the class with a lot of help from my grandmother, as well as my parents at times, and I ultimately passed with a B. I was proud of myself for pushing through and receiving a passing grade, and I believed the worst of experiences was now behind me as far as my high school English classes were going to be concerned. Unfortunately, I was wrong. A desperate struggle to maintain a passing grade in Advanced Placement (AP) Literature and Composition during my senior year would completely kill my confidence. No matter how hard I tried, my teacher was constantly having to tell me that I was not “fitting the mold” that the AP curriculum demanded, and believe me, she really wanted me to do well. She had been the teacher of my sophomore year speech class as well, and we had a great relationship. I just could not seem to get it right for AP composition. I was constantly receiving C’s or lower on my papers, and my parents were not happy. They would scold me and tell me they knew I could do better, but at this point in my life, they were no longer offering the help they once had. They expected me to be able to do it on my own, and I was too ashamed to ask for help. Moreover, my beloved grandmother had been unwell for over a year by that point, and she passed away that spring.
By the end of my time in high school, I no longer enjoyed anything about reading or writing. Regardless of whether it was being done recreationally or academically, I had no confidence in myself. I resigned myself to the belief that writing was just not for me and that reading was just not as enjoyable for me as a young adult as it had been for me as a child. The one thing I believed I still had going for me was that I was very well spoken and carried myself well for my age. Of course, I mostly had my grandmother to thank for that. This belief would later be confirmed at my first “big girl” job when I was twenty-one and applied for a promotion that I was nowhere near ready to take on. I was the youngest employee in the company at the time, and the interview was an intense panel interview with five of the company’s department heads. As I stated previously, I was nowhere near prepared to take over the job for which I was applying, so I obviously did not get the promotion. However, one interviewer from the panel made it a point to approach me later and let me know that all five of them had been extremely impressed with how well I had conducted myself during the interview. In fact, they had a hard time believing I was only twenty-one.
Fast forward a few years, and I found myself in a very different place in life. I was in the throes of a terrible battle with addiction and my mental health. You see, during my senior year in high school, in an attempt to find a loophole to the severe depression I was suffering from and keep up with my academic and extracurricular demands, I naively began to regularly take Adderall. Although I moved to campus the fall after my high school graduation to attend a local university, my stay there was short-lived. I was already dependent on the miracle study drug. Not only did it eradicate my depression, but I also felt that it made me a top tier student. It was not long before I was unable to function when I did not have it. I dropped out of college less than two months after I arrived, and by the time I was twenty-five, my Adderall dependence had advanced to full-blown addiction to crystal meth.
Crystal meth eats away at you, inside and out, slowly draining the life from you. One of its worst effects for chronic users is the toll it takes on cognitive abilities. About one year after I started using, I suddenly began to have trouble finishing thoughts and sentences. I often experienced a “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon in which I could not verbalize a word that I knew was familiar to me. It was as though the word would be “stuck” in the back of my mind. Eventually, I deteriorated to a point that there were times I was unable to understand words from my native language at all. I remember talking to an acquaintance who was trying to help me once and saying, “I wish you had known me before I became a junkie. I was so smart.” At that point, I longed for the days of struggling through high school English class, and I would have given anything to possess the abilities I had back then. I did not believe I would ever regain them. As far as I was concerned, my time with good literacy sponsorship had passed, and I just had to accept that I was where I was in life because of the path I had chosen. Luckily, I was wrong.
I got sober in June of 2017 after nearly surviving a brush with death. In 2018, I met my now-fiancée. He has two history degrees and a master’s degree from the Kelley School of Business, and is the son of two university professors. They played an instrumental role in encouraging me to push past my own self-doubt and to work to regain what I believed would be lost to me forever. Finally, after a year of constant encouragement, I made the decision to return to college. Now, at this present moment in time, not only have I developed reading and writing skills that are likely better than before, but I have also found the confidence in myself that I was missing back in high school. My newfound literacy sponsors have played a huge part in my ability to develop new literacy skills, and what I understand now that I did not before is that literacy is not an innate trait that can be lost forever. Where sponsorship can be found literacy can be developed, and it is never too late to start over. As Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino of MTV’s Jersey Shore Family Vacation would say, “the comeback is always greater than the setback” (Salsano et al., 2020).
References
Salsano, S., Miccolis, F., Jeffress, S., & French, J. (Executive Producers) (2020). Jersey shore family vacation [television broadcast]. MTV.
Wardle, E., & Downs, D. (2017). Writing about writing: A college reader (4th ed.). Plymouth, MI: Bedford/St. Martin’s.