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Personal Narrative : My Blue Notebook

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Coming home from a repetitive, colorless, and lifeless day at school, the one thing that would bring me expressive release was my little blue notebook. My exotic colored pens would hit the paper and I could have sat there filling those college-ruled lines for hours. I would write whatever came to mind: the monotonous routine at school, the girl who sprained her ankle at practice, or my dreams of becoming an Olympic-level figure skater. Images of my future-self as a skater twirled from my mind, around the room, and right onto the page. For my introverted young mind, the notebook was a place where I could vent, dream, and unveil secrets that I would have never been inclined to share. My twelve year old mind was not yet tired from the labors …show more content…

It was my first critical high school English paper. The 9th grade narrative. The assignment was simple: write about an experience from your past. That was the only piece of criterion. Such an open-ended assignment strangely gave me a substantial amount of anxiety. Not to complain about my fortunes so far, but I live a fairly sheltered life. Nothing too crazy or terrible has really happened to me. I assumed anything I wrote about would be lackluster, so I decided to revisit my cherished blue notebook. I chose a story that I had written about in 6th grade, something that first was jotted down in my notebook, then embellished for an elementary school assignment. In fact, may have even copied down a few exact sentences from the juvenile work. Obviously it’s terrible to cheat like that, but I’ve learned and grown from this incident. Don’t get me wrong, I received a decent grade on it--especially considering how bad it was. However, to me, it was devastating. In all my years of elementary and middle school, I had never earned anything less than an A- on a paper, so getting a B- on the paper was like being told I was moving to Russia for the winter freeze. No thank you. What happened? I used practically the same paper that was marked well in years past. What was different? Now, I cringe at my stupidity. Never in the history of narrative papers has anyone gotten the same grade in high school as in

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