I come from a family of avid readers. Some of my earliest memories involved trips to the bookstore with them. My sister, mom and dad had their prefered reading. For myself, however, reading never appealed to me. Every book I tried failed to keep me interested. I couldn’t finish a single chapter. This became a problem for me when I was in fourth grade, which is around the time most children seemed to have found their preferred reading genre. My grades suffered, and I fell behind. During this time I continued to watch my sister and parents, still so in love with books, which to me posed more of a punishment than a pastime.
One day, I was home looking through storage and found a book with the strangest cover picture. It depicted zombies chasing after people. Curiously, I started reading. And then it happened: I was hooked. I finally found a story that kept me invested. I couldn’t put it down until my parents forced me to go to sleep. I kept thinking about it the next day until I got home from school. I rushed through my homework, and then continued to read.
When I finished, I felt a satisfaction unlike anything I had felt before. Reading a book thoroughly for my own enjoyment, for the first time, meant there were words and phrases I had to look up to learn their meaning. Yet I felt such pride realizing I could keep reading uninterrupted, just like everyone else. What seemed so difficult before now came so easily. Naturally, I moved onto similar stories in the same genre. As I continued throughout this process, I became faster at reading, which translated to my vocabulary increasing, better grades, and my confidence at an all-time high.
I learned that hurdles can be overcome by first learning how to relate to them. In my own struggle with reading, the gross and terrifying world of zombies sucked me in and helped me develop a skill that progressed beyond the conclusion of the stories and into my daily life. It was simply a matter of finding my niche, and using my own interests to become better overall. I now realize that, in all aspects of life, even when I am not particularly interested or talented in some area, I can still find my “zombie,” so to speak, to overcome that hurdle.
