Real Heroes Write Heroes by Vendi

Real Heroes Write Heroes by Vendi - June 2017 Scholarship Essay

If my grandfather is to be believed, I’ve been a reader since I was two years old. According to him, I was never happier than when I had a book of fairy tales held in my chubby hands. Although, according to him, the Adriatic Sea is full of mermaids who eat sailor’s faces, so take his stories with a grain of salt.
Regardless of when I started reading, the result was that the books I read as a child made me believe in all sorts of magic, so when I was five years old, the list of things I wanted to be when I grew up looked like this: a superhero, a mermaid, a rock star, and a princess. In that order.
With parents like mine, two doctors who managed to move their children from their war-torn homeland to start a brighter future in America, that list seemed all too easy to accomplish. All I was missing was a cape, a tail, musical talent of any sort, and a crown. When my sisters and I sat on the plane that would take us from Croatia to the United States, it felt as though we were embarking on the life-changing quest where all of those dreams would come true.
When I turned six years old, the one thing I wanted to be was this: not bullied anymore.
My clumsy grasp of spoken English made it all too easy for my classmates to pick on me. Libraries, with their walls of stories, became my refuge. It didn’t matter what happened throughout the day if I could spend my evenings walking through Middle Earth with Frodo or spend time at Hogwarts with Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Eventually, through the practice of reading out-loud in English, my accent went away, but my love of books remained.
When I was ten years old, I realized I wasn’t cut out for being the hero of a story – very rarely are heroes homebodies who eat three square meals a day – but that I really enjoyed creating them. I could live through my rock star mermaid and superhero princess from the comfort of my own home, and in the worlds I created, the good guys always beat the bullies at the end.
As I made my way through school, I felt like a side-quest. My main journey’s topic may have switched from mermaid tails and princess crowns to writing, but it was still my end goal. Everything related to school seemed, at best, an opportunity to practice the skill that would take me to my Happily Ever After.
When I was sixteen, I learned that writers aren’t paid a great deal. By that age, I was aware that to remain a well-fed homebody I needed both food and a home, both of which require sustainable employment. So I tried other work: cashiering, drawing portraits, scribing for several small medical practices… All things I could do in the day so that I could spend my evenings swimming with the mermaids and fighting crime with the superheroes that I wrote into stories that I would share with the world someday.
It wasn’t enough. Even as I sat in a cubicle working on excel spreadsheets, a part of my mind was always on the heroes I created in my childhood. They had changed, of course, as I did, but their stories still called to me. They inspired me; they would never let the fear of failure stop them from finishing their quests. They wouldn’t let the bullies beat them in the end, even if the bullies were themselves.
I am twenty years old now, and the list of things I want to be is this: happy and unafraid. I want to be a storyteller, one who creates the sort of heroes that inspire future generations to be happy and unafraid, too.
At least until I find out how to get my hands on that mermaid tail.