More Than Inspired by Victoria

More Than Inspired by Victoria - February 2025 Scholarship Essay

Hidden beneath the black and pink polka-dot covers of a twin-size trundle bed in a small farmhouse in Middle-of-Nowhere, Virginia was a six-year-old girl. Mini flashlight held between yet to fall out baby teeth. Back bent at an angle she would one day envy. Magic Tree House: The Knight at Dawn split open in her lap. It was thirty minutes past her bedtime, but she just needed to finish one more chapter. Which, if she were honest, is what she said three chapters ago. The hiding under the covers was more out of fun than necessity. She liked to pretend she was the daughter of two loving parents who stayed up late watching home renovation shows together, taking turns checking on her to make sure she was actually asleep. Instead, her dad slept alone in his room, snores already echoing through the one floor cottage. Her dog sleeping at the foot of her bed was disturbed by the light of the flashlight than her dad would be if he found her still awake. Still, it was the game of it all that entranced her. The “pretend” that made it enticing. After all, that’s all reading was really, one giant game of pretend.
Three years later, the same little girl is standing in front of her entire class, smiling as a dollar store medal is placed around her neck. She won the class wide essay competition. Granted, she’d gotten in trouble at home because she chose to write about her parents’ messy custody situation. The arguing would go on for several more weeks, she’d apologize, swear to never do something like this again, and then write another essay in her journal that night.
There was something about the way words came together in her mind that mimicked (what she imagined) getting high felt like. Sentences interlocked. Meanings twisted themselves into a spiral, inverting entire phrases. While the painful mundanity of her day to day faded into the background, her thoughts finally calmed into something decipherable when her pen hit paper.
Almost ten years have passed, the girl is in her senior year of high school. She sits in her old AP Language and Composition from last year. It’s her free period, the one most of her peers take as an excuse to sleep in or get Starbucks or get in another round of practice. She chooses to spend it in school. Watching her old teacher educate new students in her favorite subject. The freshmen don’t get it like she does. They don’t understand how beautiful it is to be taught how to express ourselves. But they don’t have to. All they have to do is have it click once. Have the grammar rule they were struggling to understand for weeks suddenly make sense with a silly elementary school mnemonic. Decide to rearrange the order of their argumentative essay so it packs more of a punch. Realize that they actually do like graphic novels after years of brushing them off. Maybe they won’t ever wholly understand the love she has for reading, writing, and everything in between, but for the split second the light bulb goes off inside their head, they feel it. The rush. The high. The drug she’s been chasing since she hid with it beneath the covers of her childhood bedroom. For a split second, they want to know more, just like she does.
A year later, the girl sits in her college dorm room. Bundled under the covers, not to hide from fictional parents, but to keep herself warm because the heat in her old college buildings rarely work. Brightness on her computer turned all the way down, not to disguise the light of her working, but because the blue light is seriously starting to give her a headache. Back bent at an angle she knows she is going to regret in her work out class the next morning. As she reworks her final essay, writing it backwards so the emotions compound in on each other instead of unfolding, there is one thing her and her six-year-old self have in common: pure and utter delight. She is practically giddy as she writes this piece that is worth almost half of her entire grade. There is a story she needs to tell just as badly as there was a story her six-year-old self needed to read.
The language arts don’t just inspire her. They have become a part of who she is. They spur her on, keep her searching for and craving more knowledge. She doesn’t want to be the best there ever was, she simply wants to be the one who kept loving. When her bones are brittle, she takes comfort in knowing her passion for learning will still be a part of her soul. Maybe, one day, she’ll come back to this essay and add a paragraph starting with, “Seventy years later, her last act is to write one last piece.”