I Was that Kid

A personal essay

Image by Sabrina Eickhoff from Pixabay

I was that kid who loved going to the Scholastic bookfairs in elementary school. I collected Captain Underpants, sticker books, and Magic Treehouse. I loved getting books. I loved reading time during class. I loved going to the library to see what kind of book I could find next.

I was that kid.

I was that kid who would beeline to that one section of the library that held the Goosebumps books. There I would read creepy tales about gooey monsters in basements, witches who crooked their fingers at misbehaving children, yetis let loose in the city streets. The books made me imagine monsters lurking in the moonlight, in the shadows outside my door. Those books made life more exciting.

I was that kid who devoured the Eragon books, imagining that one day I would one day find a dragon egg of my own and have it hatch so that I could too be a dragon rider. I was that kid whose actual education was at Hogwarts, riding a broomstick and shouting spells with a magic wand.

I was that kid who hunkered down in the corner of the classroom in middle school over a copy of the Dungeons and Dragons players handbook, reading it over and over again, dreaming about playing the game, but never being able to because no one wanted to play it with me.

I was that kid in middle school who read monthly copies of Shonen Jump and checked out Japanese manga comic books from the library, only to be ridiculed for reading “those Pokémon books” by my classmates.

I was that kid who filled notebook after notebook, page after page, with drawings and stories, because all I wanted to be when I grew up was an author. I wrote stories, very bad ones. Imitations of Paolini and Tolkien, copies of anime that I watched. But still I read, and still I wrote.

I was that kid that initially wanted to be an author because I thought it would make me rich. Then I wanted to become an author because there would be no greater pleasure for me than writing books.

Now I’m an adult, and that kid still lives in me. I still read. I still write. I still obsess over Dungeons and Dragons, only now I have people to play with. I write my stories, and I share them, even if other people don’t care to read them or don’t like them. I still hope to be rich by being an author, but writing and creating is its own reward in itself. Books still fill my surroundings, dragons and magic and goofy superheroes still fill my daydreams.

I will never stop being that kid.

Originally published in The People Sentinel.