Revised Literacy Identity Autobiography Jen Liddy

-->

Reading happened early, easily and often, but it wasn’t a collaborative experience. I read alone and spent all my free time devouring books, systematically consuming any author’s entire collection: Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, Francine Pascal. One summer afternoon, I stopped dead in the middle of a Nancy Drew mystery. I realized, with shock, there was a formula! These books revealed themselves to be the same story disguised in different characters and settings. Carolyn Keene had duped me. Furthermore, I was disappointed: I still had over 10 unread Nancy Drew books sitting on my corner shelf, awaiting attention, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish them. I was done with children’s books and went looking for more sophisticated reading.

Reading in my family’s house was not a sport for the cultivated or urbane. Trashy titles were thoughtlessly thrown about the coffee table, and no one stopped me when I picked up Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight.  A tween, I was thrilled to be thrown into the abyss of adult literature; it was so corrupt, naughty, prurient. Whether my mother ever noticed I was reading this smut, I don’t know, but I began another round of wolfing down as many books as Sheldon would author and was immensely disappointed when I finished his list, so I moved onto Danielle Steele and Mary Higgins Clark. Reading helped me escape from my mother and unhappy family life, a pastime she could not begrudge me. It was an escape that earned me nerd status among siblings and friends, but it also gained me approval from adults, and I felt desperately grown up.

I truly identified myself as a reader, easily excelling at reading in school and at home. However, there was never any overt discussion about the different types of reading that one is expected to do. The reading I was doing was purely escapist: I did not process it or analyze it. Comprehension and plot, characterization and conflict were ideas that I could easily discern, but frankly, if asked about themes or symbols or irony or the social importance of a text, I’d be flummoxed. Reading obviously got more difficult in high school, when offerings like The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick were on the menu. It was in high school that I began to struggle with reading, but I had no framework to understand why. Suddenly, reading was no longer fun, easy, or enjoyable, but I slogged through and managed to still be a good, effective reader, albeit a much more unhappy one. I can see now that this struggle was rooted in failure to thrive as a thinker vs. thriving merely as a reader.

This very struggle, as I see it today, led me to become a reluctant English major in college. There was nothing else I was really good at or had cultivated an interest in; I only knew I was a fast and good reader. So, I shrugged my shoulders and became an English major, barking the caveat that “I don’t want to be a teacher” and “I’m better at writing papers instead of taking tests” to anyone who would listen. But at college I found I had a knack for talking about literature with others and could easily bang out a paper in a few hours. Once a strong, independent worker, at college I discovered that I only thrived in an interactive, interpersonal environment. I’d struggle if forced to analyze in isolation, and I constantly questioned my literacy abilities.

Though still a successful student and a good reader, I felt less intelligent than my peers and fearfully avoided offerings like poetry and Shakespeare. I had friends and peers who could think deep thoughts, while I struggled in philosophy, political science, and sociology classes with any idea that wasn’t an experience I’d had personally. I loved the concrete and applicable-to-my-life classes. Abstract, visionary, or risky ideas seemed beyond my grasp and understanding. Rather than read more on a topic, seek out my professors’ help, or engage in challenging conversations with peers, I chose to feel inadequate, believing I was just not that abstract kind of thinker.

As an educator now, I can clearly see how a lack of guidance and facilitation stunted me. I didn’t have the vocabulary to know about learning styles, reading processes, or literacy. I wish I could go back and tell myself, “Jen, you are an interpersonal learner who processes best verbally.” Knowing and embracing that would have instilled a confidence that I would not have for fifteen years to come. But frankly, I wonder if my perception of myself during college was too harsh. I can’t imagine that any of my professors worried about me; I was a capable, able student who got good grades. Such self-doubt and an overly critical, skewed view of myself is a recurring theme in my discovery of identity and self.          

A shift in my literacy and identity happened after college: I had become a reading snob, believing that an English major should only engage with ‘real literature’.  And it was on a daily, monotonous commute from Long Island to Manhattan that I saw everyone reading a new author, John Grisham. I was disgusted and vowed I would not read that trash. But the commute was long and John Irving had just broken my heart with A Prayer for Owen Meany. I deigned to give this Grisham a try. I confess: I was hooked. And hence, my literacy identity throughout my mid-twenties was punctuated and defined by learning to ‘never say never’.  

At this point in my life, I began a more kind approach to finding my identity, and this ‘never say never’ philosophy allowed me to enjoy my reading, not judge it. I could mull over Hamill’s Snow in August and Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, but it was also okay to blow through each of Grisham’s newly-published books. It allowed me to enjoy a bus ride in silence with Groom’s Forrest Gump but to seek out a book club to process my thoughts on Ondaatje’s The English Patient or Schlink’s The Reader.  Talking and reading and discussing and arguing and thinking about books of all sorts allowed me to realize that I was no dummy for failing to comprehend understand Melville in high school or Plato in college. These complex thinkers created deep thematic schemas that were just impossible for an undeveloped mind to comprehend without facilitation.

I was able to forgive myself, if only a little bit. For throughout my mid-twenties, living in Manhattan and working for a large company, I was still fairly burdened by an overall lack of confidence. I knew I processed ideas differently than my colleagues and friends and was always very impressed with the global thinkers, the people who could see a big, visionary idea or put small ideas together to make a big idea. I felt very different from these people, very in awe of them, and at that point in my life, different meant less-than. This sense of identity held me back, and I pined to be more analytical. I was saddened that I wasn’t a ‘big thinker’, just a small reader and a ‘do-er’. I had no skills to effectively think about the “why” or “what if” of any situation, or none that I could discern. Give me a checklist, and I would accomplish everything on it efficiently. Give me a big mess to organize, and I would blow your mind. Ask me to edit a document, and I would become eagle-eyed. But these were not important tasks in my scheme of what was important in the universe. Anyone could do the stuff I was doing at my job; but I was dying to do something I could be passionate about, something that mattered and that I could do to make a difference in someone’s life. But as such a small thinker, where could I go and what difference could I make?

I was 26 when I began to dig, taking classes, talking to people, noticing what I cared about. Nutrition? Counseling? Nothing was sticking, but I kept doing what I always did best: reading and reading and reading.  Then I tried experiencing: I took the opportunity to see Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet at the 57^th Street Theater, sitting for five hours with much of it going over my head but fascinated by its beauty. I embraced the chance to see The Winter’s Tale in Central Park and was blown away by the risks the director took with setting and costumes. And on a cross-town bus ride, reading Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown”, I began to envision the terrible characters and see the symbolic imagery in my head.

I realized that plays are meant to be seen and literature is meant to come alive! How else can it have meaning? Why hadn’t anyone ever showed me this stuff before? The performance is integral to the understanding; it becomes a visceral experience. The visual aspect was so powerful! My prefrontal cortex had apparently finally fused, because suddenly I could connect ideas and see deeply into the novels that I’d been avoiding for years, finding meaning and extrapolating current-day applications. On this bus ride, I had the epiphany that there had to be better, more relevant ways to teach classic authors. I fantasized about how to help real kids connect with fancy books and deep ideas. Ultimately, reading on those cross-town bus rides, I began to listen to that inner voice, the one that said, “Maybe, perhaps, you should become an English teacher. Maybe you can make these books understandable, relatable, and palatable to high school kids. Wait! Why only teach the classics? Maybe you can even introduce them to the cool contemporary books that you love so much.” And I did the distasteful and unthinkable thing: I became an English teacher.

Obviously, I was late to come to understand that it takes all kinds of thinkers to make the world a rich place and to understand that there are different kinds of ‘literacy’ and ‘identity’. It was my shaky and brave undertaking of becoming a teacher at age 30, of delving into doing that thing I never wanted to do, that helped me realize I could teach myself to become a ‘big thinker’, moving beyond being ‘just a small reader and do-er’. I learned to read for different purposes and in different ways, and I began to appreciate this metamorphosis. I recognize now that I took literacy and identity for granted, exhibiting a kind of benign neglect of it for many years, which lead to frustration and self-doubt for far too long.

As a teacher, I live and preach the philosophy of accepting the various literacies and identities that make up each one of us. In my forties, self-doubt eases away each day, but it’s the constant engagement with new experiences and the reflection upon those experiences that allows me to be kinder to myself and to others. The big thinkers, the visionaries and the blindingly brilliant, are wonderfully generative and move us in new directions. The small thinkers, the do-ers, have a great place in our world, for no great idea is accomplished without them.  I see myself, my literacy and my identity, as someplace in the middle, constantly vacillating depending upon the context and the content.

I define my identity as flexible and kinetic: I know when I have to work harder and read more closely; I evaluate when I have to process differently; and I am able to teach others how to apply these useful skills to their own lives at a much earlier age than I was able to do so. With students, I am transparent in how I acquired this literacy identity, in reading, processing, and thinking. Students love to hear concrete stories of times I doubted myself, failures I’ve endured, and mistakes I’ve made that hindered my success. I express such vulnerabilities to model for them that our literacy is a) always changing and b) is in our control. They see me as a human standing in front of them, and my hope is that they understand that the confident woman standing up there teaching them was once as insecure and lost as they currently are.

My identity is now strongly rooted in inspiring each of us to examine our literacies, to define our identities, and to evaluate our preferences and strengths. Only then can we decide what tools work for us and practice applying these to reach the identity and goals we desire. We must remember to not accept the status quo, for it is a stagnant place that kills confidence and stunts identity.