I would ready appreciate any good feedback. Please keep in mind it has yet to be edited and is a VERY rough draft lol =). It sounds random at the beginning, but keep reading, there's a purpose, I promise.
The Reason I Will Run
When I was younger, I could not run. My legs never seemed to bend quite right and I had long, awkward arms that hung by my side, unable to move in sync with the rest of my body. Not to mention that I was chunky and short, which probably didn't help too much, and I was the only girl. My uncles, more like brothers due to the simple facts that they were all only about 10 years older than me and spent their time rotating in and out of my mothers house, were track stars. My two cousins, Mike and Damian, were the only other children in my family. They, too, spent most of their time jogging down the sidewalks, and here I was, the klutz of the family, unable to run.
I was six when I joined the soccer team. We won absolutely no games and our largest celebration was the day we got a point. Just one. Somehow, in this team full of not-so-super soccer players, I still managed to be the slowest. A few games into the season, I actually made a point. I couldn't hear any cheering, but I was sure excited, at least until I turned around and was informed that I had kicked that ball into the wrong goal. It was the combination of this accident and the fact that it was virtually impossible for me to sprint and dribble a ball that kept me out of the field for the rest of the season. I was eternally trapped in the goalie box.
Soon, however, I found my niche. My mother used to say that children are either early walkers or fast talkers, and I was unarguably the latter. Although I seemed to waddle more than run, even as an adolescent, I was told I could use complete sentences at ten months, and while my uncles and my cousins were busy sprinting down courts, my mother and my grandmother spent every waking moment teaching me about the world. We explored every museum, bear-crawled our way through every park, and imagined our path across every library in town, all the while managing to never have to run. My grandmother was a teacher, and when we weren't reading books, we were writing them, small books with hand-painted pictures and simple sentences. Stories that together, we now look upon and cherish. She sees them plainly as childhood mementos, but I see them as building blocks, the very foundation of my love for communication and the dreams I have put into them.
Freshmen year I joined the cheerleading team, convinced that it was one of the few sports I could actually play and not fail at epically due to my inability, and I did fairly well, until the day my coach announced our new task. We were going to start running, everyday. Not only were we going to be running, we were going to be running and yelling at the top of our lungs for a mile. As you can imagine, the first few weeks didn't go very smoothly for me, but eventually, after being yelled at and having older team members pull me by the hand, I picked up my feet and I began to run in unison with the others. By the next year, I was always at the head of the mile, now the team member often dragging freshmen up from the pits. I did this until I stopped cheering my senior year. The day I stopped cheering, I stopped running.
This year, while joining my family for a game of ultimate-Frisbee at the park, I learned my mother could not run. Instead, we left the game to join my grandmother on the sidelines, talking of life as we had often in the past. For the first time, she informed me that my mother, just as timid as I had been when was six, making points for other teams during soccer, was accepted into many prestigious colleges, but was afraid to pick up her feet and set forth. I, unlike my mother had once learned to run, and it is because of her I must learn again. For the first time since I have stopped cheering, I will again begin to run. I will not stop until I reach my destination.
here I was, the klutz of the family, unable to run.
This is the thought you leave me with at the end of the first para. That para is nicely written, enjoyable to read. I can't help thinking, though, that the theme of the essay consists of more than this...
We were going to start running, every day.--- I made every day 2 words instead of one. As one word, it is an adjective.
Okay, you might find this weird, but I suggest putting the end at the beginning. The whole point of the essay and the wisdom it contains are available in those last few sentences. I would like to have the concepts of those sentences introduced at the beginning of the essay.
That way WHILE READING THE ESSAY the reader will be able to continuously appreciate the wisdom it has. Know what I mean? Let the reader know about the theme at the beginning. If you make them wait, I am afraid they might not notice it at the end.
:-) also, cut sentences and shorten sentences wherever possible so that the reader has as much attention as possible available for appreciating the awesome meaning that this expresses... the metaphor about what it means to learn to run. I like it!
