Whining, Wine-ing & Winning

I’d love to say I was a quiet, focused student who loved reading and writing. I was not. I was more of a “talk through every quiet moment” kind of student… which, shockingly, got me in trouble more than once. And somehow, my 6th grade reading and writing teacher got stuck with me. She had this wild expectation that I would actually finish things. Stories. Assignments. Thoughts…she never let me off the hook. She’d hand papers back covered in notes—not mean, just very “I know you can do better.” At the time, I thought she was making my life harder. Now I realize… she was one of the first people who expected more from me than I expected from myself. And here I am, years later, voluntarily writing things and putting them out into the world. Which is honestly a little ironic because if you would’ve told 6th grade me that one day I’d be doing this on purpose, I would’ve laughed, talked through it, and probably gotten in trouble again. Turns out, she wasn’t just teaching reading and writing. She was teaching me not to quit on something just because it wasn’t perfect the first time. And somehow… that stuck.