BECOMING LIMITLESS

 BECOMING LIMITLESS

(part-1)

“I’m so stupid.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m too dumb to learn.”

These were my mantras growing up. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t tell myself that I was slow, dumb, and that I would never learn to read, much less amount to anything later in life. If a pill existed that could super charges my brain and make me smarter in one shallow, I would have given anything to take it.

I wasn’t the only one who felt the way I did about myself. If you’d asked my teachers when I was a kid, many would have said that I was the last person they’d expect to be writing this book for you. Back then, they would have been surprised to know that I was reading a book, let alone writing one.

This all stems from an incident in kindergarten that completely altered the course of my life. I was in class one day, and there were sirens outside the window. Everyone in the classroom took notice, and the teacher looked out and said she saw fire trucks. The entire class responded to this information the way kindergarteners do. We immediately rushed to the windows. I saw particularly excited because, by that point, I was already obsessed with superheroes. To me, firefighters were the closest thing to real-life superheroes I knew. I bolted to the window with everyone else.

 

The only problem was that I wasn’t tall enough to able to look down at the fire trucks. One kid went to grab this chair to stand on, and that inspired the rest of us to do same. I ran back to my desk to get mine, pushing it right up against the huge iron radiator that tan along the bottom of the windows. I got up on my chair, saw the firefighters, and completely lit up. This was so exciting! My eyes stared and mouth gasped as I watched these courageous heroes in action with their seemingly impenetrable uniforms and their bright red vehicles.

But then one of the other kids grabbed my chair from beneath me, which caused me to lose balance ad go to flying head-first into the radiator. I hit the metal heater extremely hard, and I started losing blood. The school rushed me to the hospital, where doctors tended to my wounds. But they were candid with my mother afterward; the injury to my brain was not mild.

My mother said I was never quite the same after that. Where I had been an energized, confident, and curious child before, now I was noticeably shut down and had a new, difficulty learning; I found it extremely hard to focus, I couldn’t concentrate, and my memory was awful. As you can imagine, school became an ordeal for me. Teachers would repeat themselves until I learned to pretend to understand. And while all the other kids were learning to read, I couldn’t make any sense out of the letters. Do you remember getting in those reading circles, passing around the book, and having to read out loud? For me, that was the worst-nervously waiting as the book crept closer and closer, only to look at the page and not understand one words. It would take me another three years to be able to read, and it continued to be a struggle and an uphill battle for a long time after that.