From Fear to Fluency: Finding My Voice Again by Sadeara

From Fear to Fluency: Finding My Voice Again by Sadeara - July 2026 Scholarship Essay

When I first had to do a class on Literature and Composition I was scared because I felt as though I couldn’t read a poem or an essay and discuss the underlying deeper meaning behind it like others could. I had done it before, but ever since coming to high school, reading and writing had ultimately felt like a chore to me and not something I was able to enjoy as much as I did before. So, as I looked around at my classmates who could easily discuss in a circle about what the author was trying to convey, I had ultimately thought I could not accomplish that level of understanding to write a whole separate essay—yet here I am after having passed that same exam I thought I would fail. As I started truly diving into the lessons within the class and talking to my teacher and my peers about the same essays I believed I had no experience in communicating my thoughts on, I realized after my last full class before exam season how much I had actually learned.

Through the group discussions, poem/play readings aloud, and laughter from having shared the same experience and key knowledge from the readings we were assigned, I was able to sharpen my skills of thinking on my feet, piggy-backing off of others’ thoughts on a topic and making my own conclusions while backing it up. I gained so much confidence and strength in my writing that I had caught myself discussing a topic that was non-related in class—we weren’t supposed to be—and eventually relating that same topic to one of the characters from a play that we read about and it had turned into a full-blown conversation about that this character we each had come to different conclusions about saying “He was misunderstood”, “He had no trust in his wife”, or “He was insecure”. That is when the realization finally hit me.

I remember when I had first struggled in that same class, yet that memory was so vivid to me and demonstrated the amount of information I had gained to be able to argue and dispute my own opinions from a play in my literature class. At the end of the year, I caught myself talking to my teacher and saying how I was grateful for everything she taught me because I had found my passion for writing, storytelling, and reading again—just as I did in middle school—where I would write poems for fun and read and write critiques on books after I had finished reading. I did not just hone my critical thinking skills, but I also got brought back to what I enjoyed the most—discussing books and freehand writing. I was glad she helped me understand how much writing actually meant to me and I want to cherish that from here-on-out.