Activity 7.2

In my life I've had several potential careers destroyed by the beliefs I held in my ability to accomplish the necessary tasks in these areas. As a child I was enchanted by great female authors like Laura Ingalls Wilder and Gail Carson Levine. Laura was the main reason I kept journals almost my entire life and I've kept a letter from Gail just about as long. It was my dream to write books similar to the fantasies I so cherished.

However, my confidence in my ability to write was quashed by a series of writing failures in high school. In particular, I prefer to point to a teacher who made it clear she hated all my writing and once called it "wishy-washy." When I think back on it now, though, I might have started the class with a bruised sense of competence. I took this class my freshman year of high school and the course required we pass some test to get into it. My score on the test was not high enough and my mom had to have me put into the class. I also had a best friend that I frequently compared myself to who was not only the amazing, quirky writer I longed to be but she was also the teacher's particular favorite. Parajes (2006) states that social comparisons help contribute to our own perceived capability and in this case that she was more capable was reinforced my feelings of inability. We also constantly completed these quizzes where we'd get sentences and have to fix the punctuation, grammar errors, and then label everything in the sentence. Not only a very stressful situation but one in which I quickly decided I was unable to perform adequately. I frequently thought to myself, "This is just something I'll never be able to do," and basically turned my mind off to learning any of the necessary skills for becoming a writer. My low self-efficacious feelings for writing were finally cemented my senior year of high school when I took a college credit English course and again I felt I was working as hard as I could but my effort was not shown in the grades and feedback I was receiving.

Even though I lack confidence in my skill as a writer I still have a reader's passion that pushes me towards the hope of someday writing some form of book. I guess it's as Parajes (2006) indicates "self-efficacy is not so much about learning to succeed as it is learning how to persevere when one does not succeed" (p. 345). I have accepted that I am not to be the great author like my childhood heroes but I have not resigned myself to fully giving up and never trying.