R.L. WHITE: Becoming A Writer

From Being Discouraged from Reading to Becoming an Author

I loved stories when I was a child, the way many children do. Stories felt like somewhere else to go, somewhere softer, somewhere bigger than the world I was living in. But I was discouraged from reading. I was conditioned to believe that books would fill my head with silly ideas, that reading too much would somehow make me dream beyond what I was allowed to dream.

At the time, I did not really understand it. I only knew I had to do as I was told.

Looking back, it became obvious how far behind I was at school with reading and writing. Other children seemed years ahead of me. They had been encouraged, supported, and guided in ways I had not. I believe that lack of parental encouragement around books affected not only my reading but my writing too. I hardly attended school, and by the time we left, I had one of the lowest attendance records in the entire year.

I came from a culture where, even when I was a child, there was still a very backwards way of thinking. Many elders around me were uneducated, not because they all were bad people, but because they had limited beliefs. I was not taught how to be smart in the way that a person needs to be smart to survive in the world. I was not encouraged to grow into myself. I was taught to stay small.

But I wanted something different.

From a very young age, around fourteen, I felt cast out from the culture I came from because I did not want to become what everyone expected me to become. I wanted to be cleverer. I wanted to be smarter. I wanted to learn, grow, and develop, but I could not do that while staying inside the same thinking that had kept me trapped.

I was the scapegoat child. I was manipulated, controlled, and abused in multiple ways. My childhood was smothered in trauma, fear, and constant worry. More than anything, I wanted to be like other people. I wanted freedom. I wanted the chance to become the person I felt I could be, instead of being told what I was allowed to be.

Every little dream I tried to build felt like it was being destroyed before it could breathe.

The effects of that stayed with me. I suffered greatly, and it caused me long-term health problems, trauma, brain injury, and damage I have had to spend years trying to understand and recover from. I had to fight for my place in this life. I had to fight against the expectations of my mother, relatives, siblings, and anyone else who seemed to believe, for some reason, that I was not allowed to do the same things other people were allowed to do.

No matter what I put my hands to, there were always people trying to pull me back. I received threats. I was bullied. I had people send me messages saying they were cursing me or wishing me dead. There were people who could not stand to see me build anything for myself.

But everything I have now, I built on my own.

Nobody handed it to me.

The truth is, I was always a writer of stories. Even when I did not have the confidence to share them, even when my spelling and writing were not strong, even when my learning difficulties and mind injuries made everything harder, the stories were still there. I used to write in notebooks and hide them so my mother, or anyone else, would not find them.

I did not share my hobbies back then. I did not want to. The stories were mine. They were private. They were the one place no one could fully take from me. With my learning difficulties and the problems caused by trauma and injury, only I could really understand what I had written. But that did not make the stories worthless. It made them part of my survival.

Over the years, I had to rehabilitate myself in ways people do not always see. I had to work on my mind and body. I had to learn to speak a little better. I had to soften and retrain parts of my accent and voice tone. I had to teach myself to read again from simple children’s-level reading, slowly building up to adult-level books over many years.

I used Google to help me spell. I used every tool I could find to improve. I taught myself about self-publishing, formatting, book design, cover design, branding, websites, and everything else I needed to know. From around the age of twenty-five to now, almost forty-two, I have spent years teaching myself what I was never taught properly in the beginning.

That journey has not been easy.

It has taught me that jealousy comes in many forms. It has taught me that some people are not as supportive as they claim to be. It has taught me that when you start rising from a place people expected you to stay buried in, not everyone will clap for you.

But I have also learned something stronger.

You can come from a place where you were discouraged from reading and still become an author. You can be told books will fill your head with silly ideas and still build a life from stories. You can be behind, unsupported, traumatised, mocked, bullied, and underestimated and still teach yourself to create.

I did not become a writer because everything was easy.

I became a writer because stories stayed with me when almost nothing else did.

And now, every book I create is proof that the voice people tried to silence was never gone. It was only waiting for the strength, the healing, and the right moment to speak.